As the end of 2018 is near, I’m thinking about how this year has gone and what 2019 may hold for me. This has been a very challenging year for me, both personally and professionally and the fact that I feel like I’m moving forward instead of just treading water is a victory in my book. I know that 2019 will be throwing at me some big decisions and new challenges. To prepare myself for this upcoming year I need to take some time to reflect on what I’ve done well at and where I could use some improvement.
In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear wrote about both his Yearly Review and his Integrity Report. His review focused on the things that went well (his accomplishments) and the things that didn’t (where he can improve) and he does this at the end of each year. His integrity report is about who he is as a person and whether he is living up to his vision of the person he wants to be. He does this mid-year. I decided that both of these would be good exercises for me, but I’m doing both now.
The three questions he asks in his Integrity Report are:
1) What are the core values that drive my life and work?
2) How am I living and working with integrity right now?
3) How can I set a higher standard in the future?
I thought about these questions for awhile realized that my Manifesto captures how I want to be living my core values. From there I came up with two questions:
1) How have I done with living up to all of the points in my Manifesto?
2) How am I going to do better in each of these areas in 2019?
I have answered Question One for each point, but I haven’t yet gotten to the second question yet. Clear shares his reports on his website, but I’m not comfortable putting all of the little details out there like that so I’ll just provide a few general points:
• While I’ve been writing letters and Skyping with my good friends who live far away, I need to do better at getting together with people in person.
• In some areas my passion has waned, and in others I feel like I don’t have an outlet for it.
• I’ve done a good job of staying active and eating pretty healthy, which has resulted in me keeping off the weight that I lost in 2017. I let meditating fall by the way side for most of the year, but am now on my 36th straight day of meditating. There are still certainly ways that I should be taking better care of myself.
• I had a tough time letting go of things this year, which didn’t serve me well.
• It was a good year of learning for me, but I need to do pairing learning with action.
Clear also shares his yearly review, which again has three questions:
1) What went well this year?
2) What didn’t go so well this year?
3) What did I learn?
These are good questions and I suspect I’ll use them, plus revisit Question 2 from my Integrity Report – “How am I going to do better in 2019?”
Again, it’s been a rough few months so I know there are a lot of areas where I could be doing better. Some of that may have to wait until I’m through this “rough patch” and some may be necessary to tackle in order to get to the other side. I’m doing a “staycation” over the holidays and am setting time aside to answer these questions and make commitments to myself to try to make 2019 a much better year.
On that note, this will be the last post for me until early in January. Please have a peaceful and healthy holiday season, regardless of whether you celebrate any of the many holidays that fall during the next few weeks or not.
