EP 180 It's Time for Personal Yearly Reviews
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Sara Mayer: [00:00:00] Welcome to the bold goal crusher podcast for anyone looking to stop letting life get in the way and start crushing bold goals. I'm your host, Sarah Mayer, and I'm thrilled to navigate this journey with you because it's time to start boldly achieving without working double time. So let's dive in. Hello, Bold Goal Crushers. I'm super excited about this episode because after my last episode, which if you haven't listened to, you can jump back and take a listen. That episode was all about creating yearly, monthly, quarterly, weekly, and daily rhythms. And one of the concepts that I brought up was this concept of how in corporations, they do a yearly review.
Sara Mayer: And while some of those are not positive, I'm not advocating [00:01:00] for negative reviews, but some of those experiences are not positive. There's a lot that goes into a review that could make it positive. And so one of the suggestions I had when you're creating your yearly rhythm, if you're an entrepreneur or even just anyone that it's a great practice to review your year and how you performed as a high achiever towards your goals and what you could do to be.
Sara Mayer: to change it up so that you can actually keep those goals at the forefront. So if you haven't reviewed and listened to the last podcast after this one, jump back and listen to that one. But there is an important part. Of reflection to ensure that we are truly moving forward in our goals and desires. So conducting your own personal performance review can actually be a lot of [00:02:00] fun.
Sara Mayer: So often we focus on the things that didn't go well, or the things that we didn't get done, but we failed to celebrate the big wins in our year. So I encourage you to do a yearly. Review of yourself, and it doesn't necessarily need to happen at the end of the year. Now's a great time to start this. So there are benefits to personally looking at the year.
Sara Mayer: It helps in self improvement. It helps you to set better goals, to make informed decisions, to share statistics that maybe would be lost. if you didn't have a way to change that and to view your progress over time. So many things that we progress in, it's not like a big flashing, Hey, this change, you did a great job.
Sara Mayer: It's slow and steady over [00:03:00] time. And so we may not notice those changes. So how does this work? How do you do this for yourself? First let's back up to the first thing. These things do matter, so it does matter that they are tied to the goals. They can't just be random stats or things you don't care about.
Sara Mayer: So the first thing is you want to make sure that you have defined some goals. And you know that I am not a proponent of smart goals because I like things to be big and lofty because when we make them too smart, sometimes we tie them in this nice little package, but they're not truly our big dreams.
Sara Mayer: They're like what we can measure. So your goals can be big and lofty, live a nomadic life or maybe write a book someday or become a keynote speaker. [00:04:00] They don't need to be in a specific format. And often the big things that you truly do want to achieve are not things that you can quite measure. For example, have a better relationship with a parent or a spouse.
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Sara Mayer: That's not like quantifiable, but it's a feeling, when you have it. First, I encourage you to sit down and really jot down what your goals are, your dreams. And some of you may have very specific things and it's fine. Just make them bigger, a little bit bigger. [00:05:00] So if your goal is very specific, like for example, to get a promotion at work, to make 10, 000 in revenue, I encourage you to blow that up a little bit.
Sara Mayer: Use a little TNT and really think about why do you want that promotion at work? Is that a baby step to the big goal of being the vice president or the president of a company? What is the bigger goal to that? Because that is really a step to achieve a bigger goal. Does that make sense? I hope it does. All right.
Sara Mayer: So take some time, jot down your goals. And then once you have those goals, that's when it's time to take some measures, some measurements, ways that you can measure. And this ties into the performance view. I'm not going to talk about actually how to achieve your goals and creating steps and objectives and stuff like that.
Sara Mayer: That's a whole separate talk. But now that you have your goals jotted down, so maybe it's to establish a [00:06:00] homestead or whatever, become an author. I'll use the become an author as an example because a lot of people can relate. So become an author, maybe writing one book, a hundred books, however many books, but the big goal, become an author, a published author.
Sara Mayer: When you get into measuring that, you want to create some measurements that are quantifiable. So let's talk about I'm actually going to jump into sales a little bit. So there's things that people do sales, people do that lead to sales. And then there's things that don't. And a lot of it comes down to activity.
