Conduct a periodic performance review on your life and reflect on how close to the life you want you are living. Ask your self questions to probe and figure out if you are heading in the correct direction. And make some course corrections so that you are controlling your destiny!
Ask the following questions and listen to your heart’s answers:
Do I have an overarching life goal/dream/ethos that I am working toward? I want to live a life full of _______________ (insert decription here: i.e. fulfilment/excitement/adventure/love/travel)
Have I broken down my overarching goal/dream/ethos into smaller more manageable bits?
How is my relationship with myself?
How is my relationship with others?
Why You Should Conduct a Performance Review on Your Life
This time of year is the time where performance reviews are rolled out throughout my work. It is a time for the population of our workforce to reflect on the year that was and all the achievements that we individually brought to the business. Whilst this kind of reflection is perhaps a little tedious in a work sense, self-reflection is actually a really great practice to adopt on a periodic basis especially when it comes to you and your life as a whole. It helps us know how we are doing in the areas of life that matter to us.
So I’ve come up with some areas that reflect the DustyDreamerHQ way of thinking about life which we have expanded upon in this post.
I’d suggest doing this review maybe once a quarter (every three months) this will give you some good data to know where you’re improving and what areas you want to work on. You will see some changes in 3 months but also be able to step in quick enough and correct things that aren’t looking the way you’d like and course correct. Rather than letting the bits you don’t like spiral out of control and take over your life.
Do I have an overarching life goal/dream/ethos that I am working toward?
This question is the big guiding compass that should help you drive your life forward. When you have to make decisions it is this goal/dream/ethos that you want to keep in mind because it is what you want overall for your life.
For example:
I want to live a life full of _______________ (insert decription here: i.e. fulfilment/excitement/adventure/love/travel)
Or…
I want to live my best life and for me, that looks like (traveling to distance exotic countries as often as I can, having a close-knit and loving family, spending quality time with my favorite people or doing my favorite things, being healthy and happy in all areas of my life.)
This statement is one that is a big-picture aim, obviously, for each one of you reading this the ideal will be different. So you will want to take some time to think about the big picture of what you really want in life. This will help you determine if you are on the right track and where might be some areas you can work on improving in the future.
Have I broken down my overarching goal/dream/ethos into smaller more manageable bits?
Ok so now you have an overarching life goal which can be changed from time to time, you’ll want to decide on some smaller goals that feed into that overall big picture.
So say you want a life filled with travel and adventure. Then some smaller goals would be things that were travel and/or adventure related. Maybe you want to travel to Marrakesh Morocco as your next big trip, so you would start to do research, put a savings plan in place, decide on some suitable dates and things you’d like to do while there. These are all smaller chunks of a bigger dream which you can work toward on a daily basis and see your progress.
But what about if your big goal is to be healthy and happy in all areas of your life? Well, then you’d have to determine what healthy means to you and how you would define the attainment of happiness. Say your picture of health is having a good amount of energy and being able to run a certain distance without feeling out of breath. Then your action plan to achieving these goals might be to find a suitable eating plan that will give you the energy you need, and perhaps a daily running routine that built up to achieve the goal you had for yourself.
These smaller manageable chunks will help you to progress and prioritize all that you do and make decisions about how you spend your time, money, and energy all the more easier.
Once you know where you’re going it’s a lot easier to get there!
How is my relationship with myself?
Ok so you have a life aim and you have some smaller sized actions that will get you to where you want to go. But the real self-examination starts here with you.
How is your relationship with yourself?
It’s a tricky question and one you can easily ignore, but it’s important to realize that appreciating who you are and what your good qualities are is ok. You should like yourself and be able to look yourself in the eye and smile, you are ok.
No, you aren’t perfect but you’re working on improving.
Want some encouragement – check out this blog post!
So how do you tell if your relationship with yourself is on the rocks or shipshape?
Positive self-talk
If you aren’t in a good place with yourself you will find it difficult to hear compliments, you will also be tuned to listening for negative feedback from others and you will most likely be adding to the mix with your own words of discouragement in your favorite flavor.
If this is you, please stop! You are only harming yourself.
Instead of focussing on the negative, absorbing and adding to all the bad, try to turn your negative thoughts into positive ones.
A good way to check your balance of negative versus positive self-talk is to do a tally. Keep a piece of paper with you with two columns and see how often you think about positive things versus negative.
You may be surprised to find out where the majority of your thoughts hang out.
For more on this read our blog post which has 7 handy tips to get you radiating positivity!
Thoughtful consumption
I’m a believer in how you treat your body is a reflection of how you care for yourself. If you don’t currently spend any time thinking about what goes into your body, or what physical activities you do, then you might have some deeper issues with how you see yourself.
Not that you can’t eat any junk food ever, but you should at least spare a thought about what foods make your body a more effective machine for you to use. If you are constantly using food and beverages in a reactionary way then this may be something to look at. If you consume when you feel a certain way whether it’s angry, stressed, frustrated, happy, any or all of these emotions then you aren’t being thoughtful in your consumption and you are letting your emotions affect what you eat. This can be a way of you escaping or dealing with underlying emotions. If this is the way you escape your life, then you have to ask yourself why do I want to escape my life? What is it that I’m unhappy about? And importantly, what can I do to change it?
Want more info on this – check out this post on conscious consumption…
Deal with the cause of your feelings
People use all kinds of methods of escaping the parts of their life that they don’t like, or the parts of themselves they don’t like. Sometimes the thinking is actually counterintuitive, as in the action is actually making the problem you have worse.
