Time to reflect on 2024… Make sure to do it with kindness!

We’re reaching the end of the year. This is a time when most of us will look back on the goals we had set up for 2024 and assess how far we’ve gone.

If you are where you thought you would be (or further beyond), congratulations! Please take a moment to acknowledge your hard work and grant yourself a proper celebration.

However, chances are that the year went so fast that you haven’t been able to keep up with all the promises you had made to yourself. If this is the case, reflecting on your progress and where you may have fallen short could help you move forward, but only if this is done with kindness! Remember, self-blame and criticism will get you nowhere, you want to be your own best friend.

Let’s make sure that you come out of this goal-review exercise feeling confident and motivated to tackle up big things in 2025.

Celebrate your success, the big and the small wins!

Start your goal-review process by acknowledging what you’ve done well. Write it down, give yourself some well deserved credit and consider sharing your accomplishments with others.

Studies have shown that when we share the news of a positive event with those around us, we experience enhanced positive emotions from the event (Gable et al., 2004). This process is called “capitalisation”. We capitalise on our accomplishments by multiplying their positive impact.

There are a few hypotheses on how success capitalisation might work. By sharing our wins and retelling an uplifting story, we might relive it ourselves and experience additional feelings of joy, pride and satisfaction. It has also been shown that we’re more likely to remember a rewarding experience if we share it with others. Finally, when our achievements are received with enthusiasm, this will strengthen our relationship with the person we are sharing them with, and this will also boost our self-esteem.

The more vocal you are about your wins, the better! Studies have revealed that the more people we share our positive stories with, the greater the benefits reaped.

A note of caution: you want to celebrate your success with someone who can share your excitement. Research has shown that while sharing is beneficial to our wellbeing, it is also dependent on the others’ response. Don’t pick someone who consistently downplays your achievements or who seems indifferent to them. Share your victories with your greatest cheerleaders!

What about the goals you haven’t achieved?

Those goals hold important lessons. Reflecting on the reasons why you haven’t accomplished what you were aiming for will allow you to adjust your strategies and pave the way to success. However, you can’t move forward if you keep beating yourself up for falling short. Evaluating unmet goals must be done with self-kindness, patience and empathy.

Psychological research has highlighted the importance of self-compassion when assessing our shortcomings. A study performed on freshmen in a Canadian university found that individuals high in self-compassion were less vulnerable to negative emotions when their progress was hindered (Hope et al., 2014). Self-compassion was associated increased autonomous motivation, social adaptation and wellbeing. For tips on how to practice self-compassion, I recommend Dr Kristen Neff’s resources.

Once you’ve granted yourself kindness and understanding, the next step is to gain insights from your setbacks.

You might ask yourself whether this goal is still important for you: sometimes we set goals we’re not intrinsically motivated to achieve (we might do it to please others or just because we think this is what we’re meant to want). If this goal was not aligned with your deepest aspirations, it makes sense that you didn’t invest much to go after it (or you may even have unconsciously sabotaged your efforts). It might be time to drop this aspiration and choose another one that is more congruent with your personal values.

Or you might still want to achieve this outcome, it is just that you’re not quite where you thought you would be by the end of the year. First of all, give yourself credit for the progress made - sometimes we’re a bit too ambitious in our goal setting process and we fail to anticipate all the barriers that might come in our way. Then, revise the reasons why you haven’t reached your target: were they internal or external? If the limitations are internal (e.g. lack of confidence, procrastination), how can you move beyond them? If it was external circumstances, you might want to reflect on whether there was a better way for you to react and adapt - but sometimes things are fully out of our control, in which case you just need to acknowledge what is and grant yourself some self-compassion. Now, you can decide whether you want to set the same goal for next year, or a modified version of it - but make sure you don’t drop it on your list again without a clear plan on how you will tackle this differently next year.

I have free resource for you to reflect on your goals with self-compassion. You can access it here.

Find those hidden pieces of success

It may be that you haven’t reached the goals you had set for 2024, but you might have achieved something else that you had not planned for. Some accomplishments such as writing a book, wining an award or obtaining a promotion are obvious. Others feel invisible. These are the ones associated with your inner work, your growth, like stepping outside of your comfort zone or becoming more self-aware. Look for those wins that we often forget to give ourselves credit for.

Maybe you have not obtained the pay raise you wanted. But if you have asked for it, standing up and advocating for yourself is a huge step forward. Or perhaps you feel exhausted in your role as a mother and it looks like you’re always in crisis between taking care of sick kids, constantly woking up at night, resolving sibling arguments, managing school refusal (or bed refusal, or shower refusal… you got the picture!). But if you look over the year and start thinking about what used to be an issue and is no longer, you will realise how much progress you’ve made.

Also, please give yourself credit for the everyday work that seems mundane. Being a working-mum is a huge achievement by itself, and this on a daily basis. Look at all the things that you juggle… Getting the kids ready for school and leaving the house (almost) on time so you are not (too) late for work is not easy. If you managed this (and even if it was just a few mornings that went “okay” and all the other ones were a complete chaos), you can be proud of yourself! If you have been picking up the kids for school, driving them to extra-scholar activities, prepping meals, managing the house, maybe taking care of older parents, all of this on the top of your day job, you have completed an impressive juggling exercise… And if you think that you got more help than other mums and you’re wondering why you’re still drowning under the load, I invite you to list all the tasks you’re doing on a daily basis and surely you’ll realise the extent of your contributions.

Overall, you made it through the year, congratulate yourself for that!!!

Grab my free resource: Reflect on your yearly goals with self-compassion

References

Gable, S. L., Reis, H. T., Impett, E. A., & Asher, E. R. (2004). What do you do when things go right? The intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits of sharing positive events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(2), 228–245. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.87.2.228

Hope, N., Koestner R. & Milyavskaya, M. (2014). The role of self-compassion in goal pursuit and well-being among university freshmen. Self and Identity, 13:5, 579-593. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2014.889032