The end of the business year is nearly here, so it's time for reviews at work. Today I was required to write an assessment for one other person (mercilessly, only one person requested my feedback), my manager, and myself. Writing reviews for other people is always relatively straightforward and the words come easily. Doing my own was more of a mixed bag.
Two of the sections were essentially 'what went well?' and 'what didn't?'. I wrote several paragraphs for the second box quite quickly, explaining what I have been unhappy about over the last year, what aspects were on me, and what aspects came from elsewhere. Reading it back, it needed very few edits to get the balance right.
The first box, where I needed to clearly explain exactly why I-am-the-shit-actually took me a few hours of stream-of-consciousness typing followed by editing and shifting and some pacing around and some procrastination.
In the end the 'good' box was about 3 times the length of the 'bad'. I'll take that ratio. To try and ignore the bad and not put my hands up to it would be poor form. It's no secret among my team, manager, and myself, that as my life crumbled in the middle of last year my performance was in the toilet. I'd like to see ANYONE work to a standard they can be proud of under those circumstances. Trying to give myself praise was far easier if imagined I was writing about someone else's performance. After all, those peer reviews always come easily.