If you want to practice year-end reflection in your journal, here’s the framework:
18 Questions I’m Going to Ask Myself
Every year, I get into my reflection gear by asking myself 18 questions. It’s meant to be more of a quick brainstorm to get ideas on paper than coming up with a final Grammy-winner-style list.
The goal is to spend some real time reflecting on the past year and taking 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 me get right so I can start thinking about what I want to continue and do in the new year.
Don’t read this and freak out – most of my ideas will be in the form of rough bulleted lists, which is an easy way to get chunks of ideas out of my head and into one place. After prompting I can write long form answers, these are tools, not rules.
For questions like “3 times I was happiest,” the number three is just a placeholder for “brainstorming” because many of these would be difficult to answer. If the question was “When was I happiest?” I’ll probably work until I can think of an answer that sounds better than the others then stop. For these questions, the point is to simply list with a stream of consciousness when you can remember to be happy, no matter how intense the happiness was. Then, once you’ve done that, go back and pick the 3 that were the happiest.
A great tool for jogging my memory is to open my Photos app on my phone and scroll back to January 1st. From there, I start taking notes in the “Months” section of the reflection template, which is organized later.
I’m always surprised to see what my answers are and expect the result to be either A) ok, great, do more stuff like this 3, or B) man, those were the 3 things I’ve been doing all year. I was the happiest? I need to work on doing bigger and better things in the new year. Or if I can’t think of any answers to “3 times I did something that scared me”, I’ll know to prioritize that kind of growth. Once I’ve done all the questions, I’ll work on creating some goals for the new year based on what I’ve realized about the past year.
One of the things I enjoy most about exercise is that the outcome usually doesn’t match my assumptions about the year before review.