cover image Your Best Year Yet!: A Proven Method for Making the Next Twelve Months the Most Successful Ever

Your Best Year Yet!: A Proven Method for Making the Next Twelve Months the Most Successful Ever

Jinny S. Ditzler. Warner Books, $15.5 (230pp) ISBN 978-0-446-52532-9

Originally published in the U.K. in 1994, this excellent guide to setting and accomplishing goals for personal and professional success originated in workshops the author has been teaching for 25 years. Ditzler offers a clear, concise and thorough ""framework"" for defining values, identifying important roles and prioritizing and focusing energy where it ""will make the most difference to you."" Beginning with an annual life review, she moves on through learning from the past, changing ""limiting paradigms"" to ""empowering"" ones, setting ""value-driven goals"" and being your own personal coach. Through a series of questions, Ditzler creates numerous writing and list-making projects designed to uncover an overall life ""vision"" or ""mission,"" and to ""focus your power in a laserlike way"" to accomplish ""little steps"" that will lead toward it. While goal setting and planning for daily, weekly and yearly objectives is now typical in both personal and professional self-help projects, Ditzler offers a deep understanding of some of the internal and external obstacles to the reaching of these goals, and provides commonsense advice for overcoming those obstacles. She also suggests that some frequently made and unmet goals (ideal weight, for example) should be abandoned, to be replaced by others that are fresher and more healthy and realistic. With New Year's Day and its attendant resolutions approaching fast, readers may take to this title in an exuberant way. (Nov.)