Your Year In Review
What is the most important lesson you learned this year? A useful way to reflect on a long year
As we say goodbye to the year, here are a few tips to help reflect on the year.
What is reflection?
Reflection is remembering what happened and correctly interpreting what it means.
The best form of insight is hindsight.
Why reflection matters
A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson. If you fail to learn the lesson, you repeat the class. When as adults, we don’t take the time to deeply process our experiences and the lessons, we end up repeating the same mistakes.
A Lesson Is Repeated Until It's Learned
When you reflect on your experiences, you extract lessons to guide your decision when next you are in a similar situation.
4 things you should do when reflecting
Pick a time you can be relaxed and free of distractions (for example, during bedtime.)
Take a deep dive into your year month by month.
For the first few minutes, simply let your mind wander back to the first month of the year.
Let your imagination wander. Look for: What were the happy moments? The sad moments? What was the best part of the month?
Identify a lesson, rule, or principle from the experience. Ask the questions: “What would I do again?” “What would I not do again or do differently?”
Repeat this process for each month. Write down the lessons if they were many. Now you can answer the question:
What is the most important lesson you learned this year?
I wish you a happy new year, and please share your comments on the year 2021.
I read this on the 1st of January, 2022 and I found this very important (Take a deep dive into your year month by month) and it prompted me to start a daily reflection which may give me more sense of accomplishment. Then I thought to come up with something like a 1% Daily Challenge for the next 365 days, I quickly designed a simple excel sheet to track my daily achievement.
The goal is to do something that at night I will fill and say, well-done, you did well and at the end of the month, I can reflect on that much better.
Great piece. Most times we don’t reflect on our annual experiences which as you rightly put it, we tend to make same mistakes of the previous years when similar situations occur.