Learning from Your 2023 Rear-View Mirror

December 14, 2023
Wheel of Life

Learning from Your 2023 Rear-View Mirror

While you don’t want to live in the past, the exercise of looking and learning from your “rear-view mirror” can be helpful. Learning from your trials and tribulations, while celebrating your victories and successes, allows you to grow in a healthy and balanced way. You cannot focus solely on one side – positive or negative – to find motivation to move forward to the new year.

The practice of looking in your rear-view mirror is one you can easily incorporate in your personal and professional lives. It is difficult to disjointly look at one part without looking at the other, because your work and life are intertwined, now more than ever in a hybrid work environment.

One way to look at ourselves is by “seeing” yourself as a whole being by using the “Wheel of Life.”

year in reflection

Wheel of Life – Step-by-Step Process

STEP 1

Analyzing

  • Print out the “Wheel of Life” document 
  • Rate each life category by shading in the 1 to 10 rings with how you feel about each area with 1 = Extremely Poor and 10 = Extremely Good. Using different colors allows you to visually see and think about each section differently.

STEP 2

Reflection Time and Documenting Your Thoughts

  • Take time to think about each area and your ratings.
  • What takes you by surprise? What isn’t surprising?
  • Write down your top five accomplishments of the year. What helped you in your achievements?
  • Write down your two five mishaps of the year. What got in your way or may have caused the setbacks?
  • What trends do you see in both situations? How do these trends tie in your life wheel?
  • What behavioral and situational changes can you incorporate in 2024 from the lessons learned above?
  • How are you going to act differently? What potential blind spots or signals can you look out for that might steer you in the opposite direction?

STEP 3

Tell Someone

To help with accountability, tell someone or a confidant about your changes. When you tell someone, you are more likely to follow through with the changes.

There isn’t a right or wrong way to look back, learn, and grow. What’s important is to hold the mirror with self-compassion.

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