January 2017 Meeting

We met yesterday at Peet’s for the January 2017 meeting, the first hangout of the year. Everybody seemed to be in good spirits, re-grouping from the end of the year and getting ready to take on 2017. The intention: have a successful year!

In addition to reporting on our most recent goals and setting new ones for our February meeting, I encouraged everyone to set a personal and professional goal for 2017. Personal goals ranged from taking time for oneself to learning to cook without a recipe (that one’s mine). Professional goals include producing a film, publishing a book (or two or three), getting anchor clients, developing relationships with website, and selling artwork.

Monthly Tip

The topic of finding focus came up, and I shared my favorite trick: directed journaling. This was specifically related to someone trying to come up with an angle for a project, but the process really works for anything.

Schedule five or six 15-minute appointments with yourself, spread out over the course of two weeks. Then spend each session doing free-writing on whatever topic in a dedicated notebook. Just throw out all your thoughts (stream of consciousness). Don’t worry about repeating yourself and don’t look at any of your writing.

Once you have completed however many sessions – you are brainstormed out – read everything from start to finish. Then, note the things that stand out: recurring themes and solutions. If necessary, do a few more rounds of directed journaling, zeroing in on the commonalities, and This will help you determine your angle or what to do next.

It’s much easier to figure things out when you write them down and look at them than when all of your thoughts are rolling around (like a hamster running on a wheel) in your head. Try it. And let me know how it goes.

Here are links mentioned at the January 2017 Meeting:

Post January Goals, as well as 2016 Accomplishments and 2017 Goals.

Choose a task or goal you have been meaning to do and participate in this month’s Win With Write On: Jump Into January.

The next LA meeting is on February 1. RSVP on Facebook.