Anytime is a great time to reflect on the past twelve months and acknowledge your personal and professional growth, your accomplishments, and all of your experiences. As you look back and review it‘s also a good idea to celebrate yourself!
Consider the following questions to help you review the past and plan for the future:
• What are your greatest successes and accomplishments? Sometimes a series of minor successes and accomplishments can add up to major strides forward. It’s a good idea to reflect on small wins as well as major accomplishments. Consider maintaining an annual journal to track your successes all year long.
• What would you like to celebrate? Perhaps this year you received a promotion, started a business, grew your family, moved residences, or left a job you didn’t like. Whatever it was, whether you initiated the change or not, you grew from the experience and that’s cause for celebration.
• What risks did you take that you are most proud of? Perhaps you stepped out of the box and did things differently this year than what comes naturally to you. I.e. you are an introvert and you chose to attend networking events to break out and meet new people.
• In which areas of your career or life did you experience breakthroughs? Did you have a shift in perspective? Did you breakthrough a mental, emotional, or physical boundary you previously held? Reflect on your breakthroughs and how you have evolved.
• Who and what are you grateful for? These may be your friends, family, employees, bosses, colleagues, mentors, or others in your life. How did they support you? What role do they play in your life? Who do you wish to acknowledge most?
• What was your biggest learning this year? How did you grow from it? How will you apply this learning moving forward?
• What was your biggest disappointment this year? How did you handle the situation? How did you or how will you move on from it?
• What do you wish to complete before the year ends? What’s left undone that needs to be wrapped up before the year is out. Prioritize what’s left and do what’s most important to you. Delete or delegate what you can. Most importantly, determine what action you will take.
• What is the central theme for you? If this year is a chapter in the book of your life what title would you give it?
Anytime is a great time to stop and take notice of all that is going on in your life and in your career. Reflection is the first step in planning for the future. Take the time to review the past and just how far you’ve come, then determine your goals and create a plan to get you from where you are right now to where you want to be.
