December is a weird month. Everything around us is signaling and screaming out loud: HOLIDAY! UNPLUG!
As a result, many of us pivot into friends and family time and put behind us the year that just passed. Then comes December 31st, and we rush New Year’s resolutions that won’t last more than a month.
I struggled with this for decades. I tried various approaches to set up goals for the New Year. Most methods would not work, but I eventually tailored a formula that succeeds more often than not.
The principle, in a nutshell, is to capture the top life lessons learned throughout the year and use these as a canvas for the new experiences to come. It gets me ready for whatever the New Year has to offer while applying the lens of what matters to me.
The exercise takes a few hours of uninterrupted reflection and thinking, but it’s worth it. Here’s how I’m approaching it for my – very intertwined – personal and professional activities.
Reflecting on the year
It can be daunting to remember everything from the past year, so I’m soliciting help from my digital life to boost my remembering. I typically block a couple of hours and browse through all the photos I took. Bonus: I eventually use this as the basis for a photo album I’ll share with friends and family. I also review my calendar, the emails, and the text messages I sent (way less than what I received).
Then, I block about 30 minutes and try to answer a series of questions along these lines:
- What were the highlights and lowlights of the year?
- What felt hard or easy?
- What am I the proudest of?
- What made me feel hurt, angry, or sad?
- What new things do I now know about myself, people, and the world at large?
- What went according to plan?
- What surprised me the most?
It all starts in a free flow. But very quickly, highlights, lowlights, and critical learnings become clear.
Putting the year in perspective
After reflecting on this past year, now is the perfect time to step back further and assess how it helped the critical aspects of my life. It’s like a life audit, but I’m keeping it simple by focusing on just the dimensions that matter to me.
Using a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being the poorest and 10 being the strongest) to gauge my state of fulfillment and a -/+ to indicate if I feel I made progress in the past year, I’m assessing the following dimensions:
- My love (and only one!)
- My health and well-being (physical and mental)
- My fitness level and activities
- My friends and family
- My explorations and learnings
- My creative, coaching and mentoring contributions
- My finances
Preparing for the New Year
The benefit of going through the first two phases is that I usually start to have a pretty good sense of where I want to put my energy or progress in the new year.
I’m trying to think of everything I want to accomplish, contribute, and become across all these critical dimensions in the next year.
It quickly bloats into a long list, so I’m applying an essential filter to it: What matters? It helps narrow it down to three to five big goals that I’m articulating precisely, thinking of what success will look like.
As importantly, I’m looking into what I’ll need to do to get there: what I need to start or stop doing, habits I need to form, which milestones, turning these big goals into chewable chunks. In other words, I’m creating my plan for the year.
I keep things simple, so the whole reflection, assessment, and year plan fit on one page. Most importantly, I’m trying not to overthink it, as I know things will evolve throughout the year, and I’ll have to adjust for the unexpected.
Reflecting on top lessons from the past year and putting them in perspective makes my new undertakings more meaningful and in tune with whom I am.
I’m sure you’ve built your own approach too, but if you’ve been struggling with setting goals that stick for the next year, give it a try. Make it yours, adapt the questions and the dimensions that matter most to you.
With enough reflection and thinking, you can become the exception who succeeds with their New Year’s resolutions!