Last Quarter Plan - Week 3: The Power of Year-End Reflection
Have you done your Year-End Reflection?
If your answer is no, may I suggest you continue to read this blog.
It will cover what Year-End Reflection is about, why it is important, the benefits of it, what are the tools and exercises you can use to complete the year-end reflection activity. This is now the perfect time to perform a Year-End reflection as we are in the last 90 days countdown to year end.
What is Year-End Reflection activity about?
It is an activity to look back the last 12 months, assess on activities,, projects you did, decisions you made, experiences with success or challenges related to work and personal life. Assessment based on 3 main objectives.
The 3 main objectives of a Year-End Reflection activity include
Review what worked well
Assess what could have been better, what are the learnings you carry to the New Year.
Decide what you should incorporate in the New Year Plan.
What are the 4 key benefits of carrying out a Year-End Reflection activity?
In the spirit of continuous improvement and growth mindset, it is critical to reflect on the past year and set up for future year success.
1. Improved self-awareness.
Take some time to think back on situations where, some decisions help determine next viable steps to move forward or those that hinders progress resulting in a less desirable outcome can help improve your self-awareness and provide learnings that you can improve on decision making in the future.
2 Increased resilience in the face of challenges.
By reflecting on your work through the year, you will gain insights on how you handle failures, whether you have taken those as learning opportunities or struggled to overcome the mistakes made, you will increase your resilience.
3. Enhanced goal setting for the upcoming year.
After you have assessed and performed Year-End reflection, you will be able to improve on setting next year goals by learning what motivations you can include in your measure of success, and better articulation of the goal to increase the success rate with better outcome. For example, define more specific goal, with more relevance that align to overall vision, achievement with reasonable timeline, etc.
4. Recognition and celebration of achievements.
When you take time to reflect on the year’s work, you will gain more appreciation of your accomplishments and celebrate your success, that leads to build more self-confidence and more positive outcome.
There are 4 tools you can use for the Year-End Reflection activity.
1. Reflective Journaling:
Use the following thought-provoking prompts to guide you write a reflective journal. This will provide you insights on what worked, what needs improvement, your learnings, and what to include in the new year plan.
2. SWOT Analysis:
Carry out a SWOT analysis on what your strengths, weaknesses are, Consider the external threats that impact your plan and decisions, and the opportunities await. This provides a comprehensive view that allows you to take into considerations when you work on your next year’s plan.
3. Create a Visual timeline of the year’s milestones, challenges, and successes.
This visual aid helps to recall and reflect specific moments, to recognize trends, patterns and correlations of milestones, challenges, and accomplishments so that you can identify recurring themes, or factors that contributes to success or obstacles to help move forward.
4. Feedback Collection:
Ask for feedback from your peers, managers work related activities, and family members for others can provide you an all-rounded, personal, and professional growth assessment. You can learn more about how your actions and decisions create impacts to others, gain new perspectives on your work and life.
Plus 3 actionable exercises you can do for a meaningful and deeper reflection experience.
1. Gratitude Practice:
Include a daily routine to write a gratitude journal to acknowledge what you have and be grateful for. This helps on building a positive mindset and be empathetic with people around you.
2. Values Alignment:
Carry out an exercise to assess if there is strong alignment of your vision to actions help create more impactful outcome. It provides a clear and focused direction, fosters a sense of purpose. Clear priorities avoid confusion, hence more effective execution, and better outcome. It also leads to a better sense of fulfillment.
3. Goal Review:
A review of the goals set at the beginning of the year, celebrating achievements, and reassessing any unmet goals. This is an exercise that we covered in Last Quarter Plan - Week 1: Achieving Year-End Goals. You can find the link in Ref. 1) below.
Is that all? Not quite.
So far, we have covered the What, why, and How about the Year-End Reflection activity. However, it will be like taking the steps to prepare making a cake and not baking it in the oven if you don’t translate reflections into actionable plans. It is critical to apply what you learn through out the year; use the insights you gather to improve and allow personal and professional growth. You will not be able to benefit from the hard work you have done through out the year.
There are 2 important steps to translate reflections into action plan
1. Set SMART Goals for the New Year:
SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Setting SMART goals allow you to consider the learnings and insights from the reflection to incorporate in the new year. I have another blog that speaks in more detail about SMART goals. You can find the link in Ref. 2) below.
For example, you might discover that a current year goal is too broad and difficult to measure progress and outcome. For next year, you might consider breaking up a goal to smaller goals that can be effectively measured and reasonable timeframe to be achieved.
2. Identifying Growth Areas:
When carrying out Year-End Reflection, you would notice gaps on your skillsets that you want to improve. They should include both your personal and professional growth areas. If there is no gap identified, use the SWOT analysis result to assess the need that aligns to your vision. You may consider a couple more years out. What are the opportunities that may arise, and what steps you should start taking to prepare for it?
In conclusion:
Taking the time in the Last Quarter to perform a Year-End Reflection is critical for continuous improvement and future year success. The benefits include increasing self-awareness, increasing resilience to face new challenges, enhancing on goal setting for the new year higher rate of success, increasing self-confidence by recognizing and celebrating accomplishments.
Through my own experience, if you do not invest your time to practice Year-End Reflection, you will miss the opportunities to grow, risk little to no advance in your career, worse performance next year, and not able to fulfill your aspirations.
Share this blog with others that you think could benefit from this. It becomes even more powerful when you and your teams share the experience of their Year-End Reflection activity and support each other's growth.
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Here's to a meaningful Year-End Reflection that provides invaluable insights for a more successful new year to come!
#InnovateYou #yearendreflection #leadershipcoaching #professionalcoaching #BeBrighter
Ref: 1 ) https://www.innovateyou.ca/blog/achieve-year-end-goals
Ref. 2) https://www.innovateyou.ca/blog/smartgoal
