New Years is commonly a time to look back and reflect upon the past year. Especially for high performers, it’s easy to ruminate on the past. The problem is, this doesn’t always turn into productive reflection and can be unhelpful or even toxic. This exercise is meant to take the act of reflection and look at it from a high level, separating events and emotions from the actual lessons taken away.
New Years is commonly a time to look back and reflect upon the past year. Especially for high performers, it’s easy to ruminate on the past. The problem is this doesn’t always turn into productive reflection and can be unhelpful or even toxic. This exercise is meant to take the act of reflection and look at it from a high level, separating events and emotions from the actual lessons taken away.
If you haven’t read my introduction to what vision day is, read the intro post here.
The “Past” portion of this exercise is divided into two main parts:
- Reflection: Lowlights and Highlights from the year
- Lessons: from the lowlights and highlights, what lessons can be extracted
At the end of this exercise, you should come away with what pieces from the past year you enjoyed or disliked, and the lessons you can take away into the new year.
Here we go!
Reflection
I broke the reflection exercise into four sections. The vision day video doesn’t prompt or require all of these, but I found these areas to be important for me. For yourself, you may want to tweak them based on your own values.
- Timeline: Lowlights and highlights of the year
- People: Positive and negative people in my life
- Activities: Likes vs. dislikes of activities I did this year
- Other: Various lowlights and highlights
Timeline
I started working on my timeline by reflecting on the year and writing down a timeline of memorable events that happened and whether it was considered Positive (+), Negative (-), or Neutral (•).
I first focused on what I could remember via the guided meditation in the Vision Day Video. Afterward, I did a sweep of my email to trigger a few more memories. You could use your Snapchat memories or Instagram archive to do the same if you find that more useful.
Note: Just because an event isn’t here doesn’t mean it wasn’t important. I just omitted it for brevity.
January
- (•) I spent New Years with my friends in Visalia. It was just alright, since it involved drinking a little too much and some conflict
February
- (-) I spent a lot of time/effort/money on trying to get in shape and improving my dating profiles without much of a win on either front
- (+) Sumita had a housewarming party that was a success and very fun
March
- (•) Went to EmberConf in Portland, OR.
- (-) Drank a bit too much a few nights while in Portland and felt like crap
- (+) Got a Happy Birthday song and slice of cake from my dance studio. Was very sweet of them and a highlight of March for sure!
April
- (+) Went to Coachella (some rockiness but overall fun)
- (+) Traveled to Japan with Greg, Ted, and Mike
May
- (+) Traveled to Brisbane, Australia and visited Ashley
- (+) Traveled to New Zealand and visited Aria and Sophie
- (+) Performed Extravaganza for my dance studio and went well!
- (+) Stayed at a Cabin with Sumita, Teddi, Jayleen and co. in Arnold, CA
June
Couldn’t remember anything noteworthy, so here is a picture of a cute cat
July
- (+) Fourth of July with the family is always fun
- (+) React Training with Louis
- (•) Joined Precision Nutrition
August
- (•) Started fitness classes at Yubalance
September
- (-) Started seriously considering leaving my job at the time
- (•) Started personal training at Yubalance
October
- (+) Started interviewing and ramping up into consulting
- (+) Accepted consulting offer and resigned from my job at the time
- (+) Went on Retreat for my job and ran Bar 275
- (-) The process of resigning was difficult to say the least
November
- (+) Last Day at my job
- (+) Start full time consulting
- (•) Thanksgiving with the family
- (+) Spent time in Visalia working remotely after Thanksgiving and saw friends
December
- (•) Many Parties and events: At this point loneliness was getting the best of me and I was struggling to enjoy these
- (•) Christmas was also hard to enjoy because of stress coming from loneliness
- (-) The cost of the New Years Eve Party stressed me out and I didn’t plan it soon enough
- (+) NYE Party itself went pretty well
People
Beyond just the events throughout the year, people can also contribute to highlights and lowlights. I wrote these down specifically for my own note-keeping, but decided to redact them from the public.
Overall, I definitely noticed a few people that I really enjoyed spending time with, specifically a few of my solid friends I’ve had for a while now, friends abroad, and some new friends I made through work.
That said, there were also people in my life that contributed to a more negative experience.
I believe in a Social “Cultivate and Culling” cycle, so while I need to continue to cultivate existing friendships and create new friendships, I also actively practiced removing or reducing time spent with people who impacted me negatively. I am pretty happy with my management of this this year.
