The Easiest, Most Impactful Year-End Reflection I’ve Ever Done

Less than a handful of days remain until a new year is upon us, and I can’t help but wonder ~ how does it feel for you this time? Are you excited? hopeful? determined? a bit overwhelmed?

You probably have heaps of emails in your inbox or posts on your social feed right now teasing the newest and best end-of-year reflection or writing prompt ritual you just have to try. I know I do and I love them — I love them all. You may have even done your year-end reflection already and bought your new planner/journal for the new year a few weeks back and have been filling it chock-full of vision board/manifestation images, impatiently waiting for January 1st to arrive so you can dive in (not that I would know anything about that kind of impatience or anything).

Or you may be running low on energy because, well, it’s been a year.

I’d like to tell you I do a gigantic writing dump at the end of every year, collecting prompts from all the ladies whose work I love and answering every one in long, beautiful sentences in my journal—page after page, line after line. But in reality, what I usually do is collect all the prompts, think about them, start writing, and then get completely overwhelmed and scrap the whole activity in favor of just winging it. But this year feels different. This year when I collected all of the prompts and started thinking about them I couldn’t help but wonder,

What if this year we were gentle with ourselves?

What if we stopped overthinking & overworking?

What if we went straight for results instead?

That’s what I’m aiming for ~ results.

So, a few weeks back, I started the simplest, easiest year-end reflection I could come up with and it has been hands-down the absolute most impactful reflection I’ve ever done. Ever. Seriously — the revelations have been mind-blowing. It’s this ⤵

Read your journals.

Read them all.

Notice.

Notice it all.

Watch what happens next.

If you’re a maker, you’ll probably find yourself drawn to your studio without knowing why. If you’re a musician, you’ll probably feel an itch to pick up your guitar. If you’re someone who writes, you’ll have a hard time not tucking into a corner for a few hours and writing down all of the revelations and feelings that come.

If you didn’t journal this year, you can read through whatever you used to capture your life over the last 365 days—a calendar, planner, social media posts, to-do lists, texts with friends, . . . whatever. Notice your patterns. Notice what’s changed. Even better, notice what hasn’t changed.

You’ll want to turn away. It might feel scary at first (or “cringe” as the kids say), but keep going. Don’t shy away from yourself. Don’t turn away from what former you thought was important enough to chronicle. Read it. Read it all. Pretend it’s a map to your biggest dreams, because the insights you’ll gain really and truly could be.

Trust yourself.

You are your oldest friend.

You’ve been with yourself the longest.

No one’s an expert on your life the way you are.

Here’s what *might happen ⤵

*it’s what happened to me this week

Gratitude comes rushing in. Once you see how much you’ve grown and changed over the past 12 months, how many books you’ve read, how many things you’ve been grateful for, you’ll amaze yourself.

An inner neat freak emerges. If you’re anything like me, your journals get kind of messy when life gets messy (as it inevitably does). Seeing all those messy pages, really seeing them, might make you realize just how many things you wish you’d kept better track of last year, how many things you want to keep better track of next year. Let it feel uncomfortable. Let it propel you into something better for the days ahead. (You may even end up investing money on new journals and spending hours making lists of all you want to chronicle better next year. Lean in. You’ll be glad you did.)

Possibilities arise. No matter where you are or what you’ve been through this past year, you couldn’t have written it all down before you lived it. You wrote the story as you went. No matter where you are or what you’ve been through, you have fresh, blank pages open and ready for the new year ahead. You get to write what comes next. You get to decide how much is possible for you and what you’re going to do with all that possibility. (& if you want help envisioning those possibilities, vision boarding is such a fun way to do that ~ details under my photo below)

Motivation blossoms. Journals don’t lie. You may find yourself embarrassed to see how much whining you did last year in your journals and how many times you’ve gone around that same mountain in your mind. (That’s what I found at least.) Let it make you determined to do everything you can to make sure you don’t go around those same mountains again next year. Let it motivate you to get help where you need it. There’s a difference between knowing better and doing better. Now that we know, we can do, but we may need help sometimes. That’s where new and different books come in—and helpers. Reach out. Get what you need. I suggest doing it today. (Here’s a link to the difficult personal growth book I just started reading with a couple of friends & here’s a link to the lady I’m working with to help me get out from around those same mountains.)

Now find those journals and reflect away, my friend. I hope you have so much fun with them!

& Now about those delicious books 📚. . .

I still can’t believe you and I chatted about so many books this year in this little email group of ours. According to my latest calculations, it was around 100 books or so. That’s a lot of books — and quite a bit over our goal of the 52 life-defining books I had in mind when I turned our email group into a book club around this time last year.

Here’s a list of links to the 100+ books we talked about this year.

I really want to thank you—I couldn’t have done it without you.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for sending notes back to me about your favorite books. Thank you for showing up, opening the emails, and letting me be a small part of your growth this year. Thank you for letting me know you want to keep going.

Now let’s dive into that new year together.

I’m ready.

& one more thing. . .

There’s so much noise and clutter swirling around right now, hey? In the midst of it all, I want to offer you a word of encouragement.

It’s something I’m working on in my own life and a word that feels appropriate for the season—especially for this weekend’s festivities.

Presence

I want to be present. I don’t want to look back this time next week and wonder how it all went by so fast. I don’t want to get lost in a screen or in my own mind and miss the smiles on my people’s faces, the sound of their laughter, the funny things they do. I don’t want to miss a thing.

So that’s it. Just the one word—presence. Let’s be present. That’s enough, I think. (& take breaks when we need to—bathrooms usually work)