Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

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.

This is, thankfully, not one of those "find the light" self-help books. In fact, it is so grounded in reality, that you can feel a little annoyed with yourself after doing some of the exercises. What you discover, reading this book, are mostly things you already knew. The genius lies in the order in which the author has presented the questions, so you have serveal sequential "aha" moments throughout. The book shows you how to learn your own lessons. Occasionally there are pricelss tidbits, which, taken out of context, might seem trite. But she delivers them right in the middle of the relevant exercise, where your brain is forming that exact recognition by itself, and then BAM she hits you with a one liner which brings it all together, and you think "yeah!".

It took me well over the suggested 3 hours to complete the exercises, although I did it progressively as I read each chapter. While not "ground-breaking" this book is definitely "life-changing". In hindsight, I knew this stuff already. I just couldn't seem to do anything about it, and this book offered the clarity and direction I needed. I will use this book every year.

This book was recommended to me by several separate sources and I liked it so much I've been recommending it to lots of friends and have bought a copy for one too. It's not that the ideas are radical, infact the layout and structure of the ten questions is very simple, so simple it belies a razor sharp accuracy, which enabled me to cut away negativity and carve out a new future. In my mind. The challenge now is to stick to the plan and make it work. I will refer to this book to help me review my goals every year, or more if I feel the need.

I was privileged to be one of Jinny's "Results Unlimited" clients when this programme started back in the 1980s in London. In my first year I lost 56lbs in weight, completed a diploma in Psychotherapy, undertook a remedial programme for my dyspraxia (co-ordination dysfunction) and finally learned to ski without falling over at every turn. I grew immensely in confidence and self-belief and in so doing started out on the developmental path which led me out of the corporate world into transformational healing and coaching.
It was such a delight to discover this book last year when I was browsing the internet. It is a masterpiece of clarity, concisely written and the intervening years of experience with the programme has enriched it in ways I would not have envisaged. It gives a structure for planning your life , for achieving goals in keeping with your vision, goals born out of your values and it does so in a practical down to earth manner.

I've used "Your Best Year Yet" since the mid-90s in its U.K. edition. Ms. Ditzler's 10-question process takes about half a day to complete, and disciplines you to create a one-year plan that balances your successes, mistakes, values, and major life roles. The process stresses reality, rather than fantasy; Ms. Ditzler is a strong believer in focus. Every time I've worked through the book, I was sure I knew where I would end up... and each time, my final goal list was quite different and much more balanced than when I began. And yes, in the four years since starting to use this book, each year has been far better than the last.

Jinny S. Ditzler's book stands among many self-help books designed to improve your life. Although her strategies aren't particularly groundbreaking, they are solid and workable. If you take the time to complete her "Best Year Yet Workshop," you have an excellent chance of improving your life. Her well-designed workshop, with its ten-question style, is complete, easy to follow, and helpful. Ditzler has used the "Best Year Yet Workshop" herself, and her stories of her own successes and setbacks add a personal touch. If you haven't worked with a self-help book before, this is a good one to start with, basic and friendly, with practical exercises. We [...] recommend this book for people who are serious and motivated about improving their lives.

I found the whole process of developing your goals to be very simple with this book. You just answer ten basic questions and boom! you are done. It establishes a nice foundation that you can use other books to flesh out some topics she covers briefly. She even recommends some books. I used it for 1999 and I accomplished 4 out of 10 goals. It was not perfect but I never have written any goals done and kept them in front of me before and I'm 34! Success is a process not a destination.