The Quarterly Review: A Strategy for Taking a Step Back to Move Forward

Constantly working and pushing forward without pausing to check your progress may not always be the best strategy. Taking a break to review your goals, realign your actions, and reset has enormous benefits.

With the constant barrage of tasks and activities we all have, personally and professionally, implementing a structured and intentional quarterly review process enables us to gain clarity, refocus, and move forward with greater insight.

What is The Quarterly Review?

The Quarterly Review is a purposeful practise, conducted every three months to examine, readjust, and refresh your goals. This process includes generating new ideas, identifying areas for improvement, and reflecting on your own behaviours. With a structured framework like The Quarterly Review, you will experience a sense of clarity enabling you to feel confident you’re on the right path.

The Benefits of The Quarterly Review

The Quarterly Review provides a valuable opportunity to celebrate not only your achievements but yourself, leading to the cultivation of gratitude. It takes you on a journey to reflect on your accomplishments, recognise your effort, and appreciate what you have. The process allows you to honestly evaluate what is effective and what needs improvement and it helps you create a vision for the next 90 days, and make a commitment to taking aligned action.

How to Implement The Quarterly Review

Practise Gratitude

Practising gratitude is a key component in sustaining a clear focus on the path you're following. Take a blank sheet of paper and spend 3-5 minutes creating a mind map of all you are grateful for from the last three months. You can include maintaining your exercise routine, engaging in yoga practice, eating nourishing meals, your commitment to your business, achieving sales, and collaborative opportunities. Keep writing until you feel a sense of completion.

Acknowledge Yourself

Being able to acknowledge yourself creates greater self-awareness and self-appreciation, and boosts confidence. Take a few minutes to compile a list of things you want to recognise as having achieved, faced, or navigated in the past 90 days. This could include showing resilience, working hard, becoming proficient in a new piece of software, facing your fears, showing kindness, and more.

Evaluate and Re-prioritise

Taking an objective look at how you’re tracking allows you to eliminate what’s not working and helps you re-prioritise, and implement new practises. Ask yourself these three questions – writing down your answers to determine your stop, start, and continue list:

What is not working in my life and/or business that I need to stop doing?

What is working well that I’d like to continue?

What is something new I’d like to try this next quarter?

Create a Vision

Define your overall vision for the upcoming quarter, ensuring it aligns with your life or business strategy. Take a helicopter view, focusing on the bigger picture rather than getting caught up in the detail. Compile a list of 3-5 significant milestones you aim to achieve in the next three months.

Develop Specific Goals

With clearly defined goals you will have the impetus to move forward and take action. And, you will have clear and measurable steps you can evaluate against at the end of this quarter. Based on your vision and the insights gained from your stop, start, and continue list, formulate three detailed goals for the next 90 days.

Use Affirmations

Using affirmations is a powerful way to reprogramme your subconscious mind to influence your success. By repeating positive statements, you will increase your focus on your objectives, resulting in your thoughts, actions, and aspirations aligning. Write three specific and detailed affirmations using present tense language (as if they’ve already happened) for yourself for the coming 90 days – e.g. I am loving my stimulating and rewarding new job.

The Power of Visualisation

Your ability to manifest your desired outcomes in the upcoming quarter relies on your capacity to visualise them. Using visualisation is a potent creative process that involves envisioning yourself actively engaging in or achieving the outcome you seek. Spend a few minutes each day seeing yourself achieving those goals, for example, speaking on stage, signing up new clients, or feeling great out on your morning run.

The aim of The Quarterly Review is to introduce and foster a continuous improvement way of thinking. By adopting this practise, you can align your actions with your goals, be proactive in your approach, and move forward with clarity, focus, and purpose. Schedule your reviews in your calendar and harness the power of taking a step back to move forward.

........

Kathryn's Masterclass on this subject is available on the Focus Tribe Online membership site. Click her to find out more.

Categories: Business tips