Organize Your Annual Review & Mindset Blueprint for 2023

Posted on: December 26th, 2022 by Julie Bestry | 10 Comments

The holiday week is the perfect time of year to plan for next year, to set goals and intentions, and get a fresh start. Of course, you don’t need a new year for that. Check out Organizing A Fresh Start: Catalysts for Success from this past September to see all the ways you can find inspiration for fresh starts quarterly, monthly, weekly, and each day.

But before we can design the coming year, it’s essential to review the past, and to get a handle on what worked (and didn’t) so that we can use that knowledge to set us up for future successes.

LOOK IN THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR

On the very businesslike side of the productivity realm, this is called an annual review. People in the corporate world often experience this in terms of a sometimes-feared, often-maligned annual performance review.

That’s where you tell your boss how you think you did during the course of the year (in hopes of a raise, promotion, and an atta-boy/atta-girl), and your boss tells you how the company thinks you did (in hopes that you’ll be so thankful to have a job, you won’t notice that any extra money is going to the CEO’s newest yacht).

But a personal annual review, which can cover both lifestyle and professional topics, is solely for your own benefit. It’s to help you figure out the who, what, where, why, and how of your past year so that you can find the common threads (or snags) in your successes (or challenges).

Gather Supplies 

The process is as formal or informal as you’d like, but I encourage you to start with some of the tools you use to create the structure of your year:

  • planner or calendar
  • journal
  • correspondence — email or text threads — with your best friend, accountability partner, or mastermind group
  • a sense of your values

With a pen and paper (or fresh Evernote note or blank document), sift through what you’ve written and logged about your life over the past year. Where did you go, with whom did you meet, and what did you do? As if you were reading a mystery, you’ll find yourself noticing clues to patterns in your year. (Feel free to wear your Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat.)

There are a few kinds of clues, and depending upon your life and work, as well as what you value, different clues will yield evidence for making different kinds of decisions. 

Know Your Values

Speaking of values, these are not uniform across nations, regions, communities, families, or even periods of our lives. In the United States Army’s Basic Combat Training, they focus on seven values: loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage. Conversely, the immigration portal for the Durham Region of Ontario, Canada lists Canadian values as “equality, respect, safety, peace, nature – and we love our hockey!” 

If you’re not quite sure how to identify the values that help you plan your life, here are some great resources:

Nir Eyal’s 20 Common Values [and Why People Can’t Agree On More]  (Eyal is the author of Indistractible: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.)

James Clear’s 50 Core Values list (Clear is the author of Atomic Habits.)

Brené Brown’s 118 Dare To Lead List of Values (Brown is the author of Dare to Lead, as well as Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, and The Gifts of Imperfection.)

The Happiness Planner’s List of 230 Core Personal Values

Some people highly value achievement and contribution; for others it’s balance and inner harmony. For me, it’s knowledge, usefulness, and humor.

We’ll get to how to use your values in a bit. For now, it’s just helpful to go through one (or more) of these lists and identify from three-to-five overarching values that resonate with you and how you aspire to live your life.

Ask Qualitative Questions

The Good

  • What challenges made me feel smart, empowered, or proud of myself this year?
  • What did I create?
  • What positive relationships did I begin or nurture?
  • Who brought delight to my life?
  • Who stepped up or stepped forward for me?
  • What was my biggest personal highlight or moment I’d like to relive? 
  • What was my biggest professional moment I’d want to appear in my bio?
  • What’s a good habit I developed this year?

The Neutral

  • What did I learn about myself and/or my work this year? 
  • What did I learn how to do this year?
  • What did neglect or avoid doing out of fear or self-doubt?
  • What did I take on that didn’t suit my goals or my abilities?
  • What was I wrong about? (Note: Being wrong isn’t a negative. Not one of us knows everything. In the words of Dr. Maya Angelou, “Do the best you can until you know better. When you know better, do better.”

The Ugly

  • What challenges made me feel weaker or less-than?
  • Whom did I dread having to see or speak with this year?
  • Who let me down?
  • Whom did I let down?
  • What did I do this year that embarrassed me (professionally or personally) or made me cringe? 
  • When did I hide my light under a bushel?
  • What am I faking knowing how how do? — Instead of pretending you know how to do something but are choosing a different path, ask for help. Make decision about what to do from a position of strength rather than weakness.
  • What’s a bad habit I regret taking up or continuing?
  • Where did I spend my time wastefully or unproductively? (It’s social media. For all of us.)
  • Where did I spend my money wastefully or unwisely? (Target? Let’s take a poll. Was it Target?)

