Self Evaluation

While you are waiting for your friends to complete your Online Audit it's a good opportunity for you to complete an audit on yourself.

Instructions for Self Evaluation 
You'll find it very interesting to compare your own evaluation with your friends' observations. While you're doing this it's important to think as widely as you possibly can about yourself. The Lonely Woman and her conversational Skills (see Audit example) is a good example of how wide you need to cast your net. To help you think laterally, below you'll find a list of Strengths and Weaknesses for you to consider. 

Repeated Mistakes 
Another important microscope for looking inside your character is to list your Repeated Mistakes. Even though Repeated Mistakes are related to your Weaknesses they are slightly different. Mistakes are negative things you keep doing over and over again. Maybe you trust people too much or you're a bad judge of character. Maybe you keep falling in love with 'bad guys' who are initially attractive but ultimately hurt you and don't help you grow. Maybe it's the exact opposite; you fall in love with great people but because they are so good to you, perhaps you end up taking them for granted and treating them badly. Maybe you rush off at 200 km/h into a new project without doing your homework properly and then in five months time you've run out of steam and all that work and effort amounts to nothing. Repeated Mistakes come in many different flavors and cover categories such as relationships, finance, work, recreation and so on. So below there is a section for you to write down your five greatest Strengths, your five greatest Weaknesses and any Repeated Mistakes you make. 

Your Skills 
Strengths and Weaknesses typically refer to aspects of your personality. It's just as important for you to assess the strength of your Skills and decide whether or not there are any holes in your arsenal. For example, in motor racing I've come across many drivers with exceptional Skill who can balance a car on the absolute knife edge of control, but who lack the technical knowledge to set-up the car's suspension or have the ability to find an optimal solution for a particular corner. Even though they're brilliant drivers, they are missing crucial Skills. At the lower level of motor sport this isn't a problem because they can just rely on their exceptional driving Skill to win. But at the top level of the sport they suddenly find everyone else has a similar level of car control, only now their opponents also have these additional Skills as well. 

Maybe you're a businessman doing mergers and acquisitions and can zoom around a spreadsheet with your eyes closed but don't have a grasp of the changing political landscape. In this case, even though you can negotiate brilliant deals buying and selling companies based on their current value, perhaps one day you'll get caught out by a sudden shift in global politics. Maybe a sharp squeeze in global credit affects your consumers' spending patterns or maybe some government's action to reduce oil production suddenly squeezes your business from an unexpected direction. So take a moment to think of all the Skills you need to be successful in your business, your sport and in your everyday life and then write down the ones that you think could be improved and add them to the rest of your self-evaluation.

List of Strengths and Weaknesses to consider for Self Evaluation 
As you think about yourself here are some additional categories you may not have considered before. 

SELF AWARENESS 
Knowing your internal states, preferences, resources and intuitions 
-  Emotional Awareness: Recognising your emotions and their effects 
- Self-confidence: A strong sense of your self-worth and capabilities

SELF REGULATION 
Managing your internal states, impulses, and resources 
- Self control: Keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check 
- Trustworthiness: Maintaining standards of honesty and integrity 
- Conscientiousness: Taking responsibility for personal performance 
- Adaptability: Flexibility in handling change 
- Innovation: Being comfortable with novel ideas, approaches and new information 
- Resilience: Ability to recover readily from adversity 

MOTIVATION 
Emotional tendencies that guide or facilitate reaching goals 
- Achievement drive: Striving to improve or meet a standard of excellence 
- Commitment: Aligning with goals 
- Initiative: Readiness to act on opportunities 
- Optimism: Persistence in pursuing goals despite obstacles and setbacks 

SOCIAL COMPETENCE 
These competencies determine how we handle relationships 
Empathy and Awareness of others' feelings, needs and concerns 
- Understanding others: Sensing others' feelings and perspectives, and taking an active interest in their concerns 
- Behaviour: Sense emotions and respond appropriately 

SOCIAL SKILLS 
Adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others 
- Communication: Listening openly and sending congruent messages 
- Conflict management: Negotiating and resolving disagreements 
- Building Bonds: Nurturing instrumental relationships

download the self-assessment document here