Any car owner will be familiar with the concept of the MOT, the annual assessment of your car’s viability for being on the road. It’s an important test to ensure your car is running as it should, to identify any potential issues and get the necessary repairs made before things become irreparable.
A personal MOT follows the same principles, allowing for self-reflection and encouraging a review of what is and isn’t working, where some repair work may be needed and what plans need to be put in place to prevent the wheels falling off. It’s a useful exercise to conduct, at least once a year, although you can do it as frequently as you find useful.
For me, a personal MOT is better than setting goals or resolutions at the beginning of the year, because it is less a list of ‘wants’ and ‘wishes’, and instead, it focuses on various aspects of my life and makes me reflect on what do I want more of and what do I want less of? Where has most of my time and attention been and does that align with my values?
Your journal can be an extremely useful tool for letting you carry out this regular self-assessment, providing space to review multiple aspects of your life, activities, behaviours and emotions. Going into detail can help provide clarity and foster personal growth.
What is a personal MOT?
A personal MOT is a structured self check-in that encourages you to evaluate and assess all the core aspects of your life, such as mental, emotional or physical health, progress towards goals, as well as career and relationship satisfaction.
It’s an activity that prompts you to stop and reflect and define areas of focus for the upcoming months. I’d recommend it as a semi-regular journaling exercise because it can bring a greater sense of direction to your regular journaling practice. After you’ve conducted your MOT, you should have a better idea of the areas you want to focus on, as well as some clear goals and defined steps to take, and your regular journaling can incorporate reflection on these elements.
Like with an actual MOT, your personal MOT should look at what is working well for you, areas where some maintenance is required and what requires immediate attention. It’s a powerful tool for getting a holistic picture of where you are in relation to where you want to be.
How to use your journal for a personal MOT
Below I’ve outlined some steps for conducting your own personal MOT. Please note that you can follow these steps in any order you like, the key thing is that you’re taking time to assess all aspects of yourself. Using prompts within your journal is a good way to quickly get into writing and exploring, and hopefully asking yourself deeper questions than you might do unprompted.
Step 1: Assess your mental health
For everybody, although for men in particular, it’s important to have a good understanding of your mental health and a strong vocabulary when it comes to describing the current state of your mental health. Often serious mental health problems can be the result of frequent smaller stresses, leading to a much bigger issue. Take the time to reflect on the times and situations that are taking a toll on your mental wellbeing, and consider how you could mitigate their impact going forward. Are you getting enough time to reset and relax, and if not, how could you incorporate that time into your day?
Consider the following prompts:
“What thoughts have been occupying my mind lately?”
“Am I feeling mentally energized or drained?”
Try and identify times or situations that are typically stressors and look for patterns that negatively (or positively) affect your mental health. Write about what you currently do to improve your mental health, and what you could consider implementing more of. This will help you identify areas of improvement which you can then create a plan and actionable steps for.
Step 2: Check your emotional well-being
It can be all too easy to become emotionally overwhelmed or emotionally drained without regular check-ups, and this can lead to outbursts of uncontrolled or unconstructive emotion. As part of your MOT, you should take a look at how you are feeling and how you are regularly feeling over a set time period.
If you have been journaling for some time, it can be an excellent tool for looking back and asking yourself, ‘have my emotions been largely positive or largely negative?’, ‘are there emotional things going on in my life that I haven’t fully worked through yet?’ And, ‘Who are the people and what are the things that I have a strong emotional reaction to, and do I want more or less of those feelings going forward?’
If you haven’t yet started journaling, you can still ask yourself those questions, you’ll just be relying on memory to find the answers.
By checking in on our emotional well-being we can identify any trends, patterns or areas of concern and put plans in place to make positive steps towards emotional wellbeing, before we find ourselves overreacting or lashing out.
Consider the following prompts:
“What emotions have I been feeling most often?”
“How do I typically respond to stress?”
Try and recognise both your emotional highs and your emotional lows, and consider the circumstances that prompted those reactions. From there you can start to explore coping strategies and prioritise emotional wellbeing.
