An end of year personal review can help you make progress and get a much needed boost. Get started today by following the tips that I lay out here.

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Unless this is your first time here, you probably know that I’m a big fan of setting goals for yourself. Meaningful goal-setting holds you accountable for personal development and improvement.

Whether it’s weight loss, or parenting or business, or whatever else you’d like to improve, you should always be striving to get better and improve as a human being. 

If we are staying stagnant and dormant, we are failing ourselves and our loved ones. 

Read more. Experience life. Open up your expectations for how to live and enjoy this journey on Earth.

Related: If you need a primer on getting started in creating goals that work better for you, I’ve got you covered here.

If you’ve been crushing those goals throughout your year, the next step of your improvement process should be a check-in to determine how you’ve progressed. That’s where an end of year personal review comes in handy.

For anyone who’s ever worked in a corporate setting, you’re likely familiar with the idea of an annual review with your superior. They go over your performance for the previous 365 days and set a path for growth for the next calendar year.

This is what you’ll be doing for yourself.

In this article, I’ll explain:

• Why an end of year personal review is so important to reaching and achieving your goals
• How to get started creating your own personal review
• The most important questions you should ask yourself in an end of year personal review

Let’s get into it.

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Simple question: How do you know where to go if you don’t know where you’ve been?

You’re flying blind if you don’t take a few minutes to process the journey you’ve traveled thus far to collect your bearings and figure out how to set yourself up to continue.

Take weight loss, for instance. 

Let’s say your goal was losing 10 pounds over the course of the year with a focus on improving nutrition by tracking calories and protein. You also committed to more behavioral goals like adding in strength training 2-3 times per week.

You laid out the goals executed to the best of your abilities, yet fell short of accomplishing your goal of hitting your workouts consistently. Tracking calories wasn’t exactly on point, but you did your best.

As a result, you lost five pounds. That’s fantastic. Progress is progress. And all progress should be celebrated.

And now as the new year comes around, you’re ready to lose a little more and really polish off that initial goal of 10 pounds. Or perhaps you want even more to really see it through a full body transformation. 

Great. 

And by looking back throughout the journey, you can audit your dedication and commitment levels to determine what worked and what didn’t work. If working out 2-3 times per week was a daunting task for you over the last few months, why do you think it will magically be easier in the coming year?

You need to evaluate the adventure to figure out how you can make tweaks and adjustments to improve.

This works in more than just fitness, by the way. But, you know, since that’s my passion, that’s what I’m sticking to here. 

How to get started creating your own end of year personal review

Look, I’m all about efficiency and breaking things down to their simplest ingredients so you can build from the bottom up. 

I totally get the time constraints when work, life, parenting, relationships and everything in between can make it hard to think, let alone take time for yourself.

So I’m not going to sit here and instruct you to carve out 2-3 hours of your time during the holiday end of year mad rush to think about some whimsical goal setting scenarios for yourself in self-reflection.

• You don’t need to create some fancy excel spreadsheet
• No need to buy some expensive custom journal for this exercise
• You can skip the notebook altogether and just record a few thoughts in your smartphone notes app of choice

Just like the physical workouts that I create for my online coaching clients, I like to keep my mental workouts focused, effective and efficient for those of us who are short on time.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, it’s important to note that you will have to spend some time working on this. Up to you how much, depending on how many things you’d like to review and audit.

It all starts with grabbing a pen and paper (or a handy word processing app or even a notes app on your phone). Then it’s time to crank out some lists and ask a few important questions.

And all questions essentially come back to a familiar theme:

• What went well this year?
• What did not go so well this year?

Keeping that in mind, let’s get to work.

The most important questions you should ask yourself in an end of year personal review

Look back at the previous 365 days, or whatever arbitrary timeframe you’d like to review. Alternatively, you could do this on a quarterly basis, too.

You’ll spend a few minutes taking a deep dive into four questions that will chart your path forward in the next year.

Step 1: What are the obstacles you’ve faced and how have you overcome them? 

List them all out. 

From the small (like finally picking up a reading habit) to the big (like really drilling down that goal of hitting 100-120 grams of protein per day).

Go back and jot down the accomplishments.

This is really important.

We tend to focus on the negative things that have a role in our day to day lives. We harp on those failures that prevented us from seeing the real successes that we are after. 

There’s something to be said about exploring failures and learning from mistakes. How you overcome certain situations and obstacles, even if they seem mundane, is something to explore and appreciate. There is an absolute time and place for that exercise.

However, there is an equal and opposite need to go back and celebrate the wins. You can still learn from accomplishments. 

That’s the goal of this first step.

Give yourself credit for the wins and then pare them down:

• What are the Top 3 Wins that you are most proud of?
• What’s the most important item on this list?
• Collectively, how do these wins help provide a summary or theme for your entire year?
• What does it say about you and your progress going forward?

