Self-evaluations are one of the first activities you must do when you start your personal development journey. It is also the first step of the Love 4Self method, which I created due to my self-love journey. Since everything in life starts with us, our personal development journey has to start with a self-evaluation. Hence why I will share how to do a self-evaluation in this blog post.
What’s a Self-Evaluation?
In Emmerance’s words, contrary to what you do at your employment, a self-evaluation is an evaluation that you do of yourself. When you do a self-evaluation, you don’t just grade yourself as good or bad. You also look at your environment and inner self.
The importance of a self-evaluation
As mentioned above, self-evaluation is one of the first activities you do when you start your personal development journey. The reason is that we must get to know ourselves before we get into the development part.
A self-evaluation helps you understand and get to know yourself. Look at it as if you’re meeting a complete stranger for the first time. That one stranger that you’re interested in learning more about. When you meet that stranger and build a relationship, not only do you discover what they like and dislike, you also find how they are with others and themselves.
The issue here is that we spend so much time getting to know other people that we barely know ourselves. We’re interested in people’s lives, how they might be toxic, and their relationships, but we never question ourselves.
Doing a self-evaluation opens the door to self-awareness, which is the second step of The Love 4Self method. Most of the people on earth live on auto-pilot. They don’t question anything; they let society guide them. When you do a self-evaluation, you examine the most important thing in your life: yourself.
The first step of The Love 4Self method
My ebook, The Beauty of Self-Love: How to Find Love in Your Singleness, explains The Love 4Self method more in-depth. However, if you didn’t read the ebook, in short, the technique helps you analyze your life and keep you accountable to put yourself first.
The method helps you start your personal development journey the right way. You won’t be feeling lost anymore; you will be guiding yourself on the right path. It’s true because I use the method whenever I reach my goals and start a new one.
It has helped me with my self-esteem, confidence and trust in myself. I became more courageous and understood that I will be at a loss if I don’t put myself first.
Hence why the first step of the method is Self-Evaluation. Before you dive into the below instructions, the first thing you must do is, being honest with yourself. Honesty goes a long way. The faster you’re honest with yourself, especially in this stage, the more chances you’ll be successful in your personal development journey.
To do the self-evaluation, I recommend using a journal to write down your thoughts and daily patterns. This step can take a week or two to complete. It depends on how consistent you are.
Here’s how you do a self-evaluation
When you do your self-evaluation, you have to look at yourself from a third-person perspective. It’s like you’re watching yourself play the game of life. Although you’re watching yourself, you also know everything about what’s happening in your heart, mind and soul.
There are two sections within the self-evaluation step: the internal evaluation and external evaluation. Let’s start with the internal evaluation.
The internal evaluation
The first one is the internal evaluation. You evaluate everything that has to do with your emotional, mental and spiritual health. This section takes a little bit of time because we have to do a few retrospections.
The best practice for doing an inner evaluation is to take a notebook or journal and write down your day. At the end of the day, you take a moment to write down how you felt and why it happened. I also encourage you to write down your thoughts whenever you feel a certain way.
When you’re happy, you take your journal and write down the reason why. When you’re mad at someone or at yourself, write down the cause and also pay attention to the words that you use.
Doing this will help you see your thought patterns. You’ll probably discover that you have a negative narrative. In my experience, I used to always blame myself and calling myself dumb for making mistakes.
You can also spot jealousy and greed in your inner evaluation. These are flaws that would not serve you if you leave them within you. You have to point to them and watch how you will find the solution to fixing these flaws.
The external evaluation
The external evaluation consists of everything you’re part of, but that is out of your control. When we look at our external evaluation, we have our relationships, family, friends, colleagues. And then we have our environment, which is our space, home, school, and work.
In this section, our goal is to be in a healthy, secured environment. When you start your self-development journey, you need to create a healthy environment because you cannot develop yourself in a dysfunctional or toxic environment.
What I ask my client to evaluate first are the relationships that they have. The first one should be your family because they’re most likely the ones you interact with the most. The second one is our friends or colleagues. I put them both in one basket because we usually spend a lot of time talking with our coworkers or friends during the day. The third one is the strangers in our life. Strangers are part of the list to see how welcoming we are with others and if we’re people pleasers.
The second thing I ask my client to do is evaluate their space, home, office, anywhere they spend most of their time. It’s essential to do this because you want to be somewhere where there’s positive vibration going around. I remember my client telling me how she has her own space at her parent’s place even though many things are disturbing her. She will start her personal development well because of the room she has to retreat and recharge.
The purpose of doing the external evaluation is to see if your environment is toxic (stressful, tiring, dragging etc.) or if you actually have a good support system.
Once you figure it out, you have to know if there’s a conversation that needs to be done or if you can find a support system elsewhere. Do not be afraid of walking out of a toxic relationship. It’s the best decision you’ll ever make.
One last thing
As I recommended a journal as a helpful tool for self-evaluation, I also wanted to add that it’s essential to review what you wrote when you’re done with it.
The Love 4Self method is like a cycle; you’ll have to redo the steps here and there whenever you see a change in your life. It’s important to review your thought patterns and your environment. You have to know if you’re improving or not. Hence why the self-evaluation step is crucial.
Come back next week where we will see the second method, which is Self-Awareness.
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