I also think I need to cultivate friendships in two main areas that I don’t have many in:
- Traveling
- Entrepreneurship
I will be working on strengthening social ties those areas a bit more this year.
Activities
Liked
- Hiking: Both domestically and abroad
- Dancing: Developing dance as a skill is fun
- Going to concerts: Still fun, though this started fading a little lately
- Traveling: Specifically when meeting with friends
- Parties: This was hit and miss, but overall positive in my mind
- Cocktail Making: Learning the art and flavors is fun and others get to enjoy it too!
- Cooking: I hate my kitchen but enjoy cooking when I have a good place to do it
Disliked
- Working out: Didn’t see the results I wanted to see given the input of effort
- Going to lower-end bars or clubs: I will do it for friends from time to time but I don’t find myself wanting to spend the calories on poorly made drinks at a loud, ratchet bars/clubs
- Getting (too) Drunk: I drank a lot less this year than last, but still got a bit too intoxicated a few times
- Traveling alone: When I had no friends to fallback on, it got a bit lonely at times
I think overall the takeaway is pretty simple: do more of what I like and less of what I disliked. The only caveat there is working out, which I need to figure out how to make more interesting and fun if I want to get fit. Luckily dancing and hiking can help with that.
Other Lowlights/Highlights
Lowlights
- Felt less connected to my social self
- Not as much travel this year time-wise
- Lack of intimate relationships weighed on me a lot
- Career was mostly stagnant for first 3 quarters of the year
- I would like to have an apartment with a better kitchen and maybe just getting tired of it – this also might be linked to being home more this year
Highlights
- Made a lot of new friends and visited a few abroad
- Saw 3 new countries in two new continents
- Went back to consulting remotely and enabled more travel
- Drank less overall compared to last year
- Started exercising more consistently
- Developed more professional confidence
Lessons
Honestly I ended up with ALOT of takeaways from this exercise. I’ll just jump right in.
- I lost my ability to travel as much to my job in 2018 and that had a noticeable negative effect on me. Many of my highlights from my timeline involve traveling, being abroad, and connecting with people.
- A lot of my current hobbies are expensive or rely on a third-party. It would probably be beneficial for my financial health to develop a few less expensive hobbies and beneficial for my mental health to find hobbies that don’t require another person.
- For as much money as I poured into fitness and dating this year, it was largely fruitless. I think I need to step back and rethink my approach to these things since throwing money at the problem didn’t work.
- I need personality and interest diversity in my friends, so structured groups and settings only work for a little. I need to find a way to generate more diversity in the new people I meet.
- A lot of my highlights come from partying, concerts, and nightlife, but a few of my negative experiences stemmed from getting too drunk. Even though we are talking a few times in the entire year, it still wasn’t enjoyable. So I need to continue to work on that.
- I focused a lot on trying to address shortcomings this year (fitness, love life, etc.) and not enough time on nurturing things I am good at and enjoy (travel, programming, social activities). This was likely to my detriment.
- I let loneliness really crush me this year. M’s ghost haunted me and my early failures in the beginning of the year around dating impacted my confidence a lot. Later, I was able to start appreciating time with M more instead of taking it as a sign that I was somehow fundamentally not enough. That said, my lack of love life was my single most powerful hinderance last year.
- I suffered a lot this year for not being assertive or aggressive enough. It’s a theme that pops up not only in my love life, but at work, with family, and with friends. I started being a bit more assertive later in the year and its only been positive.
- I am at my best when I am mentoring, leading, or alone. I am at my worst when I have to blindly follow orders with no clear reason or no clear win to be had. People who control without leadership skill leads to conflict.
- Inability to appreciate process and celebrate small wins hinders me and provides fuel to many of my lowlights. I need to figure out who to better appreciate the process in order to unlock wins in certain areas in my life.
Conclusion
That’s it for my reflection on the past year! Next up, I am going to be rating and reflecting on the present and where I stand in various parts of my life.
Check out my next post on Vision Day: Present
Thanks for reading!
I really enjoyed reading this and learning more about what makes you happy or not and the process of vision. You put into words so eloquently what most of us may think about but don’t bother to write it down. We should all take the time to do this important exercise Of putting all aspects of our life on the table and evaluating these so that we could make changes accordingly. Thank you so much for sharing. You are a wonderful human being Bryan!