In our post last week titled, Your Success Path, we encouraged you to join us as we plan for the year ahead.

While it’s important to spend time thinking about your future, we’ve found that it’s more powerful to consider your vision for your future after you’ve taken a look back at your past year.

So the question we’re asking today is, “Where have you been?”

We know that some of you like to take a deep dive into your reflections, while others prefer to take a broader look back. No matter how you reflect, we want to support you with some questions and suggestions to get you started.

We encourage you to reflect on your personal and professional life as you’re looking through these suggestions.

Goals or Priorities

If you had goals from last year or have done our Life Priorities exercise, you can use either of those as your foundation, and ask yourself questions like:

  • What am I pleased with? What were my successes / accomplishments?
  • What had I hoped to accomplish that I haven’t yet?
  • What’s been challenging? What obstacles were in my way?
  • What did I learn? What will do differently moving forward?
  • When did I find success in slowing things down? Speeding things up?
  • How have I listened to my instincts?
  • What role did work play in my life? What role had I hoped it would play?
  • Did I live according to the things that matter most to me? What felt out of balance?

Big Picture

If you’d prefer to think more broadly about the past year, look over the same questions above, and see what comes up for you.

Comprehensive

If you’d like to use something more comprehensive, consider our Personal Assessment exercise in this link.

In this exercise, you’ll use a scale of 1-10, to rate your level of satisfaction with various aspects of your life, this past year.

As you’re reflecting on last year, think about how you can capture your answers in a way that’s personal to you. Some suggestions that have worked well for us and our clients are:

  • Write yourself a letter.
  • Create a word cloud.
  • Draw, paint, or cut out images/words.

This week, take some time to look back and think about how you’ve spent this past year. This will help you as you envision the various ways you want to spend your time next year.

As always, we encourage you to share your reflections with us, colleagues, friends, or loved ones.

Stay tuned for next week when we’ll ask, “Where are you going?”

If you’d like support
with your personal or professional
Success Path,
contact us today.