Where are you today? Take an Inventory/Self-Assessment
“What the new year brings to you will depend a great deal on what you bring to the New Year.”
– Vern McLellan
We are working toward personal and professional growth to build a stronger version of who you are today. This essay aims to help you take a comprehensive inventory of your current situation to set a strong foundation and map for future growth. You must see them in written form or as a visual cue to keep focus and clarity on your goals. Research estimates that 90% of people who set New Year’s goals do not reach their goals. The University of Delaware and the University of Scranton completed this research. Let’s be the 10% who achieve them.
The links at the bottom of this document will provide a list of areas of your life and an outline to help you start thinking about what is truly important and where to establish goals. How you approach your life is vital to how you achieve these goals. Assessing your habits, behaviors, and lifestyle philosophy helps you reach your highest potential. I encourage you to embrace an intentional living lifestyle.
Intentional living is a lifestyle philosophy that encourages making conscious choices and decisions aligned with our values, beliefs, and goals. The philosophy is to be purposeful and deliberate about how you spend your time and energy. It is about how you use your resources rather than simply going through the motions of daily life. Your resources could be your health, money, education, social network, skills, knowledge, and abilities.
First, you must understand who you are today. This can be accomplished by taking a self-assessment or an inventory, analyzing your strengths and weaknesses, and identifying the gaps between where you are today and who you want to be tomorrow.
What does taking a self-assessment mean? It involves assessing and cataloging various aspects of your personality, skills, knowledge, and abilities. You are defining aspects of your identity, interests, and behaviors. It is a self-assessment and a self-reflection exercise. A better way to understand yourself and your potential. In a simple statement, it is about creating a list or profile of who you are.
What does taking a personal inventory mean? It is about gathering the pieces of your life’s wins and accomplishments. It is taking an inventory of where you are today regarding the different areas of your life, such as education, health, career, and relationships.
You want an inventory to know where you stand today; we are mapping a plan. We will align our goals and write our legacy in the following two blogs this month. We want to document where we are NOW and where we want to go TOMORROW. Who do you want to be? How do you want to improve? What areas do you want to work on in 2025 and beyond? Asking and answering the most important questions.
It is important to remember you cannot tackle everything at once. Change happens through continuous improvement incrementally. Small steps daily.
Then, design the life you want to live. Define who you are! Don’t be part of who you are.
Why does self-assessment matter?
A self-assessment is part inventory and part analysis. It can provide a clear and realistic understanding of your current strengths, weaknesses, and resources. By identifying our strengths and weaknesses, we arm ourselves with a vision and a plan of where we want to see growth. How can we improve our strengths? How can we turn our weaknesses into strengths? This preliminary plan helps us to set realistic and attainable goals. Self-assessment also allows us to align our goals with our core values and interests.
Knowing your current resources, such as time, energy, finances, skills, knowledge, and abilities, enables you to plan effectively. Your self-assessment will help you allocate these resources to reach your goals. It can also help you prioritize your goals based on importance and feasibility. Identifying the areas of your life and where you need to set goals is necessary.
Regular self-assessment keeps you accountable to yourself. It is a tool to help you find clarity, focus, and commit to your goals. Self-assessment provides a baseline from which you can track your progress. Seeing measured improvements can be highly motivating and encourage continuous effort.
How to complete a self-assessment
Complete a personal SWOT analysis
- List your strengths and weaknesses
- Identify opportunities and threats (what could go wrong, what roadblocks you might face)
SMART Goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time bound. Smart goals are a guide to setting objectives. Objectives define the strategy to reach the identified goal.
Reflective journaling is writing your thoughts and feelings to help determine what truly matters and where you want to go in 2025 and beyond.
How to measure your goals. You want to develop a way to monitor your goals, as being out of sight and out of mind means you don’t always follow through. Tracking your personal growth will help.
What truly matters?
As you determine what goals you want to set. Ask yourself what truly matters. You cannot do it all at once, so focus on the most critical areas of your life.
Focus, Clarity, Consistency, Balance, and Moderation
Take some time to read these past essays as you start your map. The essays will give you food for thought and help you set goals.
How to be a Better Person by Setting Personal Standards
Intentional Living – Nourishing Your Mind and Body
Why Habits Are the Secret Weapon to Changing Your Life
What Truly Matters? A Personal Growth Mindset
Intentional Living – Nourishing Your Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs)
The Power of Authenticity – Becoming Your True Self
Conclusion
This statement means that the true value of an assessment lies not just in the process of collecting data about ourselves, but in how that data is actively analyzed and used to improve your life. Having an assessment in place without acting on the information it provides is essentially useless.
Completing a self-assessment allows you to adapt your goals according to life’s circumstances. Life is messy, and every plan faces some roadblocks. If you have developed a deeper understanding of who you are today, you will be able to adapt quickly. By completing regular self-assessments or inventories, we can create a mindset and habit of continuous improvement.
Self-assessment and inventory are vital processes that help you set meaningful, realistic, and achievable goals. The process helps you to understand your starting point – NOW. It helps to align your values and goals. You create a baseline that serves as a reference point for measuring progress and a tool to adjust goals as needed. By completing a regular self-assessment of how you set goals, you can create a clear path to personal and professional growth.
Keep the SMART goals formula in mind while mapping your journey. Mapping is a graphic representation of a place usually drawn on a flat surface – a map. We are mapping our future. What does this all have to do with mapping? You need to know your destination. Mapping is a journey, a trip you are preparing to take. The trip might be running the race, painting a picture, or becoming the CEO of a major company. You still must plan your trip, pack the right items, and prepare for the process.
Start your self-assessment now and share your insights or questions in the comments. The following two document will help you see in what areas of your life you want to set goals. The first document is Chapter 3 of my book, Resolutions: Life Planning Tools. The second document is my approach to understanding the big picture for 2025 and beyond. It is a bit philosophical, but so am I.
Recommended Reading
10 Questions That Will Change The Trajectory Of Your Life, According to Psychology, by Alex Mathers.
A Guide to a Personal SWOT Analysis: Preparing for Your Next Role, by Kiran Chaggan
For more on S.M.A.R.T. Goals, check out UMass Dartmouth’s website – Creating S.M.A.R.T. Goals | UMass Dartmouth.
The Written Goal: The Mindset Behind Writing Your Goals & Reading Them Daily (Success with Swag(ger)), by Sam Kabert.
Citations
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Photo by Michiel Annaert on Unsplash
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Photo by GIK Multimédia on Unsplash
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