Ask The Right Questions ConceptThe New Year isn’t the only time of the year that it’s a good idea to pause in our busy lives and take stock of how things have gone and are going now.

Every few months (or more often), taking stock enables us to assess how we’ve done so far, and how we would like to make the next few months better.

Making the year better, of course, is what making New Year’s resolutions is all about.

As most of us know to our chagrin, many of our resolutions fall by the wayside before even the first month of the year (okay, the first week of the year) is over.

In one of his always insightful blog posts, Seth Godin encourages us to approach reassessing where we’ve been and where we’d like to go from a different angle.

He suggests asking ourselves several key questions. He applies them to work, but most of the questions apply to the rest of our lives as well. Among my favorites are:

  1. What do you stand for?
  2. What are you afraid of?
  3. What are you doing that’s difficult?
  4. What contribution are you making?

To see the remainder of Seth’s questions, as well as how he suggests that you use the answers to inform your choices on how to improve how you live your life, click here.

This idea is definitely in alignment with my late husband Saul’s suggestion that we set aside time every month (or at least quarterly) to do the same kind of assessment that we do once a year at the New Year.

Unfortunately that is one resolution that Saul and I were unable to keep. Sigh!