Before you can plan for 2023, you must evaluate yourself and your year through honest personal reflection. It is important to re-evaluate how far you have come and how you have shown up for yourself to date. You have to prepare for the future now. The future belongs to those who prepare for it today. The future can be a day, a week, a month, or years from now. 

True self-awareness lives in honest reflection. You must know yourself to grow. To build self-awareness and start your end of year reflection, these are the questions you should answer. Grab a piece of paper, or better yet, a book, and answer the following questions. 

You can either provide a direct answer or answer on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 represents you being very poor at the query, and 10 means you have shown up for yourself in such a fantastic way that there is no room for improvement. Remember, the future belongs to those who prepare for it today. 

Personal reflection questions to gain self-awareness.

1. Are you listening to people who motivate you or add no significant value to your life?
2. How did you show up for your career?
3. How did you show up for your relationships? 
4. What was your quote for the year? How accountable were you to this quote?
5. What song resonated most with you? How often did this song impact your reaction to circumstances and situations the year threw at you? 
6. What did you enjoy wearing and doing? 
7. Who did you inspire? Who inspired you?
8. Where do you go for inspiration?
9. Do you know what you are great are? What are they? 
10. How do you manage stress and negative thoughts?
11. How do you practice self-love? What are you doing to heal yourself of past hurt, shame, guilt, and mistakes?
12. What and who are you grateful for?
13. Where do you shine naturally?

Important questions to assess your year

1. How have you changed in the past year? Is this change positive or negative?
2. What is your next step of action?
3. Were you true to your goals for the year? Did you let others and yourself down on your goals, or did you accomplish them? How many of your goals did you accomplish?
4. What did you learn along the way? Which theme are you looking to let go of and release? 
5. How much were you available for your mentors and mentees? 
6. What are your top 10 highlights that you need to celebrate? 

Questions to help you plan for the future.

1. How can you improve for the future?
2. What are your bucket lists? How many of them did you get to do in the past year? 
3. Who did/do you speak to every day, and what did/do you say?
4. Do you have a routine? It could be for gratitude, mornings, fitness, or character development. But how consistent were you with the routine? 
5. How do you want to start the next day, week, month, and year?
6. What do you need help with? 
7. Where do you see yourself in the next:

• 1 year
• 5 years
• 10 years
• 30 years
• 80 years

What to do with the Answers

It is not sufficient to have a book filled with scribbled answers, you must use them. You can not call it a personal reflection if you don’t reflect on them. What you do with it determines its worth. 

Some of these questions are designed to help you subconsciously discover who you were in the previous year (what you loved, said, did, and enjoyed). Others will assist you in becoming accountable to your goals – how far you’ve come and what still needs to be done. 

Finally, you can construct an anchor out of the remaining answers. Knowing how you deal with stress, what inspires you, or your favorite things, for example, can help you make better and faster decisions in the future.

Using Your End of Year Reflection

Three things need to be done after rounding up the year. They include self-awareness, acceptance, and self-audit. Awareness is knowing where you want to be in line with who you are and your visions. Acceptance is knowing where you are from the perspective of identification and growth, not beating yourself down. Self-audit is asking yourself helpful questions to correlate where you are with where you want to be. 
Save your personal reflection so you can come back to it throughout 2023. Life is unpredictable, and things will go wrong, but by planning for the future, you can persevere over hard times because you have your guide. The future belongs to those who prepare for it today because you know how to grind and center yourself when things go wrong.