Spotify, Google & more offer up their versions of your last year, but how have you engaged in reflection?

Choose one of the following exercises to undertake with a glass of hot cocoa (or beverage of choice) for a type of reflection that will support to launch your 2025 as the most aligned year yet.

• 2024 Wrapped (The outcome of a “wrapped” summary is to look for themes that emerge from how you spent your time in the last year. This isn’t necessarily what you think you did, but what your calendar shows you did.)  The WRAPPED can be done with technology or with your calendar and post its or highlighters.

Here’s the pen and paper version:

1. Identify your main categories. While this is about your professional life, I recommend that you look at the intersection of personal parts of your life and work and here are my suggestions: 

Health (exercise, meditation, meal prep)

Classroom visits & feedback 

Time with Family

Time with friends

Personal hobbies/classes

Professional Development (conferences/coaching/professional groups)

(add any other categories you think fit your life)

2. Look through your calendar & tally the times you see each category. Paper calendar? Highlight or use stickies matched to a category. Tally up each month. Digital Calendar? View one week/month at a time - color code recurring events (which makes it easier to tally). Pro tip - as you tally, look at quarterly totals before you move on. It will help you see what you spent the majority of your time on during different months. 

3. Reflect on this data. The tally marks are data. You don’t have to get too immersed in the details of the calendar (unless your curiosity is piqued, and you need too). The real value is looking at the categories and then drawing or producing a graph or chart that helps you see how you spent 2024. 

1. What surprised me about the patterns of how I spent my time?
2. What doesn’t surprise me about how I spent my time?
3. How do my own goals & sense of purpose align to how I spend my time?
4. How is there any misalignment to my goals and purpose?
5. What did I notice about the differences between each quarter of my life?
6. If I could redesign these results to look differently for 2025, what would I change?       4. Take action! Based on your reflection, what are two actions you can take in 2025 to set a different course of action for yourself to be increasingly aligned with how you want to spend your time?

• Top 10 - (This is a list to capture the favorites or greatest hits. For our life, they can capture the same. They are a ranked preference and help you focus on gratitude, joy and accomplishment). If you haven’t already looked back through the calendar or pictures for 2024, I recommend having those on hand to jog your memory. 

1. What gets your memory working? For me, it’s the treadmill that somehow opens my mind. For you it might be music, a shower, a cold glass of water, or something else. Get yourself primed to open your mind. Once you know you’re in a space for creativity and flow, and look through photos from the last year and either (1) make a digital album just to capture powerful moments from 2024 and save any image that catches your mind from work or personal life and save it to that folder; or (2) make a list of all the memories you are seeing. You want to generate waaaayy more than 10 to start.
2. Reduce the list to 20. The criteria is “these are the 20 best moments of my year” or “these are the 20 most memorable moments of my year”. 
3. Take a short break to nourish yourself before the last step. This is important because you are going to start writing about each of the twenty moments you’ve captured to help you get to your top 10. In order to be replenished and activate your mind for this, it needs to be recharged (you’ve just made a lot of decisions and had many mental scripts working through those photos and ideas). So have a cup of coffee, get 10 minutes of fresh air, each a gingerbread cookie or close your eyes in the comfy chair and doze.
4. Ready? Replenished? Ready to Write? For each of the 20 moments that are on your list, you want to write a description. You can handwrite or type, but follow these prompts:
1. What happened in this memory (time, place, people, context)?
2. Why is it sticking with me?
3. What does it tell me about myself?
4. What are the feelings that I have about this moment?
5. Take It In To This Point. From this detailed list of 20 memories, you have a great story of your year. This alone is valuable to you, but you can take it down to top 10 by prioritizing once again to get to 10. This is your list. Write the top 10 down on their own list and reflect on these questions for yourself:
1. Looking at the top 10 for me, what have been the themes of 2024?
2. What do I want to make sure is a part fo 2025?
3. What do I want my end of year list to include next year? 
4. What actions did I take so that these memories were a part of 2024? 
5. What actions would I like to take to in 2025 to get to another amazing list?

•  Reverse Gap - (This is an exercise to look back and appreciate progress and growth in new ways. It is typically for a longer period of time of 5-10 years, but can also be done for a 1 year period). For this exercise, you are going to do a creative visualization to identify what has changed in your life in the last year. It’s meant to support an appreciative stance, so if you have had a loss or profound challenge, push yourself to identify how you have grown through that difficult time. Below I will outline how to do this exercise using a timeline, but you can use any method to capture your ideas. 

1. Timeline: Draw a horizontal timeline on a piece or piece of paper. You will need space to write, so you might want to do this across several pieces of paper (ex 4 months per page). Label the left side Jan 1, 2024 and the right-side Dec 31, 2024. 
2. Accomplishments: Start writing key accomplishments over the course of the year. Then move on to things that happened. Lastly, think about the biggest challenges and how you have met them. 
3. Capture Growth: If you don’t see the trend already, you want to start giving yourself credit for your growth. Here are samples: “I now have direct conversations with the team I supervise & I didn’t do that before. I just stewed.” or “I changed jobs to have a more balanced role and less tension. I can now focus on dinner with my family and last year was always so tense.” or “I thought I had to be superhuman and solve everything for everyone, but I’ve grown to know that I deserve boundaries too and will start to put that in place after break.”

This exercise is a way to capture your own growth and gratitude. If you’d like to do it for a longer period of time, you will see more profound growth (in role, salary, impact, personal life, etc.)

There are many, many other ways to reflect and capture growth, but these three have yielded powerful insights for leaders I have worked with over the years. Try for yourself and potentially use it as a starting activity for your team in January. It opens up pathways to appreciation, change and dialogue about impact and systems. Here’s to a powerfully positive 2025.