Reflection: The Key to Making This Year Your Best Yet
With 2024 coming to a close, it’s the perfect time to reflect back on your year. What are you proud of? What goals and resolutions did you set for yourself? What goals did you accomplish? What goals did you fall short of?
In this blog post, we’ll give you a framework for reflecting on the past year of your life, celebrating the successes and assessing where you fell short of your goals and resolutions. From there, we’ll use this valuable insight and information to set goals and resolutions for 2025.
Activity: Taking Stock of Your 2024 Goals and Resolutions
Think back to this time last year: what resolutions or goals did you set for yourself at the start of 2024? If you have them written somewhere, take a moment to find them and read them over. If you don’t, try to remember as many as you can and write them down in a checklist. Your goals can fall into many different categories, from health and fitness, to financial, career-related, relationship-focused and more.
Now, add a checkmark next to any goals you accomplished in 2024, and take a moment to congratulate yourself for your accomplishments! You worked hard to complete these goals, and you deserve to feel good about the effort you put in to achieve them. Then, take a few minutes to think about what actions you took, the habits you made, and anything else that led you to successfully complete each goal.
Next, add an ‘X’ next to the goals you didn’t accomplish. Take a moment to reflect on each incomplete goal and what barriers you faced in accomplishing them. For example, if your goal was to run four days a week to prepare for your first marathon in October, but you severely sprained your ankle in June and then tore your hamstring in September, it would be hard to have accomplished this goal, and you might need to give yourself some grace and understanding for not having completed it. For other goals, maybe you didn’t focus on them enough, or you made progress toward completing them but didn’t fully accomplish them. Write down a sentence or two about what kept you from completing each goal and assess whether 1) these goals are reasonably achievable in a year and 2) if you would still like to accomplish them. Put a star next to every realistic goal you would still like to accomplish.
Related: Transform Resolutions into Real, Positive Change
Activity: Making Your 2025 Goals and Resolutions
Now that you’ve spent some time reflecting on your 2024 goals, it’s time to use that knowledge to look forward to the New Year and what you’d like to accomplish.
Step 1: Copy the goals you didn’t achieve in 2024 but noted, with a star, that you would like to accomplish in 2025 over to your new list. Don’t feel like you have to copy them over word for word. Maybe you realized that your previous goal was too lofty for one year, and you’d like to set a subgoal for 2025 that will help you achieve the larger goal in the next 3 years, or perhaps you’d like to modify the original goal because your intention in that area of life has changed; that’s okay!
Step 2: Reflect on the resolutions and goals you did accomplish in 2024: do you have additional room for improvement in those areas that you would like to achieve in 2025? For example, if you met your financial goals for 2024, would you like to set new financial goals for 2025? Or if you achieved your goal of getting a raise or promotion at work, would you like to set another goal to continue progressing your career? What else can you learn for the process that it took to achieve these accomplishments that you can carry into future goals?
Step 3: Add in any other resolutions or goals you might have for the New Year. Think about all areas of your life and where you’d like to focus your attention. You don’t have to set a goal for every possible category (more goals means your attention will be more divided), but here are some areas for consideration:
Relationship (family, friends, romantic)
Mental Health & Wellbeing
Physical Health & Wellbeing
Financial
Career
Fitness/Sports
Travel
Volunteer/Community Service
Productivity/Time Management
Learning a New Skill
Setting goals in 3-5 of these categories will set you up for holistic growth, without being overwhelming and preventing you from having the bandwidth to complete each goal.
Want more help achieving your goals in 2025?
Check out our blog post on Powering Up Your Intentions (Resolutions) with a Mantra and a Plan for how to make a concrete plan for achieving each of your goals/resolutions this year.
Written by Liz Haas, Recovery Resources Outreach Specialist
