It’s that time of the year, December, some people like to think of it as the most wonderful time of the year, and I agree. There are a lot of celebrations, exchanging gifts, vacations, hanging out with family and friends, so we tend to put work at the bottom of our to-do list. But after all the partying and fun, guess what? Its back to work and the New Year is here.

The New Year comes with new opportunities and possibilities; at least that is what we think to ourselves, which is one of the reasons why we have resolutions, doing things differently to expect a different outcome. I applaud everyone who takes time out to do this. However, when you consider the rate at which resolutions fail, one starts to wonder, if it is worth it having a New Year’s resolution. Maybe the problem is the way we go about implementing such resolutions is totally wrong.

As a Business Owner, you need to make resolutions for your business, just like you make for your personal life, and this is not an easy task. But before you start writing goals, planning and implementing for the New Year, it would be a good idea to reflect on the past year, so you can avoid the same mistakes you made last year.

Why Reflect?

Reflecting on your business is an important step in planning for a New Year. When you take time out to reflect strategically, you can discover new ideas and opportunities and build a foundation for future growth.

Reflecting on the past helps you understand your business better, this makes setting goals and looking forward to the future a lot easier. Reflecting provides sufficient information about your business, so you don’t let the forces that more ardent push us around, and you can act or react meticulously when you need to. The purpose of this is to get you thinking about your successes and failures, what you are grateful for, what you need to change, and should give you the drive you need to move forward.

Some people may say this is a time wasting activity. In some ways, I could agree with that. Spending time on reflection can seem like wasting time, you should be out there working and doing more to grow the business so you can achieve success a lot quicker. However, when you succeed in a project, and you don’t take time to think back and figure out what contributed to the success, or when you fail and you don’t look back to see what caused the failure, you would never learn. Experience is a good teacher and when combined with reflection, it can be more effective.

When you want to reflect on the past year, start with a high-level overview of your business. Reflect on your overall activities of the business as a whole. A good example would be to ask yourself, “Overall did we achieve our goals,” then delve deeper. Delve into different departments, to get a clear picture of what happens in each unit.

In Part 2, we would show you some questions you can ask to help you reflect but let us know. What ideas has this sparked? How has this post helped you? Please share your ideas and thoughts in the comments.