How to recognise and celebrate your wins for the year
It’s out with the old and in with the new. But before we close off the year, let’s make time to reflect on 2023 and celebrate the learnings, lessons, and experiences.
No matter how the year went for you, taking time to reflect on the past year will be pivotal in helping you walk into the 2024 “new year, new me” season with a newfound sense of direction, clarity, and mindset.
Time for a warm introduction into my SLAY framework to reflect and recognise your wins for the year!
S - Self-reflection
The ultimate way you can genuinely celebrate yourself for this year is through self reflection. My favourite resource for this is the Year Compass.
I encourage you to ask yourself questions for the year, such as:
What are you most proud of?
Who are the three people that influenced you the most?
Who are the three people you felt the most supported by?
What is the best thing you discovered about yourself?
What has been your best investment?
What things did you not enjoy doing?
What are you most grateful for?
L - Learning mindset
I’m sure you learned something during the year - whether that was from a positive, negative, or neutral experience.
I’ve been obsessed with the idea of transitioning from being a “know-it-all” to becoming a “learn-it-all”, which is something that I learned from the Squiggly Careers podcast. With tools like ChatGPT and the internet (shout out to all the hate Gen Z was getting for using TikTok as a search engine), it’s impossible to know everything!
A video I love by Will Smith is where he speaks about failing early, failing often, and failing forward, with the main idea being that successful people fail all the time but they extract all the learning lessons from that failure to get to the next phase of success.
There’s a strength in being able to ask for help. I want to emphasise that you don’t have to do this journey alone. Even to write this blog, I made a post on Instagram asking for proofreaders because I felt rusty getting back into writing. A huge thank you to everyone who volunteered their time and corrected my grammar mistakes (if you, the reader, spot any more mistakes - I officially take no responsibility!).
Finding your community is key for your growth and ability to move forward, but it starts with being vulnerable and safe enough to reach out when you really need it.
A - Appreciate the small wins
Admittedly, I can be pretty hard on myself. I recently came across the term “loss aversion”, which is described as feeling more pain from loss than pleasure from gain. I was like “Damn, sometimes this is so me.” I find myself focusing more on all the things that didn’t go that well or as planned instead of also weighing up all the times things have gone better than expected or well.
I still need to check in with myself and make sure that I genuinely am celebrating the small wins and taking time to recognise that it’s totally normal to have ebbs and flows in life.
Finding out what works for YOU is key! Whenever I’m overthinking, I feel like my problems can fill the entire room I’m in. Whenever I catch myself doing this, I go outside and my problems feel relatively smaller in comparison to how massive the world is, and getting out into nature helps to calm me down and give me some perspective.
Whether it’s getting into nature, journaling, meditating, doing an activity to help you to appreciate the journey, it’s completely individual to you. I’m constantly experimenting with what works for me, and I make sure to write what works down so I can refer to it whenever I’m in a slump.
Another way I recommend celebrating small wins is to document it - check out my free wins tracker on Notion.
Y - Yes, you can rest!
I’m doing my best to move away from indulging in unhealthy hustle culture, and instead prioritising wellbeing while making progress towards my goals. When we feel like we’re behind, it can be harder for us to say no to things that aren’t serving us and to take an actual break from things.
We are human beings, not human doings. So often, we act as if we are machines and put pressure on ourselves to be productive all the time - but that simply is not realistic. We all have our high and low energy days. Some days you may feel energetic, ready to go, and focus mode at level 1,000. However, we also have days where it feels hard to get out of bed, demotivated, and just feeling absolutely knackered.
I find that during the last few weeks of the year, it’s so important to give yourself space and take a step back. The last thing we need when we’re feeling low is the pressure to be at level 1,000 once it strikes 1st January.
Not all progress needs to wait until January and you don’t have to ramp up during this time either. Remember, these things are completely up to you, and to check in on yourself to understand what you have the capacity for.
Rest is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.
Happy holidays folks!!
