How to Run Your Own Annual Review

Forget Resolutions—Here’s Your Blueprint for Making Next Year a Smash Hit

December can be a challenging month for ambitious people. Work can slow to a crawl as holiday parties and end of quarter business planning seem to swallow up our time. It can seem like no one is starting new projects, opening new positions, or signing new contracts.

So use December as an opportunity to look inward and get your own affairs in order. I’m going to share with you a technique I’ve used to end the year feeling strong and ready to take the new year by the horns.

New Years Resolutions
Let’s get something out of the way: New Year’s resolutions have a bad reputation.

Around 40–50% of Americans say they make New Year’s resolutions. Few are able to stick with their resolution. Without a strategy, resolutions merely reflect hopes and dreams, rather than realized outcomes.

Research by John Norcross and his colleagues at the University of Scranton has determined that just under half of resolvers were successful in changing their behavior. And here’s what the successful resolvers did more of:

Tried hard and made a real effort to stick with the new behavior (sounds obvious but it was a statistically significant difference!)
Thought about the severity of the problem, and how it was impacting their life
Reminded themselves about their resolution
Avoided situations where they would give in
Obviously, self-knowledge plays a great deal in the success of goal setters. The idea of self-reflection as a component of successful goal achievement is well-known. It’s perhaps best captured in this quote, from Harvard educator Howard Gardner:

“Extraordinary individuals stand out in the extent to which they reflect — often explicitly — on the events of their lives, large as well as small…by seizing the opportunity to leverage and frame these experiences, we gain agency over them. And this heightened agency, in turn, places us in a stronger position to deal with future experiences, even as it may alter our own sense of strengths and possibilities.”
Are you sold on this idea yet? Great, let’s dive in.