Reflect and Reset: The Power of Annual Reviews for Personal Growth

In this episode of The Simple Joy Show I dive into the transformative process of conducting an annual review.

Discover how this powerful practice of reflection can lead to significant personal growth and a more intentional life.

I go into the importance of reviewing the past year, not just in terms of achievements and setbacks but through the lens of personal values, lessons learned, and joy experienced.

Learn how to effectively conduct your own annual review, set meaningful intentions for the new year, and understand the pros and cons of this reflective practice.

Whether you’re looking to gain clarity, boost motivation, or simply approach life with a renewed focus, this episode is for anyone seeking to embrace the power of introspection and intentional living.

Stay tuned for more episodes of my podcast, The Simple Joy Show, where we share tips on living a simpler life every Friday.

USEFUL LINKS:

Annual Review Workbook: https://hub.simplejoy.co.uk/annualreview

Join the 30 Day Decluttering Challenge: https://hub.simplejoy.co.uk/challenge

Website: www.simplejoy.co.uk

How to Get Started Decluttering When Overwhelmed PDF: https://hub.simplejoy.co.uk/overwhelmed

Instagram: www.instagram.com/hellosimplejoy

Facebook Group: The Simple Living Society: www.facebook.com/groups/thesimplelivingsociety

Transcript

Hayley Forster [00:00:00]:
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Simple Joy Show. Today, we’re gonna be exploring a really powerful tool for personal growth and intentionality, and that’s the annual review. So this episode is going to be all about reflecting on the past year and setting the stage for the year ahead. So whether you’re a seasoned planner or you’re quite new to this concept, this episode will be for you. The audio from this episode is actually taken from a live video that I did in my Facebook group, The Simple Living Society. So feel free to come in and join that. But given the time of year, I thought it was a great episode to have on the podcast as well, so I am resharing it to you guys.

Hayley Forster [00:01:17]:
Today, I wanted to flip the chat to be less about Christmas and more about the New Year and talk about annual reviews.

Hayley Forster [00:02:07]:
When I come up to the end of the year, I like to do a bit of an annual review. Look back at the year, not just from a work standpoint, but also a personal standpoint as well. It’s more than just a reflection of your growth in the past year, it’s a really deliberate act of looking back and doing a bit of a self evaluation and a little bit of forward planning as well. I don’t feel as though I can ever do forward planning or intention setting if I haven’t looked backwards to see what worked, what didn’t work, what I liked, what I didn’t like. And it’s just about really acknowledging both your successes and your setbacks because we all have them. Life isn’t smooth sailing.

Hayley Forster [00:03:09]:
We all have setbacks. So it’s important to include those. Take the insights from them and use what we’ve learned over the year to try and shape the vision for what you want to do in the future. And that’s basically the essence of intentional living.

Hayley Forster [00:03:51]:
There’s a lot of psychological benefits to it as well, and it really contributes towards your personal growth. So I just wanna touch on

Hayley Forster [00:04:34]:
why doing an annual review is really good. I’ve got a little freebie for you all – I’ll pop the link in the comments for my annual review workbook.

Hayley Forster [00:06:56]:
The things that you can get out of it is enhanced self awareness. Doing an annual review really compels you to reflect on your past actions, decisions, your experiences, and that process of reflection. It’s really good for self awareness, and I think self awareness is such a crucial, skill to have because by understanding your past behaviors and your choices, you’re really looking at your strengths, your weaknesses, and perhaps what patterns you fall into as well.

Hayley Forster [00:07:57]:
Being able to look back and notice them is the 1st step towards knowing how you want things to be different. It’s really good for goal setting as well and clarity on the goals that you want to set as well. It involves you really identifying specific goals that you want to go after. I’m sure you’ve heard of the SMART goals, which is specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time bound.

Hayley Forster [00:08:42]:
SMART goals really help you take action on those goals. Because if you set clear goals and if you’re really intentional about them, you can really focus your efforts much more effectively.

Hayley Forster [00:08:56]:
It also gives you increased motivation, and also some accountability as well. In your reflection, look back to see if you had any previous goals from from last year. That can really boost your motivation because you might realize, oh, actually, I’ve done this, and that’s fantastic. I wanna keep it up. Or

Hayley Forster [00:09:51]:
maybe I should go back to it. So just recognizing the progress (or maybe not so much of the progress) that you’ve made towards those original goals can be quite motivating. It gets you either going again or to continue, and also just setting new goals. By seeing what you’ve done and what’s worked well, you might see new areas of improvement and that can really create a sense of accountability as well because you’re looking back on it.

