A Powerful Journal Exercise for the New Year
In my group coaching work, the Accountability Partnership, we meet as a group briefly each week. In our meetings we take a few minutes each to look back and take stock of the previous week, and we note the lessons and insights that are important to remember moving forward.
Turns out this is also a super helpful thing to do as we move into a new year.
It helps us answer questions like:
What brought me joy in the past year?
Who are people I need to spend more (or less) time with?
What are the things that made me feel the most alive?
Below is a brief outline of how we can apply this practice to a new year (yes, even in a pandemic). The truth is, this practice can help all of us look back, reflect, and harvest important insights into how we want to shape the upcoming 12 months.
Here’s the practice
Grab a notepad and create two columns. Label them: POSITIVE and NEGATIVE
Go through your calendar from the last year, looking at every week.
For each week, jot on your notepad any people and activities that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month. Put them in their respective column.
Once you’ve gone through the past year, look at your notepad and ask “what 20% of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks?"
Based on the answers, take your ‘positive’ leaders and schedule more of them in the coming year.
GET THEM ON THE CALENDAR NOW, like today! Book things with friends and prepay for shit now. That’s step one. (Again, hard in a pandemic, I know, but get creative).
Step two: take your ’negative’ leaders, put “NOT-TO-DO LIST” at the top. Put this list somewhere you can see them each morning for the first few weeks of the new year.
Theses are the people and things you *know* make you miserable, so don’t put them on your calendar out of obligation, guilt, FOMO, or other nonsense.
That's it...seems simple enough, no?
