The Year In Review exercise is an annual ritual that helps highlight your recent accomplishments, provide insights into lessons learned in the past year, and sharpen your focus on the goals for the year ahead. It's one of our favorite and most impactful activities we do to center ourselves and build toward our personal north stars.
This year, though, the process feels a lot different. After years of doing personal reviews, things that were previously relevant and fun to highlight were too often a reminder of how unmoored this year felt.
As I partnered with Cliff Guren of Syntopical to create a Year In Review workbook, we realized there needed to be a new way of doing that would provide all the benefits, while also realizing this year was different. All of humanity's sense of safety was shaken.
In Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, safety is at the foundation, which is no surprise why everything felt like a struggle this year. Humanistic psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman in his book, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, describes life as being in a sailboat, something more flexible and functional than the hierarchy of needs pyramid we are familiar with.
"Life isn’t a trek up a summit. It’s more like a vast ocean, full of new opportunities for meaning and discovery but also danger and uncertainty."
When our safety, connection and self-esteem are solid, we can put out that sail and shine and flow. When it's stormy and choppy, we need to pull in the sail and stabilize, taking care of our basic needs.
2020 has been a year when we all had to pull in the sail and slow down. "But human beings are incredibly resilient," writes Kaufman. "Even under adverse conditions, we find the potential for momentum: the sail."
As we worked through our Year In Review process, we realized the process was more valuable than ever. That looking at our values and our successes showed us, we are resilient.
We used this insight to reimagine our Year In Review process and develop a workbook to do your own Year In Review. Learn more about the workbook and download it here.