For example, if you are feeling sad about something there are many different ways you can deal with the feeling. You could eat a whole box of chocolates, which may help for a little while until you realize you are already overweight, and you’ve just eaten a whole box of chocolates because you felt sad and now you feel a hundred times worse!
Escaping can be disappearing into a video game for hours, only to reappear in your own life with none of the problems you had before you went into the game solved. In this case, you’ve just delayed the feelings you have and used a distraction in order to numb some of the pain. But it doesn’t go away unless you deal with the actual underlying cause of the problem.
Dealing with the effects of your emotions is not an effective way to create positive change in your life. In fact, it can disguise and create new problems which are actually just symptoms of an underlying issue. It is far better (though a much harder and longer process) to deal with the cause of your feelings than to have to continually escape your life with various distractions.
Read more about this topic with our blog post 7 Steps to Overcoming Your Invisible Barriers.
Forgiving yourself
So, we all make mistakes and this is true of the very best of all of us. Sometimes we just mess up and make the wrong decision and other times we may “let” certain circumstances get the better of us and react in a way that we now find distressing/repulsive/humiliating etc.
If you have a good relationship with yourself then you will be able to work through your feelings and find forgiveness for yourself. It may take some time but forgiving yourself for your mistakes and shortcomings is a part of life. Mistakes are part of the learning process and though you may have made those mistakes in the past my guess is you don’t want to make them again. And so you can take actions to prevent these things from occurring again.
Remember you are not your past, and you can change what your future looks like if you decide you don’t like where it’s heading.
It’s all up to you.
If you want to read more about Forgiving Yourself check out this post.
Investing in yourself
A way to tell how your relationship with yourself is going is to look at ways you are investing in yourself. Are you giving your you the proper attention and care? Are you seeing to your mind and your body the way you would your loved ones? If you want to read more about ways you can invest in yourself read our blog post.
How is my relationship with others?
Am I hanging onto hurt others have caused me?
Whether you have been abandoned, had a bad breakup, or lost out on an opportunity because of someone else there are always instances where we as human beings find it hard to let go. But really holding onto these occurrences actually damages ourselves and our other relationships more than it hurts the other person.
There are many ways to deal with these relationships but on your side of the equation, you can learn to accept the losses and work towards forgiving the other person. Whilst this will benefit the relationship you have with that person, it will also affect your relationship with yourself, and with others. So, it is an important aspect of your life that should be reflected upon once in a while.
A tool that you can use to directly deal with these problem people in your life without having to have contact with that person is to use the Empty Chair method, which you can read about in our dedicated blog post.
Implement the Power of a Compliment
Complimenting other people is a great way to give back to another human being without spending a dime and with relatively little effort. Do you take the opportunity to compliment your fellow worker, store person, or your neighbor?
Just saying please and thank you with a smile can add a little bit of sunshine to someone else’s day. An additional point you may want to consider that relates to your relationship with yourself is, are you able to compliment others without feeling insecure about yourself?
If you need a few more pointers on the why’s and how’s of complimenting people check out our blog post for more.
Are you a good listener?
Part of having good relationships with other people is how effectively you listen to what they are saying. Do you hear what people are saying and apply the appropriate level of empathy and concern to their words? Or are you off in your own world while they are talking? Perhaps you are busy thinking of a response to their words, maybe your own witty come back or maybe a similar or better story on the same topic as theirs? If you find yourself trying to one-up other people or tune out try to be conscious about this habit and learn to listen. After all, everyone has at least one thing that you can learn from them if you allow yourself to be taught.
Put yourself in the other person’s shoes
You may already be familiar with the phrase “walk a mile in another man’s shoes” and it’s true. In order to understand another person’s perspective, you may want to think about how that person views life. If you grew up with siblings and someone close to you was an only child the way they view the world will be different. Think about how that might be and try to use that insight into creating a more fulfilling relationship.
In addition, you may also think about how you might like to be treated if you were in that position. What if you had just lost your dog, would you want people to laugh or would you like them to help you find your pooch? This may seem obvious but in the moment when emotions are clouding our judgment, we may find it more difficult to do.
Do you bring sunshine or storm clouds to other people’s days?
I’m sure you all know people that are draining to be around, they make your day go from ok to worse. Somehow being around their energy isn’t helpful and if you start paying attention you may discover why. Of course, everyone has their bad days but overall does your presence make people happier, are you positive and optimistic or do you just see the negative in every situation? Do you constantly complain about whatever you can think of complaining? This is sure to drive people away from you. Misery loves company so you may end up hanging out with people who aren’t very positive.
So, if you find yourself complaining think rather about the good things in life, use a positivity journal and try to bring some sunshine to the people around you rather than rain.
Want to be more positive – try these 7 tips!
Self-Reflection is about continuous improvement
A periodic self-reflection is like a regular dentist appointment, it’s sometimes a bit uncomfortable but ultimately lead to you having a better outlook on life. You can come out with a bit of a strategic plan of the areas in your life where you’d like to make a change.
Though you may see a few things you’d like to change, remember to focus on one thing at a time and build on the momentum. If you try to do too much you will end up overwhelmed and distract yourself from the progress you’ve made. So, take it one step at a time and just keep on trying and keep recording your progress.
And let us know how you are going! We’d love to be able to help you!