The Business Chat - Your "I'm great" list

Well I don’t know about you, but on December 23 I have to say that business is one of the last things on my mind right now. Even I, as a hard-core seller am done with it for the year. At least I’m done with all the making, selling, photographing, writing, admin-ing, social media-ing work of running my business.

There is still one last task to do. It’s a fun one (depending on your definition of fun). My last task is my annual review. My review is not just how I functioned in my “job”, or how well the “company” did, it’s also about setting goals and milestones for the upcoming year. No matter how small your company is I think a review is critical to your future. A review allows you to see exactly where you are now so that you can map out how to get where you want to go.

There are 3 steps to my annual review:

• Step 1: Review the Previous Year
• Step 2: Outline Goals and Overall Focus for Next Year
• Step 3: Plan how I will achieve these goals

The point of step 1 is to see what I managed to achieve in the past year (and pat myself on the back) and to see where I currently stand. To start I look back on the year and ask myself a series of questions. The questions start very simply:

• What went well in 2012?
• What did not go well in 2012?

I must admit, being December 23 and being surrounded all this holiday festivities, I had a hard time concentrating on this task today. And so I decided to just work on one small part of this for this week. I’d think this is something every single person should do.

The first question is “what went well in 2012?”

Take a few minutes to think about this. Make a list. Now is an excellent time to celebrate everything you have accomplished in 2012.

When you work for yourself there is no one to give you a performance review and tell you how great you are except yourself. If you are like me, you have a to-do list the size of a phone book (I am assuming that you are old enough to remember what a phone book is). It’s a very natural thing for us as small business owners to only ever look at all the things we haven’t managed to do yet.

It’s time to give ourselves a pat on the back.

Let’s spend this pre-Christmas time focussing on the positive and celebrating all the things we did manage to do. Go ahead. Write them down each and every single accomplishment no matter how small. Think of new skills learnt, books read, knowledge acquired, tools bought, sales made, everything positive you managed to do in 2012. I’ll bet it’s a bigger list than you realize.

It’s a nice way to end a year, celebrating how much you managed to do. Now, don’t you deserve a treat for being for fabulous?