Self Reflection Journal Exercise For End Of Year Review 2020
Hi, Muses. Welcome back to my channel. If you're ready to wrap up the year that was 2020 into a neat little bow and toss it into a dumpster fire, this video is for you. But in all seriousness, I'm going to share with you a simple three-step journaling process that includes a wee bit of time traveling that will help carry you forward into 2021 and beyond.
Watch the video below or read on for the full transcript.
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I'm hosting an in-depth 2020 review and self-reflection workshop inside my coaching membership next week, and I thought I would be remiss if I didn't share at least some of that gold with you here on my channel. So let's get started.
Long story short, we are going to use this journaling process to write a letter to our future selves that we will email to ourselves and schedule to be re-sent on January 1st, 2022 so we can open it on that new year's day, a little over a year from now.
Before we can get to writing that actual letter, we need to do step one, which is wrapping our heads around the abyss that was the year 2020. I know it has been a long, hard, difficult year for many of us, and processing it is probably not going to be easy, but stick with me because it's worth it. When you read this letter to yourself a year from now, you'll see how far you've come, and you'll be glad you made a record of the things that you experienced in 2020.
So go ahead, get out some pen and paper or click away at your keyboard. And here are some great reflection questions to use to wrap your head around the year that was 2020.
Question number one: What were the most important things that I accomplished, learned or experienced in the year 2020?
Question two: If you had to describe your experience in 2020 in a single word, what word would that be? And in addition, what word would you like to carry with you into 2021 as a feeling or experience that you want to have in the coming year?
Question three: What can you let go of and/or what boundaries could you establish for yourself to better serve you in 2021.
Question four: Who are the people that had the biggest impact on you in 2020, either good or bad?
And question five: Based on everything that has happened to you in 2020, what are your top three priorities going into 2021?
So those are five questions to get you started reviewing and wrapping your head around the year 2020 and what it was for you. If you're interested in how I specifically use prompts like that to journal, check out this video where I go into greater detail about my process that I call Anytime Pages. It's a really useful tool for ensuring that you get some aha moments out of your journaling. It's a wonderful tool for self-reflection.
Before we move on to step two, comment below and tell me how you prefer to journal. Do you prefer using a nice notebook, a plain notebook, loose leaf paper, typing on your computer? Do you have a favorite pen? That kind of stuff. Comment below and tell me, I'm super curious to know. And in case you're curious, I really love Muji gel pens and I use plain notebooks. (Because they're not precious and I can mess up in them and not feel bad. It's great.)
Now let's move on to step two. Step two is where you take everything you learned from your journaling on those questions and translate it into a letter to your future self. An easy way to get started is to read through everything that you wrote and circle things that really stick out to you that you want to make sure to include in that letter.
Then once you've circled everything, you then transfer those things to a list and you prioritize them or arrange them in a way that the related things are together. If you want to get really nerdy, you can check out this video where I teach how I use Notion and Kanban boards to outline. It can be a really useful visual aid to help you wrap your head around a complex topic that you're going to be writing about.
Once you have finished prioritizing and outlining all of the things you want to include in your letter, it's time to actually write the letter itself. And this is perhaps the most important part. You want to make sure that you write the letter from an honest and compassionate place, such that when it comes time for your future self to read this letter on January 1st, 2022, they have an honest portal into their past, which will give them the gift of seeing how far they have come since then.
I can tell you, it can be really difficult to look back on dark times when you're reading these letters in the future. I know the first couple of years after I started doing this, it was really hard, but what I can tell you is that even though it was a small amount of progress, because I had those letters, I was able to see that progress. Whereas if I didn't have this honest and compassionate record, I wouldn't necessarily have been able to see the progress that I made, and that is the opposite of motivating. So even if your 2020 was an actual dumpster fire of fuckery, the compassionate thing is to be completely honest about that with yourself.
You could make the letter as short or as long as you would like. You just want to make sure again that you're being honest, you're being compassionate, you're setting a tone for what you would like 2021 to be going forward. And you want to make sure your future self has a record of the really big important things, either positive and or negative, that happened in 2020. So that way at the end of 2021, it's really simple for your future self to compare the two years and to see how far they've come.
Lastly, step three, this is the part where you actually send your future self this letter. The way you do that is by typing your letter into your Gmail and you email it to yourself and hit send right away. And then when it pops up in your inbox, you use Gmail's rescheduling feature to schedule the email, to come back into your inbox at a later date so it's not just living in your inbox until then. And you want to make sure to schedule it for January 1st, 2022 early in the morning. You want to make sure it is in your inbox before you wake up on January 1st, 2022, because likely between now and then you're going to forget you wrote this letter and it will be a gift to you when you wake up.
And now this is the bonus step four. You repeat this process every New Year's Day, and you just add it to the same email. So over time you actually have a long email chain where the bottom email is your letter to yourself that is the oldest, and then the next oldest, and then the next oldest. And the longer you do this, the more of an honest and compassionate record you have of your past that you can look back on and see how far you've come.
Like I said, the first few years when you do this, especially if you're in a dark place, this can be hard to do. But I guarantee you it is worth it, because after you come out of that dark place, you'll be able to see how far you've come. And I know from personal experience, it can be really, really hard to see just how far you've come if you don't have a record of how truly dark a place it was that you came from.
I hope you come to love this yearly journaling and letter writing process as much as I do. And if you're interested in some more timey wimey, wibbly wobbly magic, I recommend checking out my Masterclass on a process that helps you overcome procrastination and resistance. In it I teach you three incredible mindset shifts and give you another simple three-step process. And this is honestly the thing that got me out of my funk.
When I look back on my past letters, there were letters from before me using this process and there are letters from after, and the difference is staggering. So if you struggle with procrastination and resistance of any kind, I highly recommend you go check it out. And you can get access to this Masterclass for free. All you have to do is go to this link and sign up.
If you liked this video, please hit that like button and be sure to share it with your friends. Next Tuesday, I'm taking some time off for the holidays, but I will be back with another new video Tuesday, January 5th, 2021. It'll be the first in a four-part series to help set you up for success for 2021. Subscribe so you don't miss it.
I'll see you then. Bye.
OUTTAKES: Wrap up 2020 into a neat little bow and top it... Top? Top it.
If you're ready to wrap up... [GARBLE GARBLE]
In the year 2020... [MUPPET NOISES] [CLICK]
[GROAN] I lost my train of thought.
Up into a...
I'm crazy.
