The Past - Reflect on how you acted and understand why

Content

1. Housekeeping - Get rid of the clutter
2. Reviewing - Note the relevant events
3. Results - What came out of it
4. Retrospective - Synthesize into lessons learned

Personal Context - Why you should do it

Personally, I appreciate this part the most because I just enjoy looking into the past. It feels very enjoyable to look consciously at what I have achieved, what I have overcome and what did not go well.

One fact I like to highlight is that you should always remember that the person you are today is a manifestation of the combined life experiences you went through. So, if you remind yourself of those life experiences, you will get to know yourself better.

One other thing: When going through the questions for the review, keep in mind that no answer needs to be eloquently put but intuitively feel right instead. So:

• Your first answer in your head to these questions is usually the right one
• In everything you review, ask yourself if it is really your thought or an external expectation (societal or somebody in your circle)
• If you just get 50% done, you are likely more advanced than 90% of the society you live in and 100% more advanced than before you were doing it at all

Take the time and I promise you: Everything will feel better.

The advantages

• Time passes slower - When you look back regularly, take the time to note it down, reflect on it; time passes much slower than usual.
• Pattern-recognition - You start to create analogies to similar things happening in the past. For the sake of argument, let's take a repeating choice in partners for relationships: What do they have in common that annoyed you? What are the positive characteristics that you want to find in your significant other?
• Making yourself proud - We forget far too quickly about the positive things we achieved. It does not necessarily need to be something somebody else sees as an achievement. The question is: What did you do that makes you proud? An easy example is trying something new.
• You identify things which bug you - Sometimes, you may feel something unconsciously stressing you, annoying you, bringing negative energy to your life. Perhaps you identify it by reflecting?
• Sharing - When you go through the exercise, you can talk about it with people, sharing insights, celebrating positive moments, getting support on things which bother you.

Housekeeping - Get rid of the clutter

Housekeeping - The rationale

First, you need to filter out the "noise" in order to clearly think.

We live in a fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) world where we constantly get bombarded with news. Psychologically-speaking, it is interesting to know that the English word "news" has its roots in "novelty". Sou, you get what is "new".

The problem is that novelty is something that can get you addicted. And that is what we experience everyday.

We still need to read that book, we have bookmarked that article (or even opened 100 tabs) we wanted to read, as soon as we have the time. We are asked if we have watched that new TV show on Netflix, the new movie in the cinema, what we think about the newest scandal, gossip…

I said it once and I will say it again: You need to control the flows of stimuli and media you consume before it reaches you.

But even then (speaking for myself), you will always have something pending to be responded to, to be consumed or to be processed.

So, clearing your mind is critical.

Housekeeping - How to do it

• Clean out all your email accounts. I recommend the "Inbox Zero" principle all the time because it eases your mind.
• If you have content which is pending to be consumed by you, check where it is and write down the "locations" (physical magazine, website, read-it-later-app, email folder, bookmark). Again: Don't write down what is where, but just where you have open "to consume" stuff.
• Go through your pc with the focus on the "Downloads" folder and the "desktop". Delete everything that you have not touched within the last 4 weeks or write it down on the piece of paper as an "open to consume" location.
• Go through your Project/Life Planning/Task Management tool and clean up everything

Now, get either "Pocket" or "Instapaper" and push all the "open to consume" content into one of these two tools. Make a commitment to yourself that

• you will only consume content that went through an audit of "It looks/sounds interesting",
• send it to one of these two "Inboxes" and
• take one block in your calendar (e. g. Monday morning)
• where you will have a look into the tool of your choice and consume what seems to be the most interesting to you at that very moment.

Reviewing - Note the relevant events

Reviewing - The rationale

Your past is your present. It does not necessarily need to be your future but your present, it is for sure. In the end, you as the present individual are the result of your past. The past is much more about what happened by you than what happened to you. The distinction is important. Let me explain:

What happened to you:

• Victim consciousness - You were powerless
• Blame - Somebody or something is responsible and you have no saying
• Fear - As you have no control over what happens to you, the future is frightening

What happened by you:

• Accept responsibility - A lot of things happen to you as a consequence of a decision you made
• Gain control - You have the feeling, you have a saying in how you develop
• Confidence - You account for your successes but also the failures; so making better decisions in the future, will let you fail less (hard)

The review is really the simplest thing to do: Just walk yourself mentally through the year in chronological order.

