The New Year is here and it is that time of the year when I do my personal Year-On-Year Analysis. Confused? Yes! Like all Businesses do YOY analysis at the end of the financial year, I do a personal assessment of myself every year.

Let me give you an idea on how I do my analysis so that (may be) you can give it a try.

Year after year, if you are not better in the following, you are probably in the wrong direction with your growth goals:

• Personal
• Financial
• Professional

Personal:

Take about thirty minutes to see how you are as a person compared to how you were a year back. There are many points that can be checked under ‘Personal’. The following set of questions should help.

• How healthy are your relationships (family, friends, peers, etc.,)?
• How healthy are you physically (Check your BMI, BFI, etc.,)?
• Have you upgraded yourself in fashion (Opening your wardrobe should help)?
• How stressed are you?
• Did you learn/start something (hobby, study, after work fun project, etc.,) new?
• How many people did you help?

Above are just examples. You can have as many questions as you want. But do not forget to note them down somewhere safe.

Financial:

For you to have a smooth personal growth, like it or not, financial factor plays an important role. For the last 14 years, starting from when I was a student, I’m used to tracking my income, expenses & investments on a daily basis. At the start of every year, I set the following goals and check the same the year after:

• Income (Salary, Return on Investments (ROI), other incomes, etc.,)
• Savings after tax
• Investments (equity, real estate, FD, gold, bonds, etc.,). [I do not consider keeping the money in savings account as an investment 😉 ]
• Overall Networth

The goals are generally in % of the current financials.

Professional:

For most, current job is the highest source of income except if you have made some good investments. Also, close to 40% of your time in a year is spent on work related activities. Professional goals can be short term and long term as a normal practise. But having yearly goals (call it short term or long term) makes a huge difference.

One of the important factors that I check is my Brand equity within the company. A simple question would be, “Did my brand Value grow within the professional space?” Haven’t given this thought anytime? If you see people who move up the ladder and hold top positions in corporates all over the world, are people who build a strong brand for themselves.

This Brand equity sums it all. Your brand value goes up only if you are in the right place, doing exactly what you like and delivering at your fullest efficiency. This, for me is more important than other professional acknowledgements.

If this did tickle some part your brain, sit down and spend some time to list down your objectives for this year and save them in the cloud (if you wish) so that you don’t loose it. Make frequent visits to the objectives to make sure you are on the right path. if you feel so, you can make quarterly evaluations (like organisations do) to track your progress.

Need help? Do not hesitate to drop me a message.