Step 3: Evaluate physical health and energy levels
As part of your personal MOT, you should assess how you are feeling physically and look at the root causes of those feelings. Are you feeling well rested and energetic? If so, what routines have you got in place that are helping you feel that way and how can you ensure those routines aren’t interrupted? If you are feeling aches and pains, or you’re feeling tired and sluggish, again, assess the root causes and try to develop a plan that will prevent you feeling that way in the future. Use your journal to consider prompts such as:
“Am I getting enough rest, exercise, and nutrition?”
“How does my body feel daily?”
Your journal is an excellent place to keep trackers for key physical health metrics like sleep, workouts, diet and daily movement, which can make your regular MOT all the more effective because you can look back and see exactly what you were or were not doing when you were feeling a particular way. Tracking habits can also help to keep you on track with them moving forward, when you have created an action plan off the back of your MOT.
Step 4: Review personal and professional life
Our personal and professional relationships can have a huge impact on every aspect of our lives, and conducting a regular audit of both your personal and professional life can allow you to assess your satisfaction with both. Are you feeling fulfilled in work? Do the people you spend the most time with make you happy? Where work and relationships are making you feel stressed or burnt-out, what can you do to mitigate these feelings? Are you 100% present in your personal relationships and if not, how can you work to be more committed? Consider questions such as:
“Am I making progress toward my goals?”
“Do I feel satisfied with my work and relationships?”
Identify strengths and areas for development as well as what you want more of, and what you want less of in your personal and professional lives.
Step 5: Set actionable goals
The final step once you have reviewed all the various aspects that make up a personal MOT is to turn your findings into actionable goals and next steps. Consider the positives and negatives you have uncovered at each stage and start to consider, what do I need to do to increase the positives and decrease the negatives. What are the things I’m currently doing that I want to do more of? What do I want to do less of? What don’t I currently do that I think I should?
Start to create a list of goals that align with the changes you want to make. Once you have these, you can start to focus on the small, achievable steps you can take to improve your overall well-being. You can start to consider a timeframe for achieving each step and then achieving the overarching goal. You can then start to plan habit trackers or monthly review sections into your journaling habit, using your journal to keep you on track towards your goals.
When and how often to conduct a personal MOT
The frequency of your personal MOT is really up to you and will largely depend on what you find achievable. For many people, conducting the MOT at the beginning or end of the year is a useful way of resetting their mindset, focussing on goals and going into a new year with a positive attitude and a plan for success. For others, a quarterly review is useful for keeping them on-track and for providing a space to reassess and redefine goals at multiple points throughout the year.
Set a frequency that is right for you. The important things are that you’re doing a deep dive to gather a whole host of insights and then regularly checking-in with yourself and reviewing your progress. You might find it beneficial, rather than repeating the whole process multiple times a year, to instead schedule smaller review processes that allow you to maintain focus.
Your personal MOT might be introspective and focus more on the way you feel and emotional aspects of your life, or you may choose to go down a more scientific method. Whichever route is best for you, your journal can be an exceptional tool for regularly monitoring the data that you will eventually use to conduct your MOT, whether that’s qualitative data, such as diary-style entries detailing your thoughts and emotions on a given day, or quantitative data, such as body composition tracking, food diaries or daily habit trackers.
So there you have it, my step-by-step guide to conducting a self assessment, personal MOT. But it’s not enough to simply go through the motions, if you want to experience the benefits of personal growth, then you need to start a regular personal MOT journaling routine and check-in with yourself and your progress on a regular basis. I’ve included a free downloadable template for a weekly check-in below which can be used to form the basis of your more long-term, yearly or quarterly MOT’s.
If you’ve conducted this kind of life-audit before, or are planning on conducting one, I’d love to hear from you, and I’d also love to hear your favourite self-reflection prompts. Let me know in the comments below!
DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE PERSONAL MOT JOURNALING TEMPLATE
