New years as new beginnings

New years are always wrapped up as new beginnings. We like to make New Year’s resolutions because we believe if we make a fresh start with the new year, the probability of completing our goals will increase. People love to start new years with fresh energy and goals, but enthusiasm usually quickly fades as we realize our goals require solid plans, mindset change, and everyday discipline. How to make the most of our goals? Maybe we can utilize the power of reflection and use our achievements from the previous year as inspiration.

Life is a continuous flow of inspiration, of wins and losses, and valuable lessons. We can use the fresh flow of energy as the new year kicks in to continue our everlasting self-growth journey. With the help of reflections upon our previous achievements, we can create our personalized self-improvement goals and plans.

The importance of reflections of past years

Reflections are our accumulated experiences and memories, to which we give emotional and cognitive value. We can’t take all the events from the past at face value. We need to give it some meaning. That’s where the value of reflection lies. Therefore, reflection is giving meaning to our previous experiences and our past actions and emotions. Reflection is also a great motivator for change. With reflection, we tend to give our past personalized note that we keep stored in our memory.

That’s why it’s always good to reflect on previous years to summarize the year: what went wrong, what was good, and what we want to improve. Reflection is also a valuable tool to learn from our experiences.

The psychological role of new beginnings

New beginnings are always motivating. Starting a new year is always a chance to try to live our life a bit differently, and make new plans. You can choose to be more disciplined, mindful, creative, focused on health, and much more. The ideal time to start with detailed planning and implementing your defined goals is the beginning of the year. However, implementing new goals require developing new useful habits if we want to keep the energy for the desirable behaviours and ditch the unproductive one.

How we can use our reflections for the upcoming years?

Reflection is a powerful tool to use for your self-improvement. Ideally, you can spend some time by yourself to analyze experiences and events from the previous year without any judgement to see how each experience fits your values and goals. Writing can help as well. You can use journaling to reflect on the most important life milestones from the previous year. Based on your reflections, you can write:

• What experiences would you like to have more in this year?
• What goals are significant to you?
• What 5 words can describe you the best?
• What were your biggest obstacles, and how can you overcome them?
• What are your main points for self-care and self-growth?

Final words

Therefore, our tips for getting the most of your new year resolutions would be:

• Use reflection to understand what you’d like to achieve in this year and what goal is important to you
• Define your most important goals
• Create detailed action plans for your goals
• Find creative and easy ways to incorporate daily activities that bring you closer to your goals.