Reflection
Happy Holidays everyone! As the year is coming to a close it’s easy to jump into the new year with new energy and ideas. I suggest before you start running forward, you take a second to pause and reflect on the past year. What went well? How did you grow? What could’ve gone better? These questions and more are important to understand as you step into 2024.
Why Looking Back Matter
Business and Personal Growth: Reflecting on your experiences, achievements, and challenges allows you to assess your growth over the past year. You can identify areas where you've improved, lessons learned, and areas for continue to development.
Goal Assessment: If you set goals for the past year, reflect on them to evaluate your progress. Analyze which goals you achieved, which ones you didn't, and understand the reasons behind both outcomes. This information can guide your goal-setting process for the coming year.
Identifying Patterns: By looking back on your experiences, you may notice patterns in you or your customer’s behavior, choices, or reactions. What sold well? What didn’t? Recognizing these patterns can provide insights into your habits and decision-making processes in the new year.
Gratitude: Reflecting on the past year allows you to acknowledge and appreciate the positive aspects of your business. Expressing gratitude for the people, opportunities, and experiences that enriched your year can lead to a positive mindset — which I believe goes further than most think.
Learning from Mistakes: Nobody is perfect, and everyone makes mistakes (said best by Hannah Montana). Reflecting on your past year allows you to recognize and learn from your mistakes. Understanding what went wrong in certain situations can help you avoid similar pitfalls in the future.
Celebrating Achievements: Reflecting on the past year provides an opportunity to celebrate your accomplishments, no matter how small. Recognizing and acknowledging your successes will make you feel even more confident heading into the new year.
Setting Intentions: Once you've reflected on the past year, you can use the insights gained to set intentions and goals for the future. This proactive approach helps you approach the coming year with purpose and direction.
A Reflection Guide
A year is a loooooong time — a lot happens. It can feel overwhelming to look back at the year and note everything. I’ve outlined some buckets below for you to reflect on when it comes to your creative small business. You may have more or less buckets, but these are some ideas to get you thinking. With each bucket I encourage you to think specifically about:
What went well?
What didn’t go well?
What can be improved?
Look back at:
Last year’s goals
Financial performance
Product performance
Operations and processes
Marketing, branding, in person events
Customer experience and satisfaction
Now What
You’ve reflected on this past year, congrats! I’m sure you learned and achieved a lot. Now that you’ve finished looking back you are ready to set goals for the new year. Take a read through my blog on setting goals and my free Goal Planning sheet.
Reach out today! I would love to walk through the past year with you and set goals for the new year.
