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Photo by spunkinator
 

Raise your hand if you love getting performance reviews from work…

I thought so :)

Like them or not, they do serve an important purpose - to provide feedback on how we are doing and to show areas of improvement.  But with performance reviews, you don’t get these very often.  Once a year?  Six months?  Three?  But when you have them it provides a good picture of “where you’re at”, no?

But these kinds of performance reviews only cover the professional side of you.  And depending on how you go about your day, there’s at least 8 hours that you don’t spend working.  So where’s the feedback for those times of your life?

Introducing the Daily Performance Review:

Let’s face it, you’re tired at the end of the day.  All you want to do when you get home is eat then go to sleep so you can get up the next day and start over again.  But there is something to be said about spending a few minutes in quiet reflection to see how your day went.  And what you could’ve done differently.  Here’s a few ways you can go about doing this:

  • Find a quiet place in your house where you won’t be disturbed for a little bit.
  • Sit down on the floor or on a chair.  Don’t lay down as the urge to go to sleep maybe too strong (speaking from experience here ^_^)
  • Take a few cleansing breaths.  This is where you inhale deeply, hold the breathe for a second, then exhale twice as long.  Feel the fatigue and negative energy melt away and fall off.  Remember, you want to do your self review in a non-negative state.
  • After a few minutes of the cleansing breaths, you should start to relax.  You there yet?  Good :)
  • Close you eyes and imagine that you are smack dab in the middle of a movie theater.  It’s a private screening so you’re the only one there.  What’s playing?  The day you’ve had of course :)
  • Rewind to when you first opened your eyes.
  • Then press Play.
  • Obviously the movie in your mind would not go in real time (that’ll take another 8 hours or so ^_^).  Skim over to the interesting bits. 
  • Let’s start with the good stuff first:  I was able to take some time to eat my lunch.  Or I resisted the urge to strangle my boss when they told me they were moving the timetable up for the due date of my current project ^_^.  You should get these things out of the way first.  You did a good job, acknowledge that you did, then move on.
  • Now for the not so good stuff:  My temper got the better off me today, especially when someone cut me off on the road.  I was short with a co-worker, with family, with friends.  Now think what you could’ve done different.  Then replay it again in your mind with the different approach. 
  • Step into the role when you replay it in your mind: Feel and experience everything going on in that moment, this helps the different approach register as it will feel more natural.  And the mind is more apt to accept something as true the more something feels natural.
  • Practice, practice, practice: It’ll feel weird the first few times you do it, but it gets easier with time and you’ll find it an important part of your routine :)

But above all else, this exercise is not to be taken as a form of self-criticism.  It’s a time for reflection and positive feedback.  To find out what things you do well and things not so well, with the end goal of improving.  And isn’t that the goal of a performance review in the first place?

Thanks for reading.