Hayley Forster [00:10:33]:
You know you’re gonna look at it in the future, and it’s a real positive motivator group for you to keep on trying and keep on moving forward with them. Another benefit is that it can help you cope with setbacks. If you reflect on the challenges that you’ve had during the past year, which is a really important part of the annual review process for me. There’s no point in just looking at the good stuff. You’ve gotta look at the bad stuff as well. But what it does, it really helps you develop resilience and helps you learn from your mistakes as well. Understanding the setbacks, what went wrong.

Hayley Forster [00:11:16]:
It’s all part of the growth process. It can help you then foster an attitude of positivity towards those failures, looking at it as an opportunity for you to to learn and to develop. Hopefully, when you’re in those moments in the following year that you can remind yourself and reaffirm, “Okay. This is a challenge, but I’m gonna learn something from it”. There’s always gonna be things that really test you on that aspect, but we need to try and remember that something positive will come out of it.

Hayley Forster [00:11:52]:
Another positive benefit is enhanced decision making skills. This really comes from being intentional, because by reflecting on your past decisions, your past actions, both good and bad. You can really identify the patterns you make in your decision process. So you know what was good, you know what was bad, and you can try to see what led to those moments and that then allows you to make better future decisions and aligning things more closely to your values. So if you know what your values are, you know what things worked well, what didn’t, you know then what decisions you need to make to try and make sure that you continue living, to your values and towards those goals as well. It really gives you that mental clarity.

Hayley Forster [00:12:46]:
It can be quite therapeutic doing an annual review. I really enjoy it. I like looking back on things and lots of lovely memories come back (and maybe some not so nice memories as well). But what it does, it provides a really structured guide for you to organize your thoughts, your priorities, and that can really reduce the anxiety that you might be feeling at this time of year. It gives you a lot of mental clarity, and that just makes you makes you feel good. Not only does it make you feel good, it makes you feel empowered and confident as well.

Hayley Forster [00:13:29]:
Actually, looking at your annual reviews and seeing what you’ve been able to achieve, that’s gonna really boost your self confidence. It will empower you as a person to keep following your intentions and believe in your abilities, believe in your potential, take new challenges, do things slightly differently, and step out your comfort zone and really try new things, which is growth, which is exciting. That’s what life’s about, isn’t it? It’s about experiencing new things. And I would say as well, it just gives you long term vision and purpose.

Hayley Forster [00:14:13]:
I know it’s a big word and people get scared by it, but it isn’t necessarily meaning it’s all encompassing purpose that you need to achieve this dream, and it’s like this massive mountain you need to climb. It literally can be day to day actions of you just following your intentions and aligning to your values. That, for me, is a purpose.

Hayley Forster [00:15:06]:
So it’s not necessarily this big massive goal that you need to impact millions of lives and all that. It doesn’t need to be that. It just needs to be that you’ve got a longer term vision of how you want to live your life. Knowing what that vision is, assessing it, adjusting it if you feel you need to. Just because your values were here 5 years ago, doesn’t mean that they might have moved along a bit, so just make sure that you you’ve got your values up to date.

Hayley Forster [00:15:55]:
And just ensure that your daily actions align with those broader goals. That really is what gives you your sense purpose and your sense of fulfillment. It doesn’t need to be this massive thing that you’d feel daunted by. There’s so many psychological benefits to annual reviews. I would really, really encourage you to do it.

Hayley Forster [00:16:22]:
What I really try to emphasize in the workbook that it’s very much focused on intentional living rather than being very passive about things. I spent my years pre kids being very passive. Life just passed me by, and I was just going along with what I fell into.

Hayley Forster [00:17:26]:
I ended up going into a corporate because that’s what I thought I should do. I wasn’t sitting and asking myself what actually do I want? So it’s just nice to sit down, take some time for you, identify what you really want to do in life, understand those reasons behind them and just set yourself a really intentional, heartfelt plan and move forward with that.

Hayley Forster [00:17:52]:
Keep your workbook as a reference, remind yourself of your commitment you’re making. Go through it and use that as a motivator.