Many areas in our lives (including our careers-Joel J Turney LLC), we have things we are working towards and want to be able to see progress in.  Whether that is with our goals, success, financial aspirations, or our career and family values, there is generally a desire to make progress in those areas in our lives.  Unfortunately, life throws a lot of curve balls at us and makes these accomplishments difficult.  This can seem like a repetitive cycle unless you take note to measure every little piece of progress.

Measuring progress is a process aimed at determining whether goals are being achieved.

Defining and Understanding The Goal

If you don’t know what you are working to change, how can you measure progress?  You can’t!  So, you need to put attention to defining your goal and understanding what it looks like along the path to completing it.  You don’t want to have only a single measure, how you or have you not accomplished it.  Instead, break it down into steps and minor accomplishments along the path of completion so that you have many steps and small accomplishments along the way to measure progress with.

Recognizing Progress

Recognizing progress starts by looking for change.  Change is necessary and desirable when working on goals and so change is what you should start out looking for, not static consistency.  Once you’ve made enough progress to achieve your goal, then consistency with that will be important to hold on to it.  Progress means you are moving forward and closer to where you want to be, no matter how small that might be.  This is especially true when looking at breaking habits or tackling difficult goals since its easy to be discouraged otherwise by the time and effort needed to sense some accomplishment

Sharing the progress you make with others is a great way to recognize it as well.  Not in a bragging way, but simply to inform or include others in your journey as its very motivating to have others encourage you to continue and help you recognize the progress you are making.  Find yourself a partner or team to look for progress and show appreciation and encouragement for it.

Use All Your Resources

Considering all your resources involves looking around you to ensure you have multiple ways to measure your progress.  Just relying on your own opinion as a measure is not enough since the mind loves to play tricks on us and your thoughts from just a single day can shift so quickly, its dangerous to trust only a single source.  Ask those around you that you live and work with to help you guage how well things are going and look at other tools available to measure progress.  Having multiple opinions and many smaller factors to measure makes progress much more evident.  If all you have is the end result, its easy to miss progress along the way and be discouraged.

Let Progress Steer Your Path

While you don’t want to loose sight of your goals and visions which got you started along your path, other seeing progress along the way can help you to adjust and redirect your plans from what you originally intended.  Perhaps you learned some new things and have changed your mind about your goals or your approach to accomplishing those.  That’s OK, and in fact, its great to experience these changes and know that the progress you are making proves that you are changing.  As you measure your progress and see where things are leading, adjust your goal, your plans and actions to accomplish it and continue to work towards it.  Put value on the small progress steps that you continually make and know that stepping and looking forward, even if its just one step at a time, still has you moving on a forward path.  Be swift in your adjustments and keep progressing and measuring along the way.