The time after Christmas and before New Year is a perfect time to stop and reflect.

There’s a lot of downtime. Almost everybody stops working. There’s minimal pressure to work.

Looking back makes me relive the good stuff. It also makes me think about how could I better handled the bad stuff.

Looking forward gives me clarity where I want to go. If I have that vision in mind, I have a reference to check if I’m still on the right track and reassess if I want to continue the path I’m in.

Questions I ask myself to kick-start my introspection:

• What’s the highest point of my year?
• How about the lowest point?
• What’s the biggest lesson I learned?
• What’s the most significant realization I had?
• What change did I do that had the biggest impact?
• What did I do that I’m most proud of?
• What did I do the I’m most ashamed of?
• What’s the happiest thing that happened?
• How about the saddest thing?
• How about the most unexpected thing?
• Am I still heading to where I want to be?
• What am I aiming to do next year?