Sara Mayer: So I must have this many quality conversations. I must do this much outreach. And then the likelihood of me making a sale is high. Same thing with writing a book. You must write a certain number of pages. In order to publish a book and you must write a certain number of pages that lead to a certain number of chapters to then have [00:07:00] them edited.
Sara Mayer: And so those are measures that you can put in your performance review of yourself that you keep track of. Now, you may have three goals, five goals, however many goals you have. Those are the big things that you want to measure throughout the year on whether or not you're making progress on those things.
Sara Mayer: Are you moving forward with your big goals? That's the purpose of the performance review. Are you making progress on your personal development? Are you making progress on your finances, your relationships? You can measure almost anything. For example, If your goal is a little more not quantifiable, have a better relationship, one of the activities to have a better relationship could be to have a certain number of date nights, or it could be to take vacations with your spouse that are, not full of distractions, or it could be to have quality [00:08:00] conversations or write more notes.
Sara Mayer: So you can think of a way to measure almost anything. And so first, jot down your goals, then jot down some ways to measure those goals. And this is even before we get to the performance review. And once you have what your measures are going to be, or things that are important to you, that at the end of the year you want to see improvement on, or at least holding steady.
Sara Mayer: So for example, you may have a great credit score, and you want to maintain that. So you want to track that. And at the end of the year, right? My credit score stayed the same, or it went up. Perfect. It didn't go down. So there are other things that may be not tied to your big goals that you want to track that are important to you.
Sara Mayer: But these are things that are It's important that at the end of the year, you want to review yourself on how you [00:09:00] did. So maybe it's how healthy you were. Maybe it's how much, how many books you read. A lot of people have goals for that. So you have your big goals and then you have other things that you might track with measures.
Sara Mayer: And so it's important that you gather information regarding your goals throughout the year. You can't just do a yearly review blind. That's why I'm encouraging you to start now. So put this in a document, a notebook, if you're a paper person or an Excel spreadsheet, if you're really technical, like I'd probably put it in Excel.
Sara Mayer: I'm known to love paper as well. So it just depends. Then you're going to put these in your. Paper and in your format, your tool. And you want to really think about what exactly the rhythm you want to measure this. So maybe it's a monthly score. Either you can score yourself one to five or you can actually for [00:10:00] your credit score go look it up.
Sara Mayer: Or you can track weekly how many pages you wrote for the book. And so you put this into this tool and you'll want to track it for a period of time. So maybe quarterly you. You track it and then every quarter you review, but it needs to be captured on a regular basis. And so once you have these measures that you're trying to measure, the next step for you is to do a quarterly review or a yearly review.
Sara Mayer: And I also encourage you in this document to put in some notes and some wins, wrote a bunch of pages, finished chapter one, no stuff like that so that you can truly capture the things throughout the year that maybe you would miss on a regular basis. And so once you have all of this, if you're going to do your quarterly or yearly review, it's [00:11:00] really important that you find a place to comfortably do this and gather all the relevant material.
Sara Mayer: You can even print off a screenshot of your calendar and this document that you've created. And. Take a look at it, and I think it's important to really reflect on your achievements. So what really did, were you shocked about that stood out to you that maybe you hadn't planned for? What did you do really well?
Sara Mayer: What were your big wins for the year? I'm a big fan of color coding. I envision I would be a highlighting student. Stuff, if it was on paper or turning things green, if it was an Excel, but those are really important and it's important to then journal about those, like what led to those successes were those surprises, where they plan, were they things that you really focus on and why are you most [00:12:00] proud about those things?
Sara Mayer: And take some time to do that. And then next up it's assessing the challenges and maybe things that you miss the mark on. So it's important to acknowledge setbacks and challenges. Michael Jordan missed more shots than he made and lost more games than he won or whatever. But. I think it's important to remember that those are the learning lessons that can be used for a future.
Sara Mayer: So I encourage you to be kind to yourself. Remember, you just spent all this time talking about your wins, but also be kind to yourself when you're looking at your failures. Come at it from a growth mindset. What can I learn from this? What can I do differently? And what can I give myself grace on?
Sara Mayer: Because remember, we're talking about some of your biggest, boldest goals. We're also [00:13:00] talking about some stuff that are just easy to track and daily things that you want to feel good about, but your biggest, boldest goals should be challenging. They should be hard. Remember like that example of getting a promotion.
