Starting Up Your Own Self Detective Agency
Part 14 - Measuring your SD progress

You can find all sorts of weird and wonderful questionnaires online for depression, anxiety, distress and self-esteem, to name but a few, but at SD we have some reservations about their use. Who sets the questions? How come they are often framed in a negative fashion rather than in a positive or neutral way? Are the questions trying to normalise our behaviour? And how helpful are they anyway?

There are other options available to you (including not using any such tools at all). You could use an ongoing diary. You could draw how you are. You could make up your own questionnaire(s). You could use a straight-line A to B, or a continuum line.

There is one progress-measuring tool, however, that gets to the heart of the matter while being playful: the jelly baby tree. All you have to do is pick the jelly baby that most represents how you are at any moment in time. If you do this over a period of time you may notice a progression. Alternatively, you might have a jelly baby to aim for. It is entirely up to you how you want to use it. There is no right or wrong way.