“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.” -Zig Ziglar

I have achieved my goal of the positivity quest, which was to change my mind. It has been a long and well-documented climb of turning my sights and sensitivity towards a positive world view. Yet, here I stand, 365 days later with not only an extraordinary view of my life’s potential but with the unerring confidence to trust it.

I began this experiment knowing that unless I found a path to finding the gratitude, joy and satisfaction with my days the rest of what I could do would matter little. What I realized in the process is that it is through focusing on the experiences of gratitude, joy and satisfaction that we are able to achieve at all.

Without boasting, but simply as a matter of proving a point, I offer my short list of accomplishments in this year of the positivity quest:

I won the Willamette Angel Conference Investment award of $165K.

I published my first book, “Love that Works- a guide to enduring intimacy,” which will be in national distribution this spring.

I redesigned and repackaged the Good Clean Love product line and grew its distribution and sales.

I completed the positivity quest- and missed only one day when I was in the hospital with my son.

I founded Stop for Girls- a non-profit organization designed to educate girls about sex trafficking

I started a weekly radio broadcast on LA talk radio- Lunch with the Loveologist and have increased listenership from hundreds to thousands.

I have increased my readership into the tens of thousands on multiple blogs and my weekly sustainable love newsletter.

Anyone who has been following this quest will know as I do that all of these things happened bit by bit throughout the year. Anyone who ever tells you about their overnight success is lying, because for all of us mortals- it is the collection of small acts, the persistent coming back to a task with positive expectations that wins the day every time. Courage is the father and gratitude is the mother of making your heart resilient and your world view positive. Problem solving is the activity that moves one forward.

Bigger than any of the achievements that happened during the course of this transformation is truly what it feels like to be me. At 49 years young I can say that I have never been as content, clear or strong as I am today. While living life positively does create impressive results in the world, what is even more amazing is how it changes life inside oneself. I have become my own friend and because I know how it feels to love myself, I can offer it more freely to everyone else in my life.

For those of you who have followed me on this journey, don’t despair, there will be a Y2 PQ where I will offer continuing insights into sustaining a positive life. This quest will somehow form itself into a book that I hope will lead many down the path of their own positivity quest.

One of the great discoveries of this quest is that I am in fact a writer and on my good days, maybe a teacher too. This next year I hope to learn more about growing the experience of gratitude in my writing, which I have begun to cultivate through this quest, but remains elusive at times. I will also be exploring the art and practice of deepening our relationships to ourselves, our lovers and our family. This will be a new video blog called, “Things your mother should have told you about love, sex and ….”

Maybe by the end of next year I will be able to speak into a lens without stuttering.

Thanks for making this journey with me… Look for exciting new ways to start your own. Remember what Goethe said “The day is committed to error and floundering; success and achievement are matters of long range.” And this by Van Gogh: “Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. “