If you’ve visited my site before, you’ll know that I’m a fan of taking some time out at the end of the year to reflect, evaluate, and make plans/goals for the coming year. I talked about doing this in 2021 in one of my earlier posts and I talked about how this article and the included annual life review template gave me a framework to do that. However, when I sat down this year to work through my life review I found it difficult to complete. Despite having had some amazing experiences this year, I overwhelmingly felt that I hadn’t achieved much. And this heavy feeling caused me to want to shut down altogether when it came to really reflecting on the year.

Year in Review

A year ago, I categorized 2021 as my year of movement. A year that started off slow, but in which I slowly gained momentum into feeling like I was living a full life. In 2022 I definitely carried over that momentum. I continued my Latin American Adventure, spending time in Colombia and Argentina, and making a quick stop in Chile. I picked up momentum with dating, experiencing some high highs and some low lows. I lived in the time and space that I was currently in, rather than waiting for/anticipating the next thing to happen. I felt like I learned a lot, but I didn’t feel like I had made any progress (if that makes any sense). And perhaps this is why the idea of thinking about failures, successes, growth, and any other reflections made me just want to go take a nap. Lol.

What I Learned

I still haven’t totally worked through the review template. But I have completed some sections, one being where you assess your life at the moment by assigning a score (on a 1 to 10 scale) to different life categories. I was interested to see what categories had gone up and which had gone down, so I could better understand if this feeling of under-achievement was warranted. So I made this chart (apparently in 2020 I skipped over this part of the review process – oops).

What I realized is that it is very likely that I am exactly where I need to be. Last year I talked about the tendency to always focus on career and money goals, and so this year there were other areas that I wanted to pay more attention to. I see gains in the Fun, Family/Friends, Personal Growth, and Environment categories. So when I look at things through this lens, I actually made a lot of progress. So I want to reiterate that it’s important to not only look at, but celebrate gains in other aspects of our lives, rather than what we traditionally do: use career and money gains to measure progress. We have to look at the big picture.

The Sum of the Journey

Plotting out my scores in the categories over the years helped to breathe new meaning into the saying “you can have it all…just not all at once”. Some years certain things are going to be more of a priority, and other things may suffer a bit for it. But that’s ok because at the end of the day life is a journey, and if we take the sum of our learnings/experiences/progress over the years, the hope is that there can be some balance in the aggregation. After all, when I summed up my category scores from this year and last year, I saw that they were actually the same…just of a different composition. And that has helped me to reframe my perspective on this year.

Looking Ahead

If this year was also a year of movement, as I look ahead to next year, I think I would like to frame it as the year I transition into stability. A year from now, I’ll be interested to see in what areas I’ve made gains and in what areas I’ve taken a step back. Will these movements align with the things I set out to focus on in the beginning of the year? But I’ll keep in my mind that whatever happens, it’s all good. Because the point is not to get all those categories balanced at once, but to make progress where you can, which adds to the sum of all the progress that you’ll make over the course of your life. 

What goals do you have for next year? What areas in your life do you want to focus on? How do you define balance in your life? How would you describe in one word your hope for what next year will be for you? Let me know in the comments! I’d love to hear! And please share.