If you prefer to do the year-end reflection exercise in your own journal, here is the framework:
18 questions I’m going to ask myself
Every year, I kick-start my reflection by asking myself 18 questions. It’s meant to be more of a quick brainstorm to get ideas down on paper rather than a definitive Grammy-winners-style list.
The goal is to spend some real time reflecting on the past year and taking inventory of what I liked and what I didn’t. When I was happy and when I wasn’t. When I felt better and when I was stressed. This will help orient me so I can start thinking about the new year in terms of what I want to continue and what I want to do differently.
Don’t read, watch, and freak out: most of my thoughts will be in the form of bulleted lists as an easy way to get bits of ideas out of my head and into one collected place. I can write longer answers when I’m inspired, these are tools, not rules.
For questions like “I was happier three times,” the number three is simply a placeholder for “brainstorming,” because many of them will be difficult to answer. If the question were “when was I happiest?” I would probably work until I could think of an answer that seemed better than the others and then stop. For these questions, the point is simply to list in a stream of consciousness all the times you can remember being happy, no matter how intense the happiness was. Then once you’ve done that, go back and pick the 3 that were happiest.
One of the best tools to refresh my memory is to open the photos app on my phone and go back to January 1st. From there, I start taking notes in the “months” section of the reflection template, which are arranged below.
I’m always surprised to see what my answers are and I hope the result is A) Ok great, do more things like these 3, or B) Man, were these 3 things the happiest I was all year? I need to work on doing bigger and better things in the new year. Or if I can’t think of an answer to “3 times I did something that scared me,” I’ll know how to prioritize that kind of growth. Once I’ve answered all the questions, I’ll work to create some goals for the new year based on what I realized from last year.
One of the things I enjoy most about the exercise is that the outcome usually doesn’t line up with my assumptions from the previous year review.
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