I am a morning person. Have always been one all my life. I’ve never been able to sleep in ever in my life!
Jan 1st was no different for me. Staying up late welcoming the new year with friends did not stop me from waking up early. And that’s exactly what I did.
Instead of doing my calligraphy practice (a new hobby that I recently started), I decided to reflect upon the past year and the year ahead aka the 2019 review. I decided to switch it up though. Not having penned my thoughts in a long time, I was worried I would quit writing midway since reflecting and writing about the entire year does involve a lot of mental work. I was worried about being caught up in the emotions that memories can evoke and also getting carried away with my words.
Instead I made it easier for myself. I opened a google doc, put in the categories that I wanted to reflect upon and started doing so.
This is what I came up with:
Category Name:
Highs:
Lows:
2020 Intentions:
One or two sentences for each of the items in Italics.
The categories I reflected upon were:
- Professional
- Financial Health
- Physical Health
- Fun
- Nutrition
- Mental Health
- Relationships
- Hubby
- Child 1
- Child 2
- Brother
- Sister in Law
- Dad
- Mom
- Friends
- Self
- Spiritual
- Side hustle
- Hobbies
- Learning
For some of the categories I found it difficult to come up with even a single High. I forced myself to think of the smallest win possible. For example: one of the areas I struggled with coming up with a High for was physical health. The fact that I finally bought a Fitbit to be aware of how much I walk everyday was one of the high’s I finally listed.
The exercise does not stop here though.
The second part to this activity is taking the 2020 Intentions items and identifying what Habits and Routines need to be incorporated and monitored in my life. I strongly believe that we are a product of our habits. It’s one thing to set an intention to walk 10 mins everyday. But to actually see it through, it needs to become a habit/a routine/a part of your life. And that is what will give us the results we seek.
I built a table of Habits/Routines that I would like to see in my life. I categorized it into Daily, Weekly, Monthly. And then I built a tracker in a spreadsheet to track these habits on a daily basis.
Templates for both the Year in Review exercise and the Habit tracker are available. Please feel free to copy and use.
In case your curious about the title of my post , here’s more context.
Reflecting on 2019, I personally hit rock bottom in certain categories. Rock bottom has different connotations for everyone. For someone who has very high personal standards and who holds everyone around her to those standards, even relatively small things felt huge. I slipped in several aspects of my life. The discipline and standards that I have always lived by were unable to bear the weight. Mental and physical health felt the biggest impacts which in turn impacted the relationships in my life.Things like skipping my weekly zumba, eating out more than twice a week, letting my plants die etc are the kind of things that were the results of the mental funk and indicators of hitting rock bottom. Not to mention the car accidents etc.
It was not all gloom and doom. There were a ton of high points as well! Professionally it was a great year with a fantastic job landing in my lap right at the beginning of the year. Lot of learning and growing there. A few fun trips and pushing myself out of the comfort zone and doing things I normally would never do. And ending the year on a strong note by starting with the changes I want in my life – starting with changes to the physical space we live in.
Looking forward to 2020: The Year of the Phoenix seems cliched and again seems to indicate a ton of gloom and doom. It truly is not that bad compared to what others may have gone through. But it does seem like a lot of work to rise up from the mental funk of 2019, the kind of funk that I have not experienced in my life before. To me it feels as gargantuan a task as rising from the ashes!
I fall into the category of people who does not believe in setting resolutions. I set intentions and a process to incorporate a habit into my life and an accountability structure to get me to my end result.
Dr.Marshall Goldsmith, the leading business coach in the world does something similar with tracking his daily habits and strongly advocates we all do so. In my interview with him several years ago, he mentioned paying someone to call him every night for 5 minutes t o ask him the questions on his spreadsheet!!! Here is his sheet. I am not paying anyone to ask me these questions. Instead I take 5 minutes at the end of the day to quickly fill these in.
Here are the templates for your use. Feel free to copy and use.
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