Guide: The End of Year Review

By reviewing your past year, you get the opportunity to learn from your lessons, notice certain patterns, and get a better understanding of what makes you happy.

This annual exercise nurtures and develops sparks of inspiration, celebrates your uniqueness, helps you appreciate all the good in your life, tracks your personal growth, and allows you to strategically plan all the great and beautiful things you want your future to hold.

How to do the end of year review?

1. Take the time to reflect on your life over the previous 12 months. Jot your thoughts down on a piece of paper or a digital note.
2. Allow your thoughts to come without judgment, accepting any emotions that might surface.
3. Notice how reflecting on each event makes you feel.
4. Acknowledge lessons you learned over the past year.
5. Let go of what you can’t change or fix, and focus your attention on what you can control.

Questions to reflect on

What are you grateful for?

What are your happiest moments of the past year?

What are your most meaningful lessons of the year?

How have you moved closer to a major life goal?

What are your personal accomplishments?

What have you achieved professionally?

What are you willing to leave behind?

Life lessons and knowledge gained

If you want to plan your next year with intention, look back at all the challenges and difficulties you had to face over the last year, and think of top three to five life lessons you learned from the experiences you have had. It’s that practice of pausing, noticing, and reflecting on life’s lessons is what makes us more aware and mindful.

1. Start with lessons from your professional experiences.
2. List disappointments, roadblocks, challenges that you faced. Write them through, analyze them, and challenge yourself to see them in a different perspective.
3. List things, people, feelings, experiences that are holding you back from being the person you dream to be.

It’s important to give yourself time to process these feelings and your emotions, and then find the way to let them go in order to move forward. This will help you finish the past year with purpose and the opportunity to have your fresh start.

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By taking a step back, we can see our lives in full focus, recognize our milestones, highlight what we are grateful for, and acknowledge any bumps in the road. This provides us with a clear analysis of the past year, so that we can set achievable goals for the year ahead.

If you need extra guidance on reviewing your year and creating a clear action plan that you can actually stick to, you might be interested in the Best Year Journal, our go-to tool for setting relevant goals and having a fulfilling year ahead.