15 Prompts To Help You Reflect On Your Year

Plus My Top 10 Life Lessons from 2020

Key Takeaways

➡️ Hard times are not fun, but they can lead to learning, growth, and strength through reflection.

➡️ To reflect on your year, consider your accomplishments, moments, experiences, feelings, interactions, character, behaviors, obstacles, challenges, mistakes, senses, speaking up, regrets, opportunities, and what you want more or less of.

➡️ Write down your top learnings from 2020.

➡️ For a more detailed explanation, watch the video above!

Advantages To Year-End Reflection

2020 was not an ordinary year. It was a year of global turmoil, uncertainty, fear, isolation, difficulty, and loss for many. Luckily, I’ve been fortunate to be safe, healthy, and well and to know that my family is also safe.

Hard times are not fun, but they can lead to learning, growth, and strength through reflection.

When you reflect at the end of the year, you:

➡️ Learn about yourself and develop more self-awareness

➡️ Realize how much you have gone through

➡️ Honor that year with its good and bad

➡️ Process a lot of information

➡️ Get closure & remember more later

➡️ Feel good about yourself

➡️ Course correct for the following year

➡️ Develop your critical thinking skills

Did you learn something about yourself, about someone else, about the world? Write down your top learnings from this year. Then share some of your learnings in the comments below!

15 Prompts To Help You Reflect

Here’s a few questions to help you reflect on your year. As you answer these questions, consider the good and the bad. Consider your career, personal relationships, finances, spiritual, and health and fitness.

1. Accomplishments — What are you proud of this year? What were your accomplishments? What did you do that allowed you to have those accomplishments?

2. Moments — What were the major moments or surprises that happened this year that impacted you or changed your life and routine? What were the most joyful moments? Saddest moments? Most energizing moments? Hopeful moments? Aha moments?

3. Experiences — What experiences did you have this year? Any adventures? What did they teach you?

4. Feelings — What were emotional moments you had of both joy and sorrow, courage and fear, fun and boredom? How did you feel and why?

5. Interactions — What were some of the most memorable interactions you’ve had with other people this year? Whom did you interact with? How did you interact? Why did you interact? Why was it memorable? Did you meet new people?

6. Character — How would you describe your character this year? Were you kind, generous, assertive or were you negative, judgmental, and selfish? Why so? What character would make you proud of yourself?

7. Behaviors — What behaviors did you show this year at work, with your family and friends, in your solo time? Are you proud of those behaviors?

8. Obstacles — What challenges did you meet and how did you handle them? How did others handle the same obstacles?

9. Mistakes — What mistakes did you make this year? What did you learn from those mistakes?

10. Senses — What did you hear, read, watch, see, smell, taste that made you think? It could be from a book, music, film, show, conversation, conference, training, object, food, or other?

11. Speaking up — When did you speak up for yourself or for others? When did you not speak up? Why so?

12. Habits — What habits did you incorporate this year? What habits did you let go of? How did it change your life or how you feel?

13. Regrets — Do you have any regrets?

14. Opportunities — What opportunities showed up in your life? Did you embrace them? Did you miss them?

15. More of and less of — What would you have wanted more of and less of this year?

Take a moment to be grateful for these learnings in your life.

Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us. — Hal Borland

My Top 10 Lessons From 2020

Here are my top 10 learnings in 2020.

1. Activate your courage early.

Reserve the start of the day for your biggest act of courage, be it reaching out to someone, asking for something, or sharing your opinion about a topic.

Take courageous initiative early in the day, week, meeting, project, job, career, and conference. When you act with courage despite fear early on, you associate your identity with that courage.

2. Leaders stand up for good values during controversial, difficult, and uncertain times.

As COVID-19, economic turmoil, unemployment, racial discussions, social distancing, and much more unfolded this year, some leaders realized their mission, did more, and spoke up more. They shared their principles, encouraging messages, and took a stand knowing there would be some backlash.

In challenging times, lean in and lead with positive values and principles.

3. You can’t prevent a fire that is already burning.

Planning ahead of crisis is key because you won’t have much time to think and handle the situation when it arises, be it an earthquake, fire, hurricane, robbery, being fired, heart attack, stroke, COVID-19, or difficult conversation.

4. The best way to tackle conflict is with curiosity and acknowledgement.

Whenever in conflict, with fear of backlash from others, of speaking up, of saying the wrong things, or of hurting feelings, activate your curiosity but don’t shy away from uncomfortable conversations.

5. Learning without implementation is just amusement.

Consider how you will use the information you learn in a course, event, or book. Plan to implement what you learned even if in a minor way.

6. You have more wisdom than you give yourself credit for.

If you aren’t used to sharing your thoughts, ideas, and perspectives in conversations, online, in meetings, or in events, then I invite you to start doing so. You’ll be amazed with the gold you find inside your brain and soul.

7. Dreaming increases focus a little. Doing increases focus a lot.

If you want to be more focused and productive then get more outputs completed. It will boost your energy and make you want to keep the momentum going.

8. Don’t side with positions, side with people.

In negotiation training, you learn to avoid positions and to focus on interests.

One way to see beyond positions is to expand your network to include a more diverse set of people. Talk to them, ask about what matters to them, and get to know them as people.

9. For people-pleasers, the quickest path to confidence is courage to speak up.

If you are a people-pleaser or a nice person, you are always thinking about negative “what if” scenarios, like what if they get upset at you, don’t like you, and think you are stupid.

Overcome “what if” by doing what you fear the most with courage and seeing what happens.

Start experimenting new behaviors, and you will soon discover how your belief and assumptions are wrong. That will build your confidence.

10. Get free joy with a hygge routine.

Denmark is known as the world’s happiest country despite having long, dark, and cold winters. Part of their secret is in “hygge” a lifestyle that brought joy, conviviality, and coziness to their life.

The classical hygge example is the ritual of sitting by the fireplace, with hot tea, hot chocolate, or mulled wine, candles, soft music, comfortable clothing, soft blanket, warm food, a book, and good company.

It’s your turn. Write down your top learnings from 2020!

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