A popular saying goes, “History often repeats itself.” There’s a strong chance that the resolutions you failed to achieve last year, semester, quarter, or month will become your resolutions for the new year, semester, or month. This is why it’s essential not to rush when setting new goals. You must take time to pause and look back. This reflection helps avoid repeating the same mistakes.

In life, if you want to move forward, it’s crucial to learn from both your past successes and failures. That’s why, before defining your objectives for the next 12 months, it’s important to reflect on the past 12 months and ask yourself:

What Worked?

No matter how you experienced the past period, there are bound to be positive things you can identify. When a year doesn’t meet our expectations, we often focus on the glass being half empty rather than half full. However, by changing our perspective, we can identify positive aspects, no matter how small.

Recognizing the positive within the negative generates hope and reinforces the belief that improvement and success are still possible. Identifying what worked creates a foundation of best practices you can apply to future projects.

What Didn’t Work?

Without self-criticism, it’s important to acknowledge what didn’t go well and ask why your efforts and actions fell short. Such reflection allows you to step back and identify areas for improvement. The truth is, yesterday’s failures are the raw materials for tomorrow’s successes—provided you are aware of them and take appropriate action.

What Were the Bad Decisions?

You’ve likely made decisions that didn’t yield favorable outcomes, hindering your progress. Making poor decisions happens to everyone, often due to factors like insufficient information, time pressure, or poor advice.

The goal here isn’t to blame yourself but to identify the factors that contributed to those poor decisions. These insights can serve as warnings or points of attention when making future decisions.

What Were the Good Decisions?

Just as you’ve made poor decisions, you’ve also made good ones. It’s important not to take these for granted. After all, even with good decisions, you may still have made mistakes elsewhere! Valuing your good decisions boosts confidence and helps you remember situations where your decision-making proved effective. These experiences will serve as markers or reference points for similar situations in the future.

The ultimate goal of reflection is to quickly learn lessons and capitalize on them to avoid making the same mistakes repeatedly. The truth is that any failure or dysfunction from which you fail to draw lessons is bound to recur sooner or later.

To perform this reflective process methodically and in detail, we can draw inspiration from the Continuous Improvement Process using the well-known PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle from the business world. This approach establishes a virtuous cycle of successive learning and improvement, aiming for excellence.

This text is an excerpt from the book “THIS YEAR I ACHIEVE MY GOALS!” written by Henri M. Missola..

We invite you to read the next article: “I BOOST MY CONFIDENCE LEVEL.”

Retrospective on the Past. Retrospective on the Past. Retrospective on the Past.