Time For A Bit Of Personal Development — One Positive And One Negative Point, Please!

By Dan Smith

On Sunday I’ll be a year older.

I love birthdays. I love Christmas. I love Disney, but, well, that’s a different story.

Over the past few years, whenever my birthday has come around, I’ve always took some time out to look at what I’ve achieved over the last 12 months and what I’m hoping to achieve over the coming 12 months.

And this time I’d like you to join in and do the same.

We’re not looking at in-depth goals here (I know a lot of people — me included — set goals at the end of December and review them mid-way through the following year), but more at what’s been good for you and what you could have improved upon.

Simple to do, you’ve just got to give one positive point — something you’ve achieved over the last 12 months or something that stood out for you — and one negative point — perhaps something you’ve discovered that you don’t like about writing or a particularly bad experience that you had.

The Positive Point

The past 12 months have without doubt been the most productive for me as a writer so far in my career.

I went into my birthday last year being a writer with a small amount of clients. I didn’t particularly push myself, never made any major effort to gain new clients and simply plodded along quite contently.

I’m not actually sure what happened between September and December 2009, but by the time Christmas had come around, I’d realised that if I wanted to make writing my full time job, I needed to do something about it.

I started 2010 in a completely different frame of mind. I set up a new blog that I could use to write regularly on and which would help get me into the habit of writing every day; I started networking with other writers and I made a distinct effort to take on new projects.

And it paid off.

I set myself a goal in February to increase my income as a freelance writer so that it would match — or exceed — my income from my ‘day job’ (I do a lot of HR / training and development work for an international business services and consultancy company) by the end of 2010.

I’m happy to say that I’d achieved this in April, a lot quicker than I expected to and for me, although there have been some fantastic highlights over the past 12 months, that has to be the most prominent, as it made me believe that I really can make a living as a freelance writer if I just put my mind to it.

The Negative Point

Finding a negative point from the past 12 months is a little difficult, as I’ve used everything as a learning tool.

However, whilst the 70 hour weeks I was putting in earlier in the year didn’t leave me feeling great, it’s actually the point I covered last week about receiving a bit of negative feedback due to some typos and grammatical errors (you can see the post here — How To Deal With Negative Feedback In A Positive Way) that is probably my most notable negative point from the last year.

It wasn’t the fact that it was the first piece of negative feedback I’d received — although that was a little hard to take in — but it was more because the errors were things that shouldn’t have happened.

I’ve now turned this into a positive point, though and have become a lot stricter with my proofing and editing.

Now it’s your turn — one positive point and one negative point from the last 12 months, please!