Are you asking yourself tough questions?
Regularly conducting a critical assessment of yourself is crucial for achieving a longer, more fruitful life—but you can’t productively assess if you aren’t willing to ask yourself hard questions.
Bad behaviors and poor habits can lead to undesirable life challenges. An essential initial step is highlighting threats and personal vulnerabilities in each of the twelve keys:
- Plan for a great year
- Sleep well
- Enjoy healthy eating
- Stay fit & grow stronger
- Learn more
- Improve your productivity
- Grow emotional resilience
- Engage positively with others
- Prevent disease and illness
- Avoid addiction
- Create peace of mind by managing risk
- Assess your year
Let’s get started by asking some meaningful questions in the twelve key assessment areas. Ask yourself:
- Do I have challenges in the coming year that I am unprepared for?
- How many days do I feel tired before the day even begins?
- What percentage of my daily diet is made up of “bad” calories (e.g., processed white flour, white rice, and sugar)?
- What areas of physical capability am I losing (e.g., range of motion, strength, quickness, balance, task coordination, endurance)?
- Do I lack knowledge in an essential area of life that is holding me back or undermining my well-being?
- Am I routinely making mistakes that cause me to redo my work?
- Am I routinely making mistakes that cause me anxiety?
- Do I have any high-demand/low-value relationships that need to be adjusted or terminated?
- What diseases and illnesses were my parents vulnerable to that I am doing little to nothing to address for myself?
- What addictive elements am I vulnerable to? Which of these am I exposed to? Am I susceptible?
- If I died tomorrow, would my family know what to do?
- Am I repeating mistakes I’ve made before?
Once you’ve identified answers to the above, you’ll want to obtain data to finalize your assessment. Take the steps below to monitor and capture critical areas of performance:
- Identify the data critical to your performance needs, objectives, and goals
- Define the means of providing the data
- Create a simple means of capturing and recording the data
- Routinely compare your performance data against relevant target levels and identify trends
Check in each quarter and review your performance against planned objectives and goals. Remember: To achieve different outcomes, you need to change—new decisions, new actions, and different behaviors.
Need help? Use Living Better in the Later Years’ Quarterly Assessment Checklist.
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Header Image Credit: rostislavsedlacek