It’s natural to reflect on your career this time of year and set a resolution for the next year. Your year end results may be coming in shortly. If you are fortunate to receive a bonus, this is the time it is typically paid out. These tangible results provide you with objective measures to use when evaluating how you did. You may have some goals that you feel you haven’t achieved yet. This year especially has been a challenge. So many things happened that may have affected our ability to remain on track with our goals.

How Do I Think I Did This Year?

So, the year end results are in. We all have a competitive streak in us. We want to be productive and perform well. So how did you do? It’s a time to reflect on how you did and what that means for the next year. Self-promotion is absolutely necessary in the workplace. In order to market yourself, you have to know what you accomplished through the year. Making a list of your achievements is a worthwhile exercise. It will help you during the performance review process. People have a tendency to only focus on the recent events. This will enable you to remind your boss of 12 months of accomplishments, not just the last few months. It will also allow you to identify what you can do to improve the following year as part of your resolution for the new year.

Am I Still Learning?

Do you feel challenged at work? Continuous learning and growth is so critical to how we view our roles. It has a great deal to do with our level of satisfaction at work.

Does My Job Make Me Happy?

Let us face it, we all do things we don’t like at work. There are aspects of our job that are not as exciting, challenging or meaningful. There are responsibilities that we perform that are very rewarding. The beginning of the New Year is a great time to reflect on how we feel as a whole. What are your thoughts about your job? Does it make you happy?

What Are My New Year’s Resolution Goals for This Year

The beginning of the year is a great time for reflection of lessons learned. What are your key take aways? After carefully assessing how things went, what do you plan to change? It’s critical to be practical when goal setting for the year. Think about three or four things you would like to accomplish this year. Be practical in your goal setting. Establishing a realistic timeframe for achieving these goals and how you can objectively evaluate your progress.

Sometimes we are going a hundred miles an hour and do not take the time to reflect. Reflection is a healthy exercise and it is an important part of learning. Once you take some time to assess your career, you can make changes for the better. Whether or not you decide to move on to another stage in your career, the exercise is a worthwhile one. Even if you had an exceptional year in terms of your performance, there’s always an opportunity to learn and grow.