Here is a brief history of my past New Year’s wishes for you…

• To welcome in 2004, I wished you bright ideas.
• To welcome in 2005, I wished you time (both being present to time and taking time to document important life experiences).
• To welcome in 2006, I wished you broader and deeper relationships and the will to make a difference in someone’s life every day.
• To welcome in 2007, I wished you soul and everything that soul music represents.
• For 2008, it was unusual…I didn’t write a wish around NYE…yikes…what happened?
• To welcome in 2009, I wished that you have someone believe in you.
• To welcome in 2010, I wished that you gain personal growth from deeper relationships.

For 2011, I wish that you “know thy peaceful self.”

“Know thyself” is a famous quote that is credited to numerous Greek sages as well as carved into the Temple at Delphi.  To extend that, I’d like to extend a wish to everyone: that you how to find your peaceful self.

A peaceful self is not typical.  Most of us are so busy that we don’t have time to stop thinking.  Our brains are constantly “on,” constantly learning, evaluating, working, comparing, planning, feeling, reacting, responding, and more.  The news, email, voicemail, online, traffic, and more bombards us.  Good things happen and we become ecstatic…bad things happen and we are upset.  Every day, people around us love us and hurt us, people are thankful and then complain, people pick us up and let us down, people act greedy and giving, people act self-centered and compassionate.  Our brains process these interactions all day long…we process emotions along with our beliefs and values…these are often processed without us noticing what is happening.  We even lose sleep at times because so much is on our mind.

What I wish for you in 2011 is that you know how to find inner peace in the face of any type of stress…anxiety, fear, worry, doubt, and any similar experience.  Everyone goes through life and experience times of good and bad, life and death, creativity and destruction, love and war…the pendulum swings, the waves come and go, and change is constant.  We have limited control over many things that happen in life…but we can manage how we think about life.  And, the beauty of being human is that we all have this in common.

To Life and Thank You!!!

What I wish for you in 2011 is knowing your path to inner peace.  Learning how to conjure inner peace has been a true blessing for me in 2010, and I wish this for you in 2011.

I am grateful and joyful for every person that I had the opportunity to interact with in 2010, thank you for being you and experiencing life with me.

Peace!

ab

It’s been a few weeks since the new year started, and I wanted to wish everyone who reads this a Happy 2010.  In particular, I am very grateful for all my family, friends, coaches, and colleagues…and wish them a great 2010.  For the past 5 or 6 years, I’ve written something like this in my blog on New Years Day (though, the old blog is currently on hiatus).  While I wanted to write this on New Year’s day and thought about it long before and since, I didn’t have a full sense of what to say…until last night…so, here it is:

As many others experienced, 2009 was probably the craziest year in my life…it was both terrible and super.

It was terrible to face a relatively short period of very deep depression in the latter part of the year.  While provoked somewhat by being downsized, I found that really wasn’t the root cause of my depression…at the time, I didn’t really know what was causing me to feel so awful.  It was surprising to find out so many people faced depression in 2009.  For anyone that has been through a clinical depression, you know it’s not fun.  If you have NOT been through it, a) imagine something you have strongly and emotionally dreaded doing, b) multiply that feeling by 100, and c) have it on your mind 24×7 whereby it drowns out most other thoughts.  This should give you a decent picture of how it feels.  The part that I never expected was that it’s not easy to shake “the feelings” without a hell of a lot of work to retrain your brain…in fact, some of the training involves physical changes to the brain…very much like training muscles.

What is super about 2009 is that I learned some tremendous lessons about life…and the journey we are all on:

1. It may sound funny, but my relationship with myself was without compassion.  In fact, I was beating myself up about certain things for about 20 years…I didn’t realize I was even doing it…and I also didn’t know it was making me miserable!!!  What I found out is that something can be making you very unhappy, and you aren’t even aware it is happening.

2. While it was already good, my perspective on interpersonal relationships drastically changed.  All along the way in 2009…before, moving into, being in, and getting out of depression…various people in my life showed that they cared about me in amazing ways, small and large, deserved or not.  Their care was given out of kindness, compassion, love, and good will.  It cost them very little to give the encouragement, kind words, or thoughts, and it was worth a tremendous amount to me.  People and relationships are quite amazing if you stop and truly observe, embrace the relationship, let the relationship evolve…don’t hide or put it off…don’t rebel against it…pay attention to it…get closer…give it respect.  What I discovered is that relationships often have unexpected value…experiencing human relationships and interactions…these are like finding precious stones on the street…you have no idea how valuable they might be when you first see them.

In experiencing both terrible and super perspectives, I left 2009 with some clarity and insight about personal growth from human relationships…that I wish for you in 2010:

1. I wish you a new sense of the relationship you have with yourself…that you can be patient, supportive, and fair to yourself…that you know what you need and you give yourself what you need.  This sounds funny, and I didn’t know what this meant until the end of 2009…but it actually was life-altering.  Since it is ambiguous, I’ll also offer a related wish (something more concrete), I wish that:  you can see your life’s purpose to be the best “you” that you can be, to feel a sense of worth from serving your fellow human in whatever you do, and you discover that joy is everywhere you look if you let yourself see it.  These are hard to do daily or build a discipline to keep in mind all the time…but these were amazingly powerful things I learned and wish for you in 2010.

2. I wish you a new sense of deepening relationships with others.  We all are human…we all have flaws, issues, failures, and imperfections…we all have so much in common…we share the air we breathe, we have a brain that generates thoughts and feelings constantly and with little pause, and we experience thousands of interactions with other people during our lives.  What I wish for you is…to know you make a difference to others every day.  I wish you truly and completely experience making a difference to another person just in the tone of your voice or by saying “hello” to a stranger.  I wish you interact with someone this year…in a way that ultimately leads you to have a huge  impact on their life 10 years from now…and I wish you live this year knowing that it could be anyone you come in contact with (pause and think about that).  In 2009, people I met 28 years ago had a huge impact on  my life…people I met 12 years ago, 6 years ago, 3 years ago, and even one year ago…all had a big impact on me in 2009…I didn’t know this would be the case when I met them or interacted with them over time.  In looking at life this way, it creates a new view of how important relationships are, how they have completely unanticipated impact, and how people value each other.  I wish this perspective for you in 2010…that your relationships with others grow deeper.

These experiences were blessings for me in 2009…and I wish them for you in 2010.

Happy 2010!

With Love and Gratitude,
Adam