Reviewing - How to do it

First, you will need to get a context of what actually happened within the year. Sure, do it first just by your memory and write down the important events that come to mind. But afterwards check it out by helping out your memory by:

• looking through your photos on your phone/pc
• looking through your social media postings
• reading through your journal if you have one
• checking other sources of data you might use regularly

Write down what seems significant to you.

Second, you need to reflect on what has happened, why it happened, what could have gone worse/better or whatever else comes to your mind. To help you, you may use the following questions:

• What were the milestones or moments that "made" that year? You ‌can check it more distinctively by relating it to health, career, relationships, personal development, etc.
• Who were the people who brought a positive energy to your life? To be more precise: I do not mean that he/she was always positive but made you feel connected.

• How can you be around them more?

• Who were the people who drained you of your energy? It may have manifested by you thinking about canceling your plans with them shortly before meeting up.

• Either you try talking to them about the points which annoy you or you cut them out of your life. If not possible: Spend less time with them.

• What were the habits (also unconsciously like drinking every evening) that expanded/reduced your energy?

• How can you do less of the draining and more of the energizing habits?

• How did you grow as a person from the events? What changed about you and your points of view?
• What was stressing you out the most over the year? What is still stressing you out?

• How can you resolve it?

• What are you most grateful for?

Results - What came out of it

Results - The rationale

As you ‌experience more and more, reflecting is mostly about contextualizing the knowledge you gained from experience.

Therefore, you need to contextualize what you have achieved to where you want to go. It does not matter if you have set goals for the year, you have followed the hype of defining your "Big 5 for Life" or if you just have loosely defined an idea of who you want to be. You can order your achievements according to your areas of focus (easiest examples are again health, career, relationships, etc.) and see if they match.

If you have a lot of achievements in areas, you do not have a goal for, you need to

• either reflect your goals (are they matching your life priorities?)
• or reflect your behavior in your daily agenda.

Results - How to do it

Get through the list of events you note down from looking at your pictures, take the reflection you related to them, and write down a sentence summarizing the essence of the achievement. Then you can work further on them if you like.

• If you had set up goals before: How many did you hit? (If you hit more than 50%, set more/bigger goals next time)
• Which of them are you the proudest of? And why? Who did you share it with? How did they react?

• If they did not celebrate it with you properly, ask yourself: Is the area of the achievement really fitting my character? Or is it about the people you shared it with? (go back to Review)

• What supported me the most in building my achievements?

• A person, a peer group, a routine or time by yourself?

• What distracted you or even prevented you the most from building your achievements?

• How can you resolve these points?

Retrospective - Synthesize into lessons learned

Retrospective - Rationale

Taking lessons from patterns will help you break the ‌pattern-repetition in the next encounter with the pattern.

Contrary to popular belief, identifying a behavior pattern is not the most important step. I can give you a list of negative behavior patterns I would like to break within myself, but actually doing it is the real challenge. Therefore, I recommend not writing down the pattern itself, but a lesson learned which contains a positive statement about a potential resolution.

To give you an example: At any time, I am managing far too many topics at once. I know that and I have known it for years and years. Still, I am struggling with it. So the lessons learned here are not: "Stop juggling around more than three main topics" because I know it to be unrealistic.

The lesson learned you may have read in my review for 2021: "Attention is my most precious resource and therefore I need to focus on one thing at the time."

Retrospective - How to do it

• Go through the areas you have progressed, not at all, not as you have (realistically) expected, and things you are generally dissatisfied with in general (and may also be about yourself)
• Try to understand why that is and which pattern is keeping you from breaking it
• Write down a lesson learned which gives you advice on how to improve it

The Debriefing

Keep the different results separated from each other so you can look at them independently when you want to. Especially, the lessons learned are something that could help you break some self-harming behaviors, habits or relationship commitments.

A digital note-taking tool helps you in keeping the information accessible, structured & reconsumable.