Business ownership: what an emotional roller coaster, huh? Over the course of a single day or week or year (bye-bye, 2024) you can move from your very highest highs to the lowest lows and back again. These isolated moments in the extremes make it difficult to clearly, honestly gauge the overall health and wellbeing of both the business and the person running it. And when we try, our egos like to get in the way too—which sure doesn’t help.

There’s a song that goes something like, “The failures I hide, the victories I don’t.” Externally we like to project success, pushing our setbacks and doubts down and out of the view of the outside world. And then it’s easy to reverse this pattern in the inner sanctum of heart and soul, where the failures loom larger than they should and the victories feel muted.

If you’ve ever done a self-assessment exercise with a group, you know it’s a fascinating thing to observe. Some people consistently give themselves, their business, their situation a solid high mark of 8 or 9. Others put a 2 or 3 next to their name every time, or like to hover around 5. I too find myself tending to have a small range where I’ll always place myself, and I’ve often wondered why we have this habit of keeping a spot pigeonholed to land in during self-evaluations. Like I said before, the reality is we’re moving up and down and up and down all the time.

We business owners do struggle with an inability to assess our true situations. Do we just have unrealistic understandings of ourselves? How much does yesterday’s success or this morning’s frustration sway today’s self-assessment? How accurate and reality-grounded are these subjective evaluations ever really going to be? I wonder if there’s a better way.

Instead of rewriting past failures and fantasizing about future successes, what if we just focused in on the moment: where the work and the people are, and where our mind should be? It’s not that we don’t need to remember the past to learn to build a better future. But when we constantly live in those two places instead of now, what are we missing?

Personally, when it comes to self-assessment I find comfort in my faith, in my ultimate hope in Someone Else who knows me fully and completely, who can clearly point to where I’ve done well and where I’ve failed. The lesson I take from that belief is this: the important thing is not actually the past failures or future uncertainties, but the hope I have that is rooted in where I am now. It’s not that there aren’t things that need doing, but an honest assessment of our own state should invite us back into the reality of the present, to these handful of years we have on the earth and the opportunity we have to impact people right here and right now.

At the end of the day, regardless of company health in the moment, EOS scores, the 2025 budget, missed targets, sales strategies, or self-assessments, all that really matters is the moments we spend fully present with the people and work before us. If our time is spent too much on anywhere other than this moment, how much we miss! So the next time you evaluate yourself or your business, ask yourself: Are you rooted in what’s real today? Are you present for the priceless souls before you? Because staying grounded in the now and the who—not rewriting the past or forecasting the future—is where the deepest clarity and greatest impact begin.