Your Best Year Yet!: Ten Questions for Making the Next Twelve Months Your Most Successful Ever [Paperback]

Jinny S. Ditzler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2000

AWAKEN YOUR "CAN DO!" ATTITUDE

Within every successful person is an ordinary person who found the courage, heart, and discipline to act...to face the big challenges and make dreams come true. The life you want is yours for the taking. This unique, bestselling guide from a successful corporate coach shows you how.

Jinny Ditzler has helped thousands of men and women achieve new milestones of personal and professional success over the past twenty years. YOUR BEST YEAR YET! is a fun, proven, interactive workshop-in-a-book that offers a transformational, goal-oriented program based on ten simple questions. These straightforward, life-changing practical steps will help you make this year -- and every year -- the best year of your life as you achieve:
-- Greater income -- Time for what matters -- Fulfilling relationships -- A satisfying career -- Physical wellness -- Spiritual abundance

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (January 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446675474
• ISBN-13: 978-0446675475
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #179,773 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jinny Ditzler is the author of the best selling book, "Your Best Year Yet!" now translated into 14 languages and in its 20th printing in the U.K. She is a founder of the personal and executive coaching industry, having originated the process in the U.K. in 1981. Jinny is also the founder of Best Year Yet®, a global business that has trained over 400 Program Leaders and Coaches, who have worked with over 800 companies in 14 countries. Over a million people have used Best Year Yet in the past 31 years.

Jinny's expertise is in coaching, facilitation, writing and speaking, and she's recognized as a thought leader in the fields of organizational revitalization and personal transformation. Her passion is to make personal and organizational transformation simple and sustainable for people everywhere.

She has been active in nonprofit organizations both in the U.K. and U.S., serving on industry boards and on the Board of Trustees for The Hunger Project. She was also one of the early founders and a president of the Executive Service Corps in Aspen, Colorado, an organization that trains business leaders and independent professionals to provide consulting and coaching to nonprofits. She is married to Tim Ditzler, the creator of Producing Results Online® (PRO), the cloud software for tracking monthly and weekly progress on Best Year Yet plans.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Now everyone can be CEO of their lives August 9, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

Having read many self improvement/leadership effectiveness books, this was the first book to truly enable me to make the transformation from cognitive understanding to behavioral change. The book is an easy, engaging read with many real life examples. The step by step process goes beyond traditional goal setting. The reader can immediately apply the concepts to their personal life and move themselves into action. Upon completing the work pages in the book I had a personal strategic plan for making my next 12 months my "Best Year Yet." It was a fun, energizing experience.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A simple process that will change your life February 23, 2005

By Michael Neill

Format:Paperback

Favorite quote:

"Everyone should know the feeling of overcoming fear and mastering something. People who aren't taught that become soggy."

-Katherine Hepburn

Five years ago, I picked up this book on a whim for about six pounds in Mysteries bookshop near Seven Dials in London. Shortly before new year's eve, I got together with a few friends and went through the ten questions listed on the back cover of the book, creating in the process a one-page "Best Year Yet" plan.

Not only was the next year my best year yet, I have repeated the process every December since, (sometimes on my own, sometimes with friends), and each passing year has once again become my "best year yet".

Last year for the first time my business partner and I sat down and did the process for our then suffering enterprise; suffice it to say that despite the occasional hiccup, our bank manager is once again our friend!

The author is also an executive coach, and while many of the models she uses are not original, (she borrows particularly heavily from Steven Covey's seven habits), they are universally useful and occasionally reap (for me) surprising results. Despite the interesting stories, examples, and insights, this is far more of a "doing" book than a "reading" book, and it includes a complete do it youself Best Year Yet workshop in the back.

Beyond highly recommended!

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Great for a Novice Goal Setter February 2, 2005

By Shalin Chanchani

Format:Paperback

This book is dedicated to Goal Setting. The key concept here is to identify the key roles you play (or would like to) in life, rate your performance on each and then plan the year forward to succeed in each of these areas. The author provides a useful structure to approach goal-setting.

While a `role driven' method of goal-setting is a useful approach (and certainly novel to me), I felt it somewhat limiting to someone who is not new to this area. For example, one of my goals for the year is to do yoga twice a week. I would have to view one of my roles as that of a `yogi' to set a goal for yoga. And labelling myself `yogi' is a stretch - pun unintentional. But the role-based goal setting is a useful complement to regular goal-setting exercises.

That said, the self-assessment chart of how one performs in various roles provides a compelling visual and is a vivid motivator for change. The course / book is structured such that it leads to a single page of goals.

The commentary accompanying the exercises is occasionally verbose and perhaps even tedious. The points however are useful and the book would benefit from distilling questions / issues that lead to meaningful answers. The author has a wealth of knowledge, accumulated by conducting goal-setting seminars and talking to many hundreds of participants. This can be organized in a better way.

The entire effort took more than 3 hours (more than 6 for me) that the author promises - time well spent. Some exercises require reflection / self-awareness particularly when responding to questions such as `list the key values you uphold, in order of importance'.

Overall, for someone who is not familiar with goal-setting, this book provides a very useful process to goal-setting.... For compulsive goal-setters this book offers interesting and different a viewpoint, which will undoubtedly strengthen the goal-setting process. Read more ›

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Simple and intelligent self-help book that really works October 10, 2003

By Tim Burness

Format:Paperback

In exactly the way the author claims, this book has really helped me improve my life over the last 12 months. The strength of this book is its powerful simplicity. Many of the ideas, suggestions and techniques can be found elsewhere in many other popular self-help writings, but Jinny Ditzler's approach inspires action almost effortlessly. Compared to other similar books, it is almost impossible to read this without making at least one or two of her lists which then empowers you to make positive life changes.

A criticism might be that it is fairly basic stuff that we know already, but answering the various lists of questions here brings new clarity and confidence about what is going on, or not going on, in one's life. Parts one and two are preparation for "the ten best year yet questions" in part three. These are basically all about looking honestly at your life, seeing clearly what works and what doesn't, then setting clear and specific goals in different areas over the next 12 months.

If, like me, you are someone who loves reading these kind of books but finds that it often seems to take rather a lot of hard work to put the ideas into practice, I recommend Your Best Year Yet! Inevitably I did not achieve some of my goals for the last 12 months, but the considerable improvements I did make (plus increased clarity about goals for the future) were partly due to getting a realistic focus from this book.