Step 2: What have you learned?

Now that you’ve created the list and identified the top performers, it’s time for some introspection. This is where the magic happens.

Start thinking about the personal growth you’ve experienced over the year. 

How have you grown as a person? 

It might feel like you’re the same human being that started the year and you haven’t evolved much at all. But, if you really drill down the details and reflect on the experiences, you’ll see that you’ve likely grown in ways you never realized.

Step 3: How satisfied are you as a person?

This question can have some deeper meaning here and that’s by design. 

The goal of the entire exercise is to learn from mistakes, embrace the successes and find ways in which to improve yourself in more ways than just fitness or professional life.

So really dig and explore into the many areas of living that makes you … you:

• Job/career
• Health and fitness
• Finances
• Family
• Romance/dating
• Friendships
• Fun and leisure
• Home/physical environment
• Personal growth and development

For the sake of time, we aren’t trying to turn this into an all-day event, you might want to start by picking 2-3 facets where you’d like to improve and go from there.

Likewise, you could break it up into a quarterly approach and tackle 1-2 topics every 3-4 months.

Either way, your objective with this third step is to rate yourself in those categories. From there, it’s time to put it all together.

Step 4: Determine what’s next and take action.

The scientific definition of work is “the exertion of force overcoming resistance or producing molecular change.”

In other words, if you are staying put, you are not changing and not growing and not doing the work.

My goal for you is to build systems into your life that allow you to take action.

Once action is taken, the next step is creating consistency to turn your new behavior into a habit. For instance, you don’t need motivation or a reminder to brush your teeth in the morning. It’s just part of who you are and what you do.

That’s the level of habit-forming we’re striving for here. 

Truth be told, we might not get to a dental hygiene level of consistency, but close enough will be good enough for you. 

To get there, you’ll need to ask yourself a few questions:

• What’s missing from your list of things you’ve accomplished?
• What were you unable to spend enough time on this year?
• What big goals or dreams would you like to achieve next year?

And then it’s a matter of starting. Sounds easy. But, so often you’ve probably found yourself stuck in neutral trying to find the best path forward to start working on a goal.

I always preach taking things so small and so slow, that it’s almost impossible and embarrassing to skip.

A few examples:

• Instead of aiming to work out 5-6 days per week, just start with one session per week to start. Or maybe even just focus on doing a few pushups and squats per day until you get comfortable.
• Don’t try to read a book per week if you haven’t read a book in years. Instead, set a goal of reading 1-2 pages per day until this new habit gets baked into your routine.
• Avoid setting that alarm clock at 5am sharp if you’re currently hitting the snooze button until 7:45 every morning. Start slow with just 15 minutes at a time and build from there.

In this article, I talked about motivation and why it sucks. And then I explained why taking action was so important to conquering goals because it’s the only way to build habits, see results and spark meaningful motivation to keep you moving.

So, keep that in mind once you’ve determined a goal and decide it’s time to get to work.

Step 5 (BONUS): Create a phrase that will be your theme (or mantra) for the next year

This is a bit of a fluffy, hippy-style extra credit stuff. You certainly do not have to do this one.

But, there is something to be said about adding a bit of an affirmation of positivity to your daily routine. I’m not going to start preaching about some questionable wacky science stuff surrounding affirmations, but I will say if nothing else, it just feels better to be more positive.

And creating a few positive mantras to keep you grounded through the good times and the bad is a nice way to deflect the negativity of the day to day grind and start getting back to the perspective.

It helps remind you of the goals that you’ve set for yourself and it keeps you focused on the why behind your goals to help boost that motivation to continue.

Try this affirmation out to see if fits your lifestyle design and goals:

“I can. I will. End of Story.”

Simple. And simple gets done. 

Refer back to this phrase (or whatever statement and/or theme you create for yourself) early and often throughout your day. Do it when times are awesome and even when it gets really shitty.

Embrace a never give up attitude in reaching your goals. And then understand that perfection is not the goal, consistency is the objective. So if and when you screw up a little, just know that the only way you fail is if you give up completely.

Once you’ve taken the time to reflect on the journey to where you are now, it’ll provide the proper perspective to chart a sustainable and more fulfilling road to future success.

Don’t overthink this stuff. It’s just taking a few minutes before the end of the year to learn. And then taking that learning process and supercharging it into a course of action.

Now … get to work.

Image by Karolina Grabowska from Pixabay

Let me help you learn how to perform an end of year personal review … 

I’m here to help you out. 

If you have any questions, reach out. I answer all of my emails at pete [at] petecataldo [.] com … Hit me up with the subject line “End of year personal review” and I’ll answer any questions you have to make this work for you.

Or you can hit me up anytime on the socialz on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

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