The beginning of the calendar year provides two incredible self-assessment opportunities.

During December 2014, my leadership teams wrote a letter to themselves. This letter detailed what they had achieved in the last 12 months and answered the question if they had their time again what would they have done differently. We collected these letters and recently mailed them to their home address as a reminder of what they said they would achieve last year and offer a chance to see what progress they had made against what they identified as their goals and actions.

The second opportunity is to reassess your personal and professional goals in a more extensive fashion than simply your month in review of progress being made. This often involves allocating a larger amount of time to delve further into whether the goals have been achieved, whether they are realistic, and whether the goal is still relevant, and to reset for next year. We encourage our leadership teams to be active goal setters, starting with an extensive ‘dream session’ to let your mind run free and dream up what’s possible and then apply the usual rules of goal setting to those dreams.

I encourage you all to write a letter to yourself, looking back at the year just past and to dedicate some time in January to have an honest appraisal of your 2015 goals. Commit some time to goal setting and set 2016 up to be the best year you have ever had.

Read Steve’s last ‘Closer Look’ here.