Resolutions are out, Reflections are in

I hope you were able to log off over the holidays and enjoy your family, friends, and some alone time as I was. After the busiest holiday season in recent memory I was able to sneak away and spend 2 glorious days sleeping, reading, resting, and reflecting. 

What the sleeping, reading, and resting part looked like is fairly easy to understand but I will go into more detail about what the reflection part looked like this year. I touched on an aspect of this on LinkedIn earlier this week, but will expand on it and give you a more detailed framework here. If you haven't had the chance to do your own review, let this serve as a guide or a starting point. Modify it and make it your own. 

Theme

My end of the year reflection always starts sometime in the fall. For the last 8 years, at the outset of each year, I choose a word that encapsulates the overall theme I want the year to have across various areas of my life. So by the time the fall comes, I am starting to think a lot about how that word came to life over the course of that year, how I did (or did not) incorporate it into my life, and what I want my word to be for the following year.

Words come and go over the last months of the year and the one I eventually land on is the word that comes with the most positive emotional charge. This is the word that makes me feel the most hopeful, excited, and grounded when I hear it. This is the word I have a reaction to that makes me want to go out there and do things. We'll get to what those "things" are in a minute.

If I feel nothing when I think of a word, even if my brain says it logically makes sense based on my goals or what I want to achieve, that's not my word. Which brings me to me a key part of my annual review. I always, and I mean always, reflect on how I felt in the previous year, and how I want to feel in the next year. Feelings fuel or put out the fire. I'm here to light things up.

I put my word/theme up across from my bed where I can see it daily. Last year it was Vibrant, the year before it was Power, and this year, well, I will share it once I am certain it is not going to change (again). 

Values

With my word (or words I'm playing around with) buzzing around my head, my next move is to review and update my values. As I change every year, so too do the things I value. Different things are important to you at different points in your life. This is a newer part of my annual review from the last 3ish years but since incorporating it I have found it incredibly helpful to revisit these annually to make sure they're aligned with where I'm at. I choose 4 and put them on stickies under my computer monitor to serve as a daily reminder. 

Here are some questions to help you do the same.

1. What are some of the peak moments/events of 2023?
   
   2. What are you most proud of yourself for?
   
   3. What are the common themes for questions 1 & 2?
   
   4. What do you need to have in your life to experience fulfillment (hint: you may have realized what these are from reviewing your answers to the first 3 questions, or they may have been absent altogether)?These are your values. Distill these into 3-5 words to represent them. This year I made a huge list and then started to lump them together into categories with some overlap. This is how I refined my 2024 values.

My 2024 values are Movement, Peace, Leadership, and Play. If you're curious, my 2023 values were Growth, Adventure, Wellbeing, and Quality.

Goals

And now, to the goals. Having distilled my values to 4 words, I choose 3 major goals I want to achieve this year. Throughout the year I rotate through which of these 3 I focus on. It can change from month to month, week to week, or day to day but I learned a long time ago that I need to simplify to maximize. I can only focus on one thing at a time. Now, this isn't to say that I put my blinders on and have tunnel vision all year to anything else. Things come up, attention flows elsewhere, but these goals are my focus for the year that I will prioritize over others.

Action 

And last, my favourite part, the action plan! This is where I list small, simple actions I can take daily, weekly, and a couple bigger projects to ensure my values are incorporated into my day/week/year and that I hit my goals. This is the secret sauce.

Goals without action are wishes. Actions without a concrete plan to execute them are just ideas. 

I set myself up for success by plugging my actions into my iPhone and work calendar. I colour code both because my brain likes visual cues. Do I always stick to it? No - but they're there as a reminder so I'm more likely to follow through than not.

Experiment with what works for you.