As another year winds to a close within the next month, the idea of New Year’s Resolutions quite rightly makes most people want to puke – me included.
However, what I do believe is a valuable use of your time is to do a stock take of the past year.
This won’t take long I promise and it will be worth it. Well, you can spend either a few minutes thinking about this, or you can use it as a framework for a deeper analytical look at your year, where you spend a couple of hours making notes and looking at the 5 W’s. (Who? Where? Why? What? When?).
You can do this for every area of your life, but for today’s blog post I am focusing on your career.
Simply answer these five questions in as much or a little detail as you like. For a more in-depth analysis get your choice of typing/writing notes and spend some time reflecting deeply on these questions, and making notes for future reference.
Question 1: What Worked Well for you in terms of your Career during 2018?
Question 2: What could you have done better?
Question 3: What area/areas of your career would you like to develop in 2018?
Question 4: What obstacles stand in the way or you doing that, and how can you overcome those obstacles? (Ok, so I cheated a bit, 2 questions for the price of 1!)
Question 5: What was your stand out moment/greatest achievement in 2018 in your career?
This is a deceptively simple exercise. It will bring up lots of thoughts about how the year went, but more importantly it will hopefully clarify how you would like to improve and develop for next year. So many of us are that busy dealing with the maelstrom of social media, emails and online overwhelm that we can lose our sense of direction and focus. While during the Christmas holidays, we are that relieved to have a break from work that we don’t give it a second thought. Doing this exercise will set you up to feel more in control for the year ahead.
