Your soft skills inventory
The annual review is a waste. It's not particularly useful for employee or boss, it's stressful and it doesn't happen often enough to make much of an impact.
If you choose to, though, you can do your own review. Weekly or monthly, you can sit down with yourself (or, more powerfully, with a small circle of peers) and review how you're shifting your posture to make more of an impact.
Some of the things to ask:
What am I better at?
Have I asked a difficult question lately?
Do people trust me more than they did?
Am I hiding more (or less) than I did the last time I checked?
Is my list of insightful, useful and frightening stats about my work, my budgets and my challenges complete? And have I shared it with someone I trust?
If selling ideas is a skill, am I more skilled at it than I was?
Who have I developed?
Have I had any significant failures (learning opportunities) lately, and what have I learned?
What predictions have I made that have come to pass? Am I better at seeing what's going to happen next?
Who have I helped? Especially when there was no upside for me…
Am I more likely to be leading or following?