Your Personal Annual Review
The personal “year in review” exercise is an annual ritual that highlights your recent accomplishments, provides insights into lessons learned in the past year, and sharpens your focus on your goals for the year ahead. Many who regularly complete the exercise find that it’s one of their favorite and most impactful rituals. It helps you center yourself and build toward your personal North Star.
As Glen Lubbert of Stamina Lab and I worked together on our annual review workbook, we realized things feel a lot different this year: memories that were previously relevant and fun to highlight often reminded us of how difficult 2020 was, how unmoored the year felt. We used this insight to reimagine the annual review process.
Your Annual Review Workbook begins with an exploration of your values. We help you revisit your core values and beliefs, reconnect with your vision for your life, update your personal story, and describe your perfect day. We start with these things because we believe your core values illuminate every aspect of the review process, from what makes up a success (or failure) to what makes your perfect day “perfect.”
The annual review journey
Next, we move to your vision: your personal narrative, your aspirations, and the key areas of your life that are the focus of most of your time and energy. This exercise in personal storytelling helps you articulate your narrative for the year ahead and position yourself for growth.
The third section of the review focuses on capturing the most influential moments of the past year. Our review process primarily focuses on your successes. Yes, you can learn from your failures, but there’s a time and place for everything... We believe your annual review is a way to use your successes—the things you’ve accomplished and are most proud of—to help you build a year ahead that’s about more: more of the same positive energy, more growth, and more successes that align with your values and vision.
Once you’ve completed the first three sections of the workbook, you’ll be ready to look at the year ahead. The last section of the workbook focuses on setting goals and regular reviews. We outline a simple system designed to help you reach your desired goals and outcomes for 2021. It’s a system that reflects your values, connects with your vision, and helps you build on your 2020 successes.
Our goal for this first version of our annual review workbook is to provide a starting point—for those new to the annual review ritual and for ourselves. We hope to build on this foundation in 2021 as we refine and expand the workbook. Please reach out to me with your feedback and questions.
Get your free copy of our Your Annual Review Workbook
We’re sharing the workbook as a Microsoft Word document, so you can type your responses directly into the file, and as a printable PDF so you can write your answers out in longhand.
The best way to get the workbook is to have it delivered to your Inbox. Use this form to submit your email. A message with links to both versions will be delivered to your Inbox. You'll also receive updates of the workbook as well as information on related workshops and tools.
If you just want the workbook, you can download it using the links below: