Creating Success Through Self-Auditing

May 24, 2016 competesc

One of the fundamental tenants of Compete SC is our goal of making every person who steps through our doors better. On the surface, we are primarily making those that enter better at sports, or simply getting them in better shape.

I would be lying, however, if I said we didn’t have a secondary goal of personal growth and development with all our athletes and adult training clients. We try our best to not only produce great athletes, but to produce great people as well.

A few months back, I wrote an article on my personal meditation practice. I was pleased when I heard a few people say they liked it, received a couple emails thanking me for writing it, and even had some people say they tried the meditation method I suggested and liked it. Even though it was only a few people, I felt immensely proud that my suggestions outside the gym were taken seriously by people.

Just a few days ago, a person very close to Compete told me they had tried my method of meditating and loved it. They even tweaked it for themselves a bit, and made it even more personalized and meaningful. The fact that someone was talking about a recommendation I made in a blog post 6 months ago inspired me to share my current personal growth habit with you all.

I’ve always been a fan of daily journaling. While I was living at school, I would wake up early (before anyone on my hall was up), make a cup of coffee and dump my brain onto a blank page for 15 minutes or so. It was easy, left me feeling refreshed, and sometimes taught me things about what was going on in my subconscious. If you’ve never tried that, I definitely recommend it. However, recently my journaling practice has changed, and I’m very excited about the new product.

I have combined my love for auditing and managing with my daily practice of personal development, and created a nightly journaling format that allows me to quickly and meaningfully look back on my day, evaluate it, and dissect what went right/wrong. In a sense, it’s a postmortem for my day. I have attached what my version of this looks like to this post. I encourage you to check it out, use it word-for-word if you so choose, or modify it to fit your personal needs and goals.

The protocol for this is very simple; keep either a stack of these sheets printed out, or an empty composition notebook next to your bed. Every night as you get into bed, fill out the information, think on it for a few minutes, and go to sleep.

Here’s a few nuggets of why I like this practice

“What gets measured gets managed” – Peter Drucker. If you can create a way to measure important aspects of your life, you will manage them efficiently and effectively.
I have a tendency to lay in bed thinking a mile a minute when I need to be asleep. Instead of sleeping, I allow my brain to whirlwind about for an ungodly amount of time and lose precious hours of sleep. This practice allows me to empty those thoughts out onto paper and be done with them. My sleep has been vastly improved since I began this practice.
It allows me to pick up on whether or not I’m slipping, to what extent I’m slipping, what areas of my life I’m slipping in, and helps me identify both good and bad habits much quicker. Spotting trends allows me to notice things like, ‘my nutrition always decreases as my productivity increases’ and ask questions like, ‘how can I find a balance between these two equally important aspects of my life without making significant sacrifices to either one?’ These questions make my little composition notebook worth its weight in gold.
This practice allows me to hold myself accountable. It’s easy for me to ignore negative trends in my life when they’re just slipping through the cracks throughout the day. But when my actions are sitting there on paper right in front of my face, I lose the ability to ignore them. When I go about my day, I am consistently more motivated to act in a way that I would like to report on my nightly audit, as I know I will eventually have to write it down and face it.

Daily Self-Audit

Rank 1-10 the following categories:	Is this number better/worse than yesterday’s?
Nutrition ____
Personal Development ____
People Skills ____
Workout ____
Thriftiness ____
Productivity ____
Mood ____
Total (out of 70) ____