Setting the Stage for 2025: Reflections to Guide You in the New Year
Note: This blog post has been adapted from the episode Setting the Stage for Your Best Year Yet: Reflective Practices for 2025 on our podcast Thriving Perspectives. If you’re more of a listener than a reader, find it on your favourite podcast platform for the full experience!
As the energy of 2024 began to come to a close, I felt inspired to write a reflective post that provides insight on how, and why, to engage with the essential self-growth tool of reflection. I don’t know about you, but I find there are certain times of the year when I feel more compelled than others to slow down, turn inward, and notice the things in my life that are going well, as well as the things that could be improved. The end of the year is one of those moments where we have more time and space, which, if we are open to doing so, can yield an exceptional opportunity to take the dive within.
Consider the following quote about reflection from Terry Dubroy and I’s book The Insightful Journey:
“When we reflect, we empower ourselves to understand where we are on our journey with greater clarity. Reflection allows us to transition a step deeper into quietness, to make space within so that we can look further into the depths of our lives. When we make the time to enter a more introspective state, observations relating to our personal truth can surface, allowing us to understand our development with greater clarity. Reflection is a place that you can visit within yourself to assess how you have been walking the High Road as of late, to notice which areas of your life you are thriving in, and which areas you are merely surviving in. It can take place the moment that you get home from a hectic day, minutes before you go to sleep, upon waking, or during any other window of time that you choose.”
During busier seasons in our lives, we may find ourselves doing so much that the reflections we need to make can only happen quickly. Yet if we weren’t busy living, we would have nothing to reflect on. Such is the beauty of living a balanced life. When things are hectic, you are essentially generating the memories that you will look back on in hindsight when things are more calm. At a later stage, after a slew of chaotic and blissful days have unfolded, you can investigate the layers behind why you behaved the way you did in certain situations, for instance, why a conflict has left a specific impression on you, or even how you have learned to navigate situations differently over time.
Now that we’ve defined reflection, let’s begin to explore what self-reflection prompts and practices for paving a clear pathway in 2025 can look like. In the first part of this post, I will share tools and vulnerable insights on short-term reflections that can be done in as easy as two or three minutes. In the second part of this post, we’ll unearth the vital and visionary power of long-term reflections, and I’ll leave you with some potent reflective prompts for your personal journey.
Part 1: Short-term Reflections
Reflecting on your life from a short-term perspective can bring you back to basics when you find that certain parts of your life are getting convoluted, muddled, or heavy. I am someone who loves to dive deep and spends a lot of time in a reflective inner bubble, focusing more on long-term visions and dreams sometimes at the cost of reflecting more quickly on the magic that there is in the present moment.
When thinking about how I needed to have more gratitude for the present moment in the latter half of 2024, I invented a new reflection technique one night when I was journalling. I call this technique the 3x3.
We all have an extra two or three minutes of our day to spare, and during this brief window of time, we can renew our day-to-day lives by writing down just 9 things in total:
1) 3 things we accomplished today
2) 3 things we are grateful for
3) 3 things that are inspiring us
First, let’s talk about acknowledging our accomplishments – even the ones that we enact on a minute scale.
1) 3 Things I Accomplished Today
We often overlook and forget to take pride in the small battles that we win, or rather, the small ways that we remain productive and peaceful at times when we are being the most challenged and tempted. A day-to-day example of this would be cooking yourself a nutritious meal and saving money even though you have a fast food craving and caved into it the week before. In essence, noticing your accomplishments is about taking the stock where you took the high road over the low road on a daily level.
Next, let’s talk about reflecting quickly on gratitude by writing 3 things you’re grateful for.
2) 3 Things I am Grateful For
I know that most of you reading this are from North America. Yes, our society has its problems and things will never be perfect, but do you not have access to clear water, air, and resources? A lot of the times when I was feeling dissatisfied with my day-to-day, I noticed I was always thinking about what I did NOT have as opposed to what I did.
Many philosophers and thought leaders have highlighted the importance of finding gratitude by being content with simple joys, just like we strive to do here at Thrive. Take Epictetus, who was quoted as saying, “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” When reflecting on what you are grateful for in your life, rather than thinking in a lavish fashion about all of the excess in your world, zoom in on the small, little things that keep you grounded and rooted.
Finally, let’s take a look at an oft-overlooked yet undeniably potent self-reflection topic: inspiration.
3) 3 Things I am Inspired by Right Now
How others find immaterial gold and imbue the world with it takes many forms, and the forms that most resonate with us can be thought of as our inspirations. We have access to such an insane overabundance of knowledge at this moment in time. But when was the last time you were actually grateful for this?
Being inspired by someone who is a healthy influencer on Instagram, for instance, and then being inspired to make a change in your life, is actually something worth taking stock of. When doing the 3x3 reflection technique the other night while journaling, I actually wrote down that I was grateful for finding an easy but nutritious recipe on my phone during a busy time where I found myself making excuses for not cooking.
Plus, if you write down what’s inspiring you, you are actually reminding yourself of the impact that it has left on you and solidifying it in your mind. Many writers say that one of the purposes of writing is that, as humans, we must write to remember. Jotting down the inspirations that you want to remember and apply to your life will make you more likely to do so, as opposed to passively consuming them.
So, that’s a breakdown of the power of what a simple 2-3 minute daily reflection practice can do for you. What this simple 3x3 reflection technique allowed me to do was go back to the basics at a time where I was struggling to find purpose or fulfillment in my day today, instead of always looking ahead and wishing that I lived in my future. Likewise, if you are someone who struggles to live in the moment sometimes, this technique can be equally helpful for becoming not only more grounded in the day-to-day, but more satisfied with all of the tiny little mