How To End Your Year Strong: 5 Tips For Reflection and Setting Resolutions

The end of the year is a great time to reflect on all the things you accomplished, the lessons you learned, and set some goals for the new year. Before you get all caught up in the holiday excitement of family, food, and festivities, take a moment to learn how to end your year strong.

There are some important steps you can take now to make sure your next year will be your best year yet!

In this post you'll find:

How to End Your Year Strong
How to Use a Journal for Your New Years’ Resolutions

How to End Your Year Strong

To start, here are five tips that will help ensure a successful new year:

1. Gratitude: No matter what, you should always be grateful and appreciative. When you take time to reflect on all the good things in your life, it becomes easier to overcome small problems that come up during the year. Take a moment to give thanks for making it through the year with all its highs and lows.

2. Note the lessons: Every time you face a difficult situation, take the opportunity to learn from it. What mistakes did you make? How could you have made the experience better on your end or for others involved? If you journal, go through each month to reflect on all the difficult times you faced this year and learn the lessons within the pages of your journal.

3. Expand your goals: If there are any goals that didn’t get accomplished this year, now is the best chance to tackle them! Write down what needs to be done and start tackling those projects today so they’re ready by January first. Make sure to reflect on the reasons they weren’t accomplished so you can find solutions that avoid a repeat. You don’t want to carry the same goals year after year.

4. Planning: Planning is essential if you want next year’s goals to be accomplished successfully. Setting a plan/schedule for yourself will help ensure that work gets done as well as give you something concrete to look forward to each day. You can even break down large tasks into smaller ones so they don’t seem overwhelming! If your goal is to save $100k next year, make sure to break down what that amount looks like each month for you. If your plan is to lose 30lbs, keep track of the tasks you will do each week to reach that goal.

5. Celebrating the accomplishments: It’s important to celebrate your successes throughout the year. Take a moment to appreciate everything you’ve done and give yourself a pat on the back! This will help motivate you to work hard towards your future goals as well. This is why it’s important to keep a yearly journal of failures and successes too because it can be so easy to forget our achievements as life moves on.

Ending your year strong helps you to avoid feeling as though you’re floating through the years, repeating the same cycles over and over again. This is why journaling is important as it helps to process your life’s events so you can celebrate, learn, set new and better goals and improve the quality of your life.

Have New Year’s Resolutions?

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How to Use a Journal for Your New Years’ Resolutions

New Years’ Resolutions might seem a little silly, but they really are a great way to narrow down your focus to one or two major goals for the year. They are not meant to be something miraculous and life-changing (though they can be), but to take advantage of the new year with a fresh start. Maybe you want to lose weight this year, give up soda, start doing yoga or stop a bad habit like biting your nails. The options are endless.

When it comes to creating your New Years’ Resolutions, using a journal is one of the best tools at your disposal. It not only helps you decide on the resolutions but tracks your progress along the way.

What You Want to Accomplish This Year

Start by writing down everything you would like to accomplish this year. This might end up being a long list, which is totally fine. You are just starting with any idea you have in your head before you make your final decisions. Think of big things and small things, even if you don’t know that they will end up being a resolution. Consider your bad habits, something you want to implement, a goal you want to achieve, healthier lifestyle habits, a change in your routine, a place you want to visit, or a problem you want to solve.

What You Feel Like You Lacked in the Previous Year

To add to your list of possibilities, write down anything you feel you lacked or fell behind in the previous year. This can help you figure out where you want your focus to be, such as if you struggled with your finances this past year, you might want to look for a new job opportunity or work on your business more.

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Flesh Out Your Ideas

Go through and highlight or make a check next to anything that really speaks to you or you believe would make a positive impact in your life. Consider something you can do for the entire year, and doing that will help to make you happy or healthier, or just change your life in a positive way.

Choose 1-2 Resolutions

From this list, choose just 1-2 resolutions for the year. That doesn’t mean you won’t accomplish anything else, but you want just one or two main things to focus on. You might have some things that are good to do, but can be done in a shorter period of time, like starting to journal. this should be one of your monthly goals instead of a resolution. Instead of that as a resolution, maybe you want to read 20 books in a year or lose 30 pounds. These are more concrete resolutions that you can track throughout the year.

Track the Progress Throughout the Year

Once you have your resolutions chosen, you can then use your journal to track your progress. Have one journal you use only for your resolutions, so it doesn’t get mixed up in your other journal entries.