Although most of these are questions I’ve developed over the years, the inspiration for including this list came from the Rev Up for the Week weekly newsletter put out by Graham Allcott, author of How to Be a Productivity Ninja, among other titles. 

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2022 Year In Review: 50 Powerful Questions To Help You Reflect, which includes questions for looking back as well as looking ahead.

Ask Quantitative Questions

The quantitative questions, the ones that can be measured in “how much?” or “how many?” or “how often?” will depend on the metrics by which you’ve measured yourself in the past (or expect to in the future).

I’m not a quantitative person because I find that raw numbers rarely reflect context. If you asked “how many pounds did I lose in 2022” but you were pregnant or recovering from an illness or in mourning, the answers would be useless. It reminds me of the quote variously (but likely inaccurately) attributed to Albert Einstein:

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” 

If you’re a fish, don’t pick metrics for monkeys.

*Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.*  If you're a fish, don't pick metrics for monkeys. Click To Tweet

That said, if you have metrics that matter to you, by all means, measure. But again, make sure those metrics measure what you actually value. Some ways to measure:

Professional Efforts:

  • How often and when was I asked to contribute (to a team effort, a podcast, a conference)?
  • How much revenue did my efforts bring in?
  • How many clients did I serve?
  • How many new clients (or projects) did I bring in? 

Physical Health:

  • How many reps can I do of X? (Or, by how many reps did I increase my stamina for X?)
  • How many steps or miles did I walk (or run or swim or pedal)?
  • How often did I “complete the rings” on my Apple Watch or hit the goals set in my app?

Financial Strength:

  • By how much did I decrease (or increase) my debt?
  • How much did I invest? (Note: Measuring the performance of your investments is important for driving your future investment decisions, but actual investment performance isn’t a measure of your abilities — I mean, unless you’re a stockbroker. You don’t control global markets; you don’t control the products or services or marketing strategies of the companies in which you invest. Please don’t judge yourself by your stock performance.)

Ask How Your Year Measured Up To Your Goals and Values

Goals and values are different. In both qualitative and quantitative ways, we can flip through our calendars and our LinkedIn achievements to see where we’ve hit the benchmarks we’ve set for ourselves. We all know about SMART goals and the importance of them being measurable.

But values? You can’t check off a box to say you’ve “done” a value. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider whether your accomplishments are in line with your actual values. 

We all have things at which we’re stellar, things that we may consider (or others may consider) to be our superpowers. I have a mug that reads, “I WRITE. What’s your superpower?” Writing (and talking — so much talking) is intrinsic to who I am. Because knowledge, usefulness, and humor are my values, when I’m writing this blog, I’m in alignment.  

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But for most values, it can be hard to tell and certainly hard to measure. One method to measure if you’re living in alignment with your values (and the goals toward those values) comes from the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) modality.

ACT is a type of psychotherapy that focuses on emphasizing actions that increase well-being, and the ACT Values Bulls-Eye helps people not only identify their values but envision how well they’re doing in trying to live in alignment. This short video offers some guidance for using a simplified version of the Bull’s-Eye; online, you’ll find a variety of modifications for circles, stars, and graphs.

Get Creative in Describing Your Year

Not everyone wants to feel like they’re putting themselves through a performance interview. But there are creative ways to look at the year you’ve just survived.

Morgana Rae, a wealth and life coach who transforms people’s relationships with money, had an interesting idea in her newsletter last Friday. She said that she had a “one-step super trick for empowerment” in the new year — to end the prior year with a headline! 

Don’t worry, you don’t have to pretend to work for the New York Times or a clickbait web site. Morgana’s was “2022 was the year that nothing worked out as planned, but everything worked out.” In 2009 (the year I was hospitalized 6 times and mostly couldn’t work with clients), my headline could have been, “2009 was the year that gave me lots of entertaining-in-retrospect cocktail party anecdotes.”