Sara Mayer: That's not really the goal. The goal is to become CEO of the company. That's not easy or become CEO of your own company or whatever the goal is. That's not easy. And so they should be challenging. So give yourself some grace on these goals when you have challenges and failures. You are not meant to accomplish these all in one year.
Sara Mayer: Again, you're not meant to accomplish all of these in one year. You're meant to make progress in them. So after you identify some of the challenges and setbacks, it's really important to ask yourself a couple of questions. What can I do differently next year or next quarter if you're doing this quarterly?[00:14:00]
Sara Mayer: How can I plan for my life to get in the way if life actually got in the way of you accomplishing some of these things and who has already figured this out that I can connect with? That's the key.
Sara Mayer: Take some time and think about that. What can I do differently? How can I plan? And who has already figured this out that I can connect with? And that's where you take your plan and then create some objectives. Remember, goals lead to objectives, which are steps that we do to get that done. Create some objectives around the what and the who.
Sara Mayer: And then take your objectives and put that into your calendar so that you have planned for that. Now, you are going to have areas of improvement. So you might need to become somebody different. You might need to learn something in order to be [00:15:00] good at it so that you can then do something else. And it's really important to create that development plan.
Sara Mayer: So after you do the assessment, it's not just about, okay, adding more tasks to the list, or this is how I did really well. and then this is how I did it and what. No, it's time to create that development plan. What do I need to learn? What do I need to do in order to get those things accomplished? And that's where It takes a lot of self awareness, but it also could be a mentor.
Sara Mayer: It could be a book. It could be a podcast that you listen to that helps you really change or identify those areas that you need to work on in order to be more successful in your next year. And maybe it's simply just keeping your eyes on the prize more. Maybe you need to do monthly reviews of this and it's about creating an action [00:16:00] plan.
Sara Mayer: And when you create an action plan for improvement and break it, break those goals down into more manageable steps, you're able to track progress, but also celebrate those wins. Now, I would be remiss if we didn't talk about accountability. All of us have different tendencies. There's a book called the four tendencies.
Sara Mayer: I encourage you to check it out. It's a great book. And sometimes people really resist things that are set for ourselves. Like we say we're going to do this, but we don't really ever do it. But if somebody else asks us to do it, we have a strong will to complete that. And I think it's important. To put in some accountability measures.
Sara Mayer: Maybe you need an accountability group. Maybe you need a timeline on your phone. Everybody's a little bit different about that, but there are ways to stay accountable. Maybe you just need to post it on social that you're doing it, and this can help to bring your [00:17:00] goals alive. Now let's talk about celebrating our progress.
Sara Mayer: So you just did your quarterly review. Congratulations. or maybe it was a year review. Congratulations. That's awesome. It's time to celebrate those wins. So remember, no matter how small your achievements are, those are wins. And there's a psychological benefit to celebrating milestones. Do you remember when we were growing up and we first went to school and it was like a milestone first day you took the picture, they still do that.
Sara Mayer: And then. At the end of the year, you graduated and took a picture. And so those milestones are a great way to naturally trick your psyche into achieving and feeling good about those achievements. So I encourage some compassion and self care as part of the celebration, but I think it needs to [00:18:00] be celebrated somehow.
Sara Mayer: So think of a way to do that. And That is the way that you can do a yearly review. So the first step is really coming about those goals, coming up with those goals, deciding are you going to do yearly, quarterly, monthly reviews? And then the next step is about creating those measurements. How are you going to measure those goals?
Sara Mayer: Improvements do you want to see and then about having that honest conversation with yourself and you can even do it really formally, like sitting down now, Sarah, you did really good. I don't encourage that, but maybe I do. You can do it. And that is how you do a yearly review. And the benefits to that are you get to see progress year over year.
Sara Mayer: And sometimes you may slip back a little bit, but when you look at things over time, it's a better indicator on improvement than when it slowly comes about. [00:19:00] All right, bowl goal crushers, it's time to get to it. So you can crush your goals and everything that gets in the way. I look forward to seeing your yearly reviews.
Sara Mayer: Thank you for tuning into the bold goal crusher podcast where we crush goals and everything that gets in the way. I always love to support my community.
Sara Mayer: I look forward to seeing you crush your goals this year.
