Are you on track?

Evaluation

In order to get to where you want in life, you have to know where you want to go and I find that checking where I am at regular intervals helps me stay on track.

The Jewish New Year is approaching and I use it as a time to think over the previous year and see where I have headed, what I have accomplished and what I wanted to accomplish but haven’t yet.

You may do it on the Secular New Year or on your birthday. The key is to go thru the process at least once a year.

If you have an independent business, it is even more important. I find this time of year ideal since it is the end of the summer and beginning of the school year.

Plan

After that, I plan the coming year. What do I want to accomplish this year? Where do I see myself in one year’s time?

You may look at the previous year and see that you accomplished most or all of what you wanted to. That’s wonderful. Now make new goals to stretch yourself for the coming year and keep going.

However, you may look at the previous year and see that you did not accomplish what you had set out to accomplish. For example, last year I set a goal to loose weight. Over the year I had some challenges in other areas and I watched my weight less. As a result, instead of loosing, I now weigh even more.

Two important things to pay attention to

1. Don’t feel guilty that you didn’t get to your goal. I don’t get upset with myself for letting myself go or feel like I am a failure and that I will never be thin. Guilt is just living in the past which we can’t change anyways. It’s over. Besides, there are no failures, only learning experiences.

2. Don’t blame other people. I could say so and so upset me or this or that circumstance prevented me from watching myself. Everything in our lives is our responsibility. We are responsible for not getting to our goal, noone else. But the nice thing about that is that we are also responsible for being able to get to it in the future.

Analyze 

What we want to do is analyze the situation. What did or didn’t I do this year that if I change it, I will be able to get to my goal next year ? Make a plan and action steps that you can take. Often it is good to make a small intermediary goal, for example 1-2 pounds in the next month. Check out my post about goal setting tips where I talk more about this.

Other option is to decide that it isn’t really important to me what I weight and I should just accept myself the way I am and stop worrying about it.

Either option is ok. Sometimes our priorities change and what was important to us at one time in our lives is no longer as important. But if we decide it isn’t important because we aren’t willing to make the effort to change, we are coping out.

My personal plan

So last night I went over what I accomplished and where I stand going into the coming year. There were some areas where I still haven’t gotten to where I want to be. Others I have improved and others I have stayed the same. Then I made a plan of what I want to work on for the coming year and what action steps I need to take to get there.

As far as my weight is concerned, First, I decided that I still want to loose some weight. Second I decided that one of the problems was that I wasn’t exercising enough. So for the coming year I will go for walks and exercise more and after a few months I will see if that helps. If it does, great. If not, I will reevaluate and see what I can do differently.

Here’s wishing you a great year and success in everything you want.