If you’d prefer to do the year end reflection exercise in your own journal, here is the framework:
18 Questions I’m Going to Ask Myself
Each year, I get the gears of my reflection going by asking myself 18 questions. It’s intended to be more of a quick brainstorm to get thoughts on paper versus coming up with a definitive Grammy winner-style list.
The goal is to devote some real time reflecting on the past year and taking an inventory of what I liked and what I didn’t. When I was happy, and when I wasn’t. When I felt my best, and when I was stressed. This will help orient myself so I can then begin to think about the new year in terms of what I want to continue and what I want to do differently.
Don’t read look at this and get scared away – most of my thoughts will be in the form of rough bulleted lists as a simple way of getting bits of ideas out of my head and into a collected place. I may write longer-form answers when inspired, these are tools, not rules.
For the questions like, “3 times I was happiest,” the number three is simply a placeholder for “brainstorm,” because a lot of these will be hard to answer. If the question was “when was I happiest?” I would likely work until I could think of one answer that seemed better than the others then stop. For these questions, the point is to just list with a stream of consciousness all of the times you can remember being happy, regardless of how intense the happiness was. Then, once you’ve done that, go back and pick the 3 that were the happiest.
One of the best tools to jogging my memory is to open my photos app on my phone and scroll back to January 1. From there, I begin taking notes in the “months” section of the reflection template, which get sorted later.
I’m always surprised to see what my answers and expect the result to be either A) Ok awesome, do more things like these 3, or B) Man, these 3 things were the happiest I was all year? I need to work on doing bigger and better things in the new year. Or if I’m unable to think of any answers to “3 times I did something that scared me,” I’ll know to prioritize that kind of growth. Once I do all the questions, I’ll then work to create some goals for the new year based on what I’ve realized about the last year.
One of the things I enjoy most about the exercise is the outcome usually does not align with my assumptions about the year pre-review.