At the conclusion of your work week, reflecting on a provocative question can help you learn, plan, adjust and generally, just get better. I encourage you to pick one of these per week to ponder, and see what happens as a result. Writing thoughts is highly encouraged – but optional.
- What have you accomplished this week of note?
- What are the 3 most important things you need to do next week?
- Who do you need to show appreciation to? How will you do that?
- Were there any actions you took this week that were misaligned with your core values? What can you do to prevent that from happening again?
- What brought you the most joy this week? How did you express it?
- What needs to happen in the next 3 months for you to be happy with the progress you’ve made?
- What was left undone this week? Are those things important to carry forward into the coming week? Can they be delegated? Can they be dropped?
- What did you do, think, or feel that did not serve you well? How can you shed this in the future?
- As you look at your “to do” list for the upcoming week, what can be delegated to someone else that will free your time and will help the other person grow?
- What progress are you making on your long term goals? What needs readjusting?
- What is the one big thing you are avoiding dealing with? What is one step you can take to begin to deal with this?
- What are you most grateful for?
3 Responses
Another great set of tools to continue self-improvement: I already ask some of these each week, but others get me to thinking about what I have to do next in different ways, resulting in actions I wouldn’t have taken. Particularly for me this week is contemplating gratitude and joy and what I should do next to enhance particular relationships, the most important ingredient for my success.
My appreciation (# 3 above) goes to you this week, Kris. Thank you for your thought-provoking messages. They are always interesting, wonderfully insightful, and sometimes uncomfortable — but it is good to be reminded to do the ‘uncomfortable stuff’. It’s certainly much easier, in the moment, to avoid and ignore it, but you are always there, gently pushing your followers to never be satisfied, to take care of the hard stuff first, and to maintain balance in all things, work and life. Thank you for your inspiration, and please keep sharing, educating and motivationg…you do it so well!
Great advice. It addresses key actions for managing a career and personal improvement – continuous improvement, building effective relationships, and time management.