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Since my first reading of “The 7 Habits” I’ve been possessed by the idea of creating my own personal mission statement. You know, that self-defined concise written expression of the purpose of one’s existence.  And as it is obviously not the most trivial thing to do, I decided to approach it slowly and carefully.

First, I did a lot of reading on spiritual and personal development topics. In particular, following the chain of references by my favorite authors I discovered the works of Mahatma Gandhi and Dalai Lama which impressed me very deep and actually changed the way I see things in the world.

Then, little by little I started acquiring yet non-verbal feeling of what I definitely must reflect in my mission statement. The next step of choosing the right words was probably the most challenging one. To break it down I set up a couple of simple lists and over the course of several weeks had been accumulating items there. Among others, for example, I had the following lists:

• Qualities I want to possess throughout my life (e.g. calmness, integrity, kindness, etc.)
• Areas of life I want to focus on (e.g. family, friends, communities, work, etc.)
• What I want to do to myself (e.g. grow as a person, grow professionally, learn new skills, etc.)
• What I want to do to others (e.g. inspire, serve, make happy, etc.)

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The year 2009 is coming to an end. It’s hard to believe that it has been one whole decade since the millennium. The time does pass quickly and it’s true that the older we get the faster its pace seems to become. Caught in the minutiae of everyday life, we seldom get a chance to reflect on the big picture. That’s why New Year, being a tangible check point, gives us wonderful opportunity to think over what we’ve done during last year and set up our goals and resolutions for the next.

Described in one word, 2009 was the year of awareness for me. My sensation of life seems to have shaped itself to some definite and stable form. I was trying to spend every minute consciously, by doing good things that will have impact in a long run. During the year I gradually came the point where I feel ready to define my values and start developing my own personal mission statement (using Stephen Covey’s words). And even though I’m still thinking about exact wording, I know for sure that I want my life to be based on self-discipline, integrity, open-mindedness, non-complaining, and abundance mentality.

At this post I would like to report to my own self about the last year’s accomplishments along two different lines. First, I want to appraise how good I adhered to my plans and goals and then tell about the fascinating new things I experienced, learned and started during this year. Also I want to share some interesting personal statistics and of course, I’m going to set up some challenging and exciting goals for the year to come.

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One of the things that changed my life for the better during the last year was developing and sticking to so-called “daily routines”. These are simply a set of activities done in approximately same time of each day. I first came across the idea on Leo Babauta’s blog and became very interested in making this concept work for me.

Now that I have my daily routines up and running for more than six months I think it’s time to share my recipe of constant good mood and persistent feeling of accomplishment with the whole white world.

I’ll go through each part of a day one by one.

Morning

I begin my day getting up at about 6 a.m. Here I must confess that I always use “snooze” feature of my alarm clock. However this is not because I don’t have enough will to get up when I planned. What I do is set up alarm clock half an hour in advance of the time I actually need to wake up. I don’t know why but it gives me a huge pleasure to realize in my sleep that I have half an hour more to luxuriate in a warm bed. Anyway, after hitting “snooze” button for about 6-7 times I finally get up and run straight to the bathroom to wash up and brush my teeth.

Then goes yoga. As of today I spend about 30 minutes for doing 25 basic asanas. I know that it’s too fast of a tempo and I will definitely start doing it more slowly as soon as I teach myself to get up earlier. In the end I also do popular 8 minutes program for abdominals, the cheerful music from which is now the inseparable attribute of a morning for me.

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This year’s summer proved to be very exiting. A lot of bright and positive things have happened to me both externally and inside my head. I’m happy to say that I remained loyal to all of my self-development commitments.

Indeed, I have continued to swim, exercise and do yoga regularly. I’ve done quite a bit of reading and language learning. I still practice playing guitar and roller-skating. And what is the most important here is that all these activities keep bringing me more and more pleasure and satisfaction. I even started to think of myself as a self-development addict.

My traveler’s outlook was enriched by unexpected journey to the entertainment capital of the world Las Vegas in the middle of July and wonderful trip to the heart of Europe — Czech Republic in late August where I fulfilled two of my biggest dreams at once — visited Prague and attended live Radiohead concert.

There were many things that I discovered, found to be of great use and loved during the summer.

First I will recall my findings in the area of Spanish language. As I wrote before I currently learn Spanish using only materials targeted to English speakers. I already had been listening to several podcasts aimed to teach the basics of Spanish when I accidentally came across very good audio materials based on Michel Tomas’ method of language learning. During one month I listened to four audiobooks called “Foundation Spanish”, “Spanish Advanced”, “Spanish Language Builder” and “Spanish Vocabulary” course. I’ve found those audiobooks really effective and I believe that I now have no problems with most of typical tenses and grammar constructions.

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Scarcity frame or scarcity mindset is the state of mind in which one is afraid that some material or mental resource that he might have is in limited supply. This state nurtures negative emotions like greed, envy and jealousy. The opposite of scarcity is abundance. People with abundance mindset are never afraid to share their potentially fruitful ideas because they know they are always capable to generate more. They are never scared to lose material possessions because they know that the mind is their biggest asset.

Lately I’ve been reading many books on self-development in different areas, ranging from purely spiritual affirmations to the most mundane aspects of life like pickup. And everywhere all the troubles people have seem to root in scarcity frame. However, in practice understanding this while reading is not enough. Apparently it takes some time and effort to switch from scarcity to abundance completely.

What I realized is that I myself am very far from not having scarcity thoughts now and then. I found that I often compare myself to others, being afraid in the back of my mind that they might be better than I in something. The area in which this is particularly true for me is relationships with the opposite gender. It usually drove me nuts when the person I considered my partner started communicating with someone more capable than I in any area of life, be that snowboarding or business, it doesn’t matter. What a stupidity, is it not? This also may be called inferiority complex, I guess.

So, what I’m starting to do right from now on is becoming conscious of any shabby impulse inside my mind to finally liberate myself from that scarcity mindset.