In 2009 (when I was hospitalized 6 times and couldn't work), my headline could have been, *2009 was the year that gave me lots of entertaining-in-retrospect cocktail party anecdotes.* Click To Tweet

(Note: In January, Morgana is releasing a 10th Anniversary Edition of her best-seller, Financial Alchemy.)

If you’re pithy enough for headlines, could you end 2022 by describing it as a novel or a movie? You were the protagonist, but who (or what) were the heroes and villains of the story? What was the plot? Try to accurately — and/or entertainingly — describe your year in a paragraph.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

You don’t have to figure this out on your own. The free, downloadable YearCompass is a popular resource for a reason. Download this fillable, printable PDF — print the booklet version and fill it out by hand, or type your answers in the digital version — and explore the creative questions to get a deep, abiding sense of what your year really meant, and how to approach the coming year. 

DESIGN A BLUEPRINT FOR NEXT YEAR’S MINDSET

Once you have a strong handle on the year that was, you can begin to set your goals and benchmarks for the year that will be. But writing down goals and creating a task list isn’t always motivating. That’s because we’re not all motivated the same way. In Gretchen Rubin‘s Four Tendencies Quiz, I’m definitely an Obliger.

If you’re not familiar with the basics of the Four Tendencies, the categories reflect how we respond to expectations. As an Obliger, I respond best to outer expectations — and so accountability (through working with my accountability partner, the magnificent Dr. Melissa Gratias, and with my Mastermind Group) is the key to meeting my goals. Inner expectations? Yeah, I blow right past those.

You might be an Obliger, Upholder, Questioner, or Rebel. Upholders do well with discipline; Questioners need to know the “why” behind the what; and Rebels? Well, I suspect everyone’s still trying to figure out how to get Rebels to do what they believe they want to (and should) do.

Resolutions

Beyond figuring out what kind of support works best for you, it helps to borrow from marketing. For a long time, resolutions had a good long run. But the truth is most people break their resolutions. (Read James Clear’s Atomic Habits for a handle on why that is.)

So, with that in mind, let’s go back to Graham Allcott and his video, How to Not Suck At Your New Year’s Resolutions.

And if you still want to make resolutions, take a peek at Vox’s In Search of an Attainable New Year’s Resolution, science-based piece (including advice on a values-based approach).

But again, I’m less a fan of making resolutions, and more inclined to cheer on a big, bold way to set an attitude for the coming year. There are a few we’ve discussed at Paper Doll HQ over the course of the years. 

Word of the Year

Pick a Word of the Year to help you focus your attentions on your intentions. 

Another way to think of it is, what is your theme for 2023?

Whether or not you define what you will do with goals or resolutions, choosing this word helps clarify the approach you will take. To quote myself from four years, ago, the idea is that you pick a word that “encapsulates the emotional heft of what you want your year to look and feel like.” Each time you agree to take something on, you can ask whether that event or project resonates with the word you’ve picked.

Decide for yourself what the rules are. Do you want to pick a word based on what your life was missing this year? Or go for a bold new direction in which you want to take your life?

As a colleague embraced retirement this year, she picked the word “humor” for 2022 and used her newfound time to post something funny every day on social media, bringing levity to her friends.

I consider my word as carefully as picking the three wishes I’d request from a genie. I think I’ve seen too many episodes of the Twilight Zone; I know that if something isn’t worded well, I can feel cursed. The year I picked “resilience,” I ended up with too many unfortunate things from which to bounce back.

I’ve told the story before that I picked “ample” for 2020, humorously entering the year with the phrase, “Ample: it’s not just for bosoms anymore.” 2020 gave us ample opportunities to sit at home, worry, and sanitize our hands. I had much more luck in 2021 with “delighted,” but wasn’t able to find a word that resonated this year.

For 2023, my word is fulfilled.

Here are some ideas for picking yours.

Word of the Year for 2023 (Goal Chaser)

Find Your Word for 2023 (Susannah Conway)

One-Word Themes for 2023 (Gretchen Rubin)

Quote or Motto of the Year

One word isn’t enough for some people. (Me. I mean me.)

Put on your marketing manager hat and consider what kind of quote, motto, or imperative phrase would motivate you.

By the way, to make sure I wanted to say “imperative phrase” I asked Siri and in my (male, Irish) Siri’s lilting voice, the reply I got was, “Imperatives are used principally for ordering, requesting or advising the listener to do (or not to do) something: “Put down the gun!”, “Pass me the sauce”, “Don’t go too near the tiger.”

