The end of a year is a natural time to spend a moment to look back and review your life. This doesn’t have to be an extremely long and painful process. The aim is just to make some time to reflect and below I will be sharing my 5-step process for reviewing your year.

 

STEP 1: RECALL YOUR GOALS

Now I’m hoping that at the beginning of the year you set some goals or resolutions. Hopefully, you wrote them down. Now is the time to dig them out.

If you didn’t write them down then think about what you hoped you would achieve this year. Normally even if people don’t write down their goals they still have some hopes for the year ahead. Write them down.

 

STEP 2: REVIEW YOUR GOALS

Once you have something written down in front of you it is time to start reviewing.

Start off by asking yourself “Did I achieve my goal?”. If yes, that is amazing! Make sure you celebrate but also ask yourself what was key in you achieving your goals. And if you didn’t achieve your goal it is time to delve deeper to work out why you didn’t achieve your goal.

There is a major difference between working towards your goal and not achieving it versus setting a goal and then taking any of the more necessary actions to achieve it. Ask yourself “Do I feel that I put in the work to achieve my goal?”. If you didn’t then delve deeper to understand why you didn’t put in the work. If you did then try to work out what stopped you from achieving your goal.

 

STEP 3: WORK OUT WHAT GOALS YOU WANT TO CARRY FORWARD

I like to split but my reviewing the past year and then writing goals for a new year. This allows you to have some time to process, but one thing you should do as part of your reviewing your past year is to go through all of your unachieved goals and work out which ones you should let go and which ones you should carry forward.

Sometimes the reason you don’t achieve your goal is because it isn’t important to you. Maybe you set the goal because you felt it is something you should do rather than something you genuinely want. So if you didn’t achieve all of your goals go back through the list and work out which ones you would like to focus on going into the next year.

 

STEP 4: WRITE DOWN THE LESSONS YOU LEARNT THIS YEAR

I believe that life is a constant lesson, but so often we miss the lessons. Whilst reviewing your goals you will have hopefully have had some realisations. Hopefully, you will have lessons from both the goals you have achieved and goals you haven’t achieved. It is really important to write those lessons down. In a reflection moment, it is easy  for the lessons to be clear and then forget them. Writing them down allows you to have something to refer back to.

 

STEP 5: WRITE DOWN YOUR HIGHLIGHTS

Earlier you reviewed your life in relations to the goals you set and hopefully, you achieved lots and had moments to celebrate. However, not every moment in life is planned so what amazing things happened to you this year. Think back through the year and write down all the amazing experiences or moments. It is easy when reviewing to dwell on the negatives, but I’m sure you have lots to be proud of and happy about so write them down!

 

That’s it! You now know the 5-step process to review your year.

I wish you all the best reviewing your year and it helps you create a strong foundation for a successful next year.

I hope you have found this post useful and I would love to know one of your highlights in the comments below.