Are you asking yourself the 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 practices can lead to unnecessary life challenges, so you need to identify how to eliminate threats and reduce your 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
Ready to get started with your honest assessment of these 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 performance am I losing (e.g., flexibility, balance, strength, stamina)?
- Do I lack knowledge in an essential area of life that undermines my well-being?
- Am I routinely making mistakes that cause me to repeat my work efforts?
- 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 any of the same 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 below steps 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.
Completing an honest assessment and having the data will help you build a path forward, ultimately making more informed decisions than you would have otherwise. From there, you can establish a foundation upon which to plan future actions.
For more guidance like this, subscribe to the LBLY newsletter below!
Header Image Credit: rostislavsedlacek