Indeed. As a motto for 2023, “Don’t go too near the tiger” seems like a pretty wise option.

I’m not kidding. The “tiger” in question might be someone trying to get you to volunteer for one more committee or an acquaintance who drains your energy.

Whether you pick a word, a quote, a motto, or a mantra, put your motivator front and center. I discussed these ideas at greater length in Organizing A Fresh Start: Catalysts for Success, but find ways to infuse your year with your word or concept.

Use signage — Post your word or phrase on your fridge, the bathroom mirror, a sticky note in the center of your steering wheel, or wherever it will grab your attention. Get yourself a fun little felt word board with changeable letters and put it on display in your home or office.

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Alternatively, you could get a customized “Word of the Year” sticker, piece of jewelry or a plaque on Etsy. 

Create a vision board — Combine your words with inspiring images to make your year’s theme resonate. My colleague Janine Adams, and her podcasting partner Shannon Wilkinson, had a great episode of their Getting to Good Enough last week on Creating a Vision Board.

I’m so design-challenged, but Janine talked about free, easy methods for creating a digital vision board that made me rethink my aversion. Janine and Shannon recommended this video from business consultant Ellen Coule.

Put together a playlist of songs that reflect your word or theme — At the start of every day, before you even get out of bed, play at least one song from the playlist to rev yourself up for achieving your goals.

For example, if you’re not happy where you are — in your job or your life or your fourth-floor walkup apartment — and want to inspire yourself to proactively move toward your next big thing, play The Animals “We Gotta Get Out of this Place” (which, by the way, was my theme song during graduate school for exactly the reason you think). For some, a positive song makes more sense; for others, reminding yourself of what you don’t want may motivate. Do you prefer a carrot or stick approach?

On the TV show Ally McBeal, several episodes dealt with Ally coming up with a theme song for her life. I’ll leave you with the song she picked.


My dearest Paper Doll readers, thank you for coming along on this journey with me. May your annual review be enlightening and your word or theme for 2023 inspire you. If you’ve already got a word or motto for the year, please share in the comments.

Happy New Year, and I’ll see you next year!

10 Responses

  1. I’m never going to write about year-end reviews again. Why would I when I can just direct people to your fabulous post?

  2. I was thinking this might be a year of no goals, resolutions, or theme words for me. Not sure yet. But I do love your lists of questions. And your mug! I’m a Questioner with a touch of Rebel. It can be a problem. One good thing in my life for sure, though, is YOU! Happy New Year, Julie!

    • Julie Bestry says:

      I never would have guessed you were a Rebel at all, Hazel. I haven’t met many, so I’m impressed. The Questioner aspect doesn’t surprise me.

      And I’m floored and flattered to be a good thing in your life, my friend! Happy New Year to you, too!

  3. My head is spinning in a good way. Thank you, Julie! I agree with Janet that your post is the quintessential guide for doing a year-end review and future thinking.

    I use a variety of techniques that have changed over the years. Last year was the first time I created a vision board. It included a word of the year and motto, which as you suggested here, were prominently visible. “Flourishing” and “Manifest amazing shit!” were so powerful, along with the non-traditional vision board, that I’m not so anxious to let them go. For 2023, some of those things may stay. The reviewing involved personal and professional “digging,” which I loved. So many interesting discoveries were made, noted, marked, and celebrated. Those helped me to focus on what I wanted to release, bring forward, or manifest for 2022.

    The review was essential. I’ve got my work cut out for me as I haven’t dug in yet. I’ve been collecting ideas in my 2023 folder and will get to “it” soonish. I bookmarked your post to return to again.

    Wishing you a very happy, healthy New Year filled with lots of knowledge, usefulness, and humor! You share each of those so beautifully.

    • Julie Bestry says:

      Oh, gracious, Linda! Thank you. Quintessential? Now what the heck will I write next year? 😉

      You are always such a success, doing impressive things, I wish I could be a fly on the wall during your own annual review and planning sessions.

      And may you also have a happy, healthy year full of all of the things you value. Again, thank you for your praise and kindness!

  4. […] And for a more comprehensive guide, I highly recommend my friend Julie Bestry’s Organize Your Annual Review & Mindset Blueprint for 2023. […]

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