Self-evaluation and self-assessment have become popular in the business community, replacing the old employee evaluations process. Businesses see the value of having employees evaluate their behavior, both the negatives and the positives.
Self-evaluations have also been a part of spiritual and personal growth processes for hundreds of years.
Why Do Self-Evaluations?
According to High Five Test, “self-assessments involve assessing your strengths, weaknesses, accomplishments as well as failures.”
There are three main goals for doing self-assessments:
- Acknowledging your achievements. We tend to focus on our failures, not our wins. To maintain motivation and fairly evaluate our progress, we need to note (and celebrate)what we’re doing right, and the progress we’ve made.
- Admitting your failures. It takes honesty to admit when we’ve failed to live up to our intentions. We want to avoid beating ourselves up over our failures, but we do need to identify where we need to improve. “Failure feedback is a great opportunity for self-development and improvement.”
- Preparing for the future. The most significant part of self-evaluation is focusing on the future and making plans to better meet our intentions. After noting where we’ve fallen down, we must devise a plan for getting back up and moving forward.
Any self-evaluation system we develop needs to address all three of these objectives.
Why I Do Weekly Self-Evaluations
It’s important for me to do regular weekly self-assessments because I seek to live an intentional life. I can’t know if I’m living the kind of life I intend unless I periodically review my behavior and compare it to my written intentions. As American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer John Dewey said in his book, How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process: “We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience.”
In designing my intentions for each area of my life, I use a process first developed by David Sparks. Using this process, I first identified all the roles in my life. Next, I wrote an “ideal description” of what my excellent behavior would look like in each life role.
Those ideal descriptions contain my intentions for how I want to live my life in each life role. Every week, I review those ideal descriptions and evaluate how I am doing in fulfilling my intentions.
Two Approaches to Self-Evaluations
I’ve seen two major approaches to self-assessment in the productivity community. They are similar in that they both use questions to prompt an evaluation of our behavior.
1. “Did I Do My Best?”
With this approach, you ask yourself “Did I do my best?” regarding each area of your life (family, finances, work, etc.) or each life role (husband, father, friend, writer, etc.).
I appreciate that on the surface it sounds motivational and positive to ask, “did I do my best?” but I think there are some major problems with asking ourselves this limited question.
- It’s built on a flawed assumption. This question assumes that the standard to meet is doing one’s best in every area of life. To me, “do my best” infers a 100% or above effort in every activity in my life.
- I don’t agree with that standard. It’s not my goal or desire to “do my best” in every area of my life. It sounds nice, but I don’t believe that’s an appropriate goal for everyone. Some may argue that “doing my best” doesn’t really mean “giving 100%” to everything. Rather, it means, “Did I do my best given the circumstances.” To me, that invites and encourages rationalization in the entire evaluation process. It’s easy to excuse my failures to live up to my intentions by saying, “I did my best under the circumstances,” and therefore give myself a free pass.
- We all have limited amounts of time, energy, and focus. I don’t think it’s wise or possible for us to do our utmost in every task. Why can’t I choose to do less than my “best” in the areas in which I decide to do so? To be responsible I may decide that I need to do an only “adequate” job in one area if I have other areas needed my time and attention that are more important. I need to balance my time and energy in an effort to live a balanced life. That sometimes means I might decide to give less energy to one task instead of another. It means “Life Balance is … About Intentional Imbalance.” It’s not my goal or my standard to do my best in every area of my life.
- It sets us up for failure. At its heart, “did I do my best” is a standard of perfection. It’s an “everything or nothing” standard, with only a “yes” or “no” response possible. There is no option for a spectrum of answers.
- Unless you’re willing to rationalize from the “best” standard, it’s ultimately destructive, condemning, negative and an impossible standard to meet. It discourages, not encourages. I find it telling that none of the articles I found talking about self-evaluations suggested using the “did I do my best?” question. Rather, they all recommended asking questions that would prompt reflection on wins, failures, and plans for future improvement.
- “Did I do my best?” doesn’t include any important follow-up questions. In an adequate self-assessment, there is not only one question, “did I fail or succeed?” To meet the goals of self-evaluation, we also need to ask questions to follow up. If I answer yes, I did do my best, is there room for improvement? Might there be better ways to do my best? If I answer no, I didn’t do my best, what could I do to improve my performance in the future?
- The failure to have follow-up questions to the one question is a serious flaw. It ignores the wisdom that acknowledging an experience alone (whether positive or negative) is not valuable. It is reflection on that experience that is valuable. Good follow-up questions encourage and facilitate that reflection.
- The failure to have follow-up questions to the one question is a serious flaw. It ignores the wisdom that acknowledging an experience alone (whether positive or negative) is not valuable. It is reflection on that experience that is valuable. Good follow-up questions encourage and facilitate that reflection.
2. “How am I doing? Where can I get better? Where am I doing good?”
These are the questions I use in my weekly reviews. They were recommended by David Sparks in his article on Mid-Year Reflection and Planning.
After reading the “How to Write a Self-assessment About Yourself” article, I realized that these three questions met all the goals of a self-evaluation:
- “How am I doing?” prompts me to assess my performance honestly. Has my behavior lived up to my intentions for each life role? This open-ended question allows for answers along a spectrum, not just a simple “yes” or “no.” Perhaps I’ve not done very well meeting my intentions as a husband, or I’ve done OK, or I’ve done great. This is not an “everything or nothing” standard. It gives me the ability to make a more accurate evaluation of myself than a “yes” or “no”. Life is not black or white, and our evaluations of our lives ought to have the same flexibility.
- “Where am I doing good?” prompts me to focus on where I’ve been successful in meeting my intentions. Answering this question makes me notice and acknowledge where I have done well. It helps me to recognize where I’ve made progress. Focusing on my successes gives me a more balanced view of my behavior and provides me the motivation I need to continue to strive toward meeting my ideals.
- “Where can I get better?” points to the future. After evaluating my wins and losses, this question leads me to come up with plans for the future to improve the areas in which I didn’t do well. Instead of beating myself up over areas where I didn’t do well, I acknowledge them, leave them in the past, and work on improving myself in the future. When I do this section of my review, I often add action items to my task manager or add an item to my habit tracker. It helps me to zero in on specific ways I can improve my behavior in the future.
“How am I doing? Where can I get better? Where am I doing good?” Are Effective, Helpful Questions in Evaluating my Behavior
Using these questions to evaluate my behavior has many benefits:
- I get a general sense of where I stand in each role.
- Using open-ended questions allows for a much more accurate and nuanced evaluation.
- Negatives are recognized, but in a positive light with opportunities for improvement.
- Positives are highlighted and help me to overcome my tendency to focus only on my negatives.
- This approach helps me to balance my positives with my negatives.
I suggest that you build these questions into your weekly review, whatever system of intentional living you chose to use.
I have a document that lists all of my roles and lists all of my specific ideal behaviors for each role. Above each ideal description, I have three questions, “How am I doing? Where can I get better? Where am I doing good?”
By doing this, I can read each element of my ideal behavior, and then glance up to read and answer each evaluation question. It gives me a simple way to do a comprehensive assessment of myself. For more information on my review system, see my blog post.