Welcome to the second week of Traveling By Your Inner Compass! If you’ve been playing along so far you have:

1) Selected a Compass Direction for 2009
2) Created a Possibilities List of ways you can start moving in your chosen direction
3) Chosen some items from the Possibilities List for your first week Action Plan
4) and most importantly you’ve been Acting on that Plan!!

If you’ve just joined us, follow the links above to go through this process from the beginning.

Now it’s time to look back on your week of action and make adjustments and course corrections as needed.

Reviewing the Week

When you’re navigating with a compass, it’s important to take a look at the path you’ve traveled so that you can make adjustments as needed. If the path you chose was too difficult you may not have been able to accomplish everything you wanted and you may be discouraged. If the path you chose was too easy, you may be bored now and lack motivation for continuing.

By taking a little time to review your travels at regular, short intervals you can keep adjusting your course to keep things fresh, interesting and helpful. Now that you have a week’s worth of action, reflect on your progress for a few moments. The following questions can help you with this:

• Do I feel better about where I am this week than I did last week?
• Did I take enough action to keep my momentum up? Did I try to do too much and get overwhelmed?
• Did life throw me any curve balls? Did those unexpected challenges throw me off course?
• Do I like and enjoy the path that I’m on? Do I want to change direction completely? Are there ways to make the journey more fun?

If you journal, this is a great exercise to do once a week. At the very least, take 10-15 minutes to think through some of these questions.

In my week, I’ve done pretty good job of Reaching Out. I attended a couple of great social events and made several phone calls to some friends I’ve fallen out of touch with. I commented on many blogs over the course of the week. I’m writing a guest post for another blog (to be announced soon) I’m also hosting the Carnival of Personal Development next week, which is a great way to “meet” other bloggers. I’ve also had a gigantic curve ball tossed in my direction, so I need to make some adjustments based on that.

Adjusting Course

Now that you’ve reflected on the past week, it’s time to set some tasks for the upcoming week. Be sure to look at your Possibilities List if you need ideas. Make sure that the items you select seem interesting and will take you further in your direction.

Working off of my Possibilities List, but taking into account my curve ball, in the next week I can:

• Continue calling friends I haven’t spoken with in a while
• Attend a weekend social event outside of my normal routine
• Take a group exercise class
• Look into doing more audio posts or possibly some video posts to better engage with my readers

That’s probably a good task list to start with. It may not seem like much, but it is appropriate given some of the challenges I need to deal with right now. Of course if I end up accomplishing more than I expected I can add more. The key is to keep reviewing and adjusting at short, regular intervals.

Your exercise for today is to do a short review, either mentally or in writing. Then make a one week plan and commit to doing your chosen activities for those days, starting now.

When you’re finished, share a bit of your progress in the comments section. Also, don’t forget to follow me on Twitter. I’m tweeting a couple of tips per day to help you through this process.

Related posts:

1. Project Management, Change Management and Personal Development: Where is the Crossroads?

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