Contemplating Life’s Choices

It’s the end of the year and for me that means time to reflect on the past year and to plan for my year ahead. I’ve worked over the years to truly disconnect from work and to have the space for myself, my family, and friends.

To help me process and prepare for 2023 I’ve started to work through my reflections and planning. It’s something I’ve done for a number of years and most years it helps me achieve the majority of my goals. I tend to have a year, every couple of years, where I don’t achieve much that I’d written down but that’s also been helpful for me to learn more about myself.

Given things feel unstable for a lot of folks I wanted to talk through the pieces of my reflection process in case others are looking for ways to assess and prepare for the year ahead. I have found a lot of value in this and I hope you do too. This process had changed and grown a lot over the years and will likely continue to evolve but that’s ok.

If you want to participate, don’t feel you have to do every piece of this process. It works for me and I acknowledge some of it can feel duplicative but it works for me. If it doesn’t work for you change it up so it does or skip the pieces that don’t resonate with you. You may want to break things down into smaller categories or you may want to add things that I don’t reflect on and that’s ok. This practice helps you identify what maters most to you and that alone is meaningful.

Ok, so the first part of my process is a series of questions to reflect on. I’m not going to go through them all in one post so you’ll have to come back to see the whole process.

The first thing I do is look back on the current year. I rate how things were overall and make a few comments on seven areas that are important to me. You have to decide what you care about enough to keep an eye on or this won’t have much impact. Here’s what mine looks like.

Reflections on 2022:

1. Health
2. Friends
3. Family
4. Finances
5. Growth
6. Work
7. Marriage

I rate each item on a scale of 1 (radical change needed) to 10 (#winning, things are going great). You could rate on a 1-3 scale or 1-5 or don’t rate at all but just make some comments. Remember, it’s what works for you. I rate each item and jot down a sentence or two about what’s worked well, if I’ve rated things highly, or note what I’d like to change or do differently, if I rated things low.

This piece of the reflection is meant to be high level and looking broadly at the whole year. Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up on what happened in the last couple of months so my tip if you can’t remember what’s happened is to either scroll back through your social media feed to see what you posted about. This is likely to just be a highlight reel but sometimes you can find some hidden gems there. If you journal or blog look back at what you’ve wrote to find the things that stand out to you. The other thing that helps me is looking at the pictures I’ve taken on my phone. I often find memories I’ve forgotten or things that were meaningful at the time that I want to reflect on.

Over the years I’ve done this, I’ve found that my rating on these categories tends to be around 7-8 where things are going well and there’s some room for improvement but I’m not feeling like there is a need for massive improvement. I remember when I first did this I had some categories rating 4-5 and acknowledging that I wasn’t happy in that aspect of my life helped me get intentional about changing things up.

Ok, so this is the first part of the reflection I do. I’m interested in knowing if others have year end rituals to process the current year and plan for the next. If you decide to participate I’d love to hear what you think. You’re welcome to share your reflection in the comments if you’re comfortable with it and if not write things down so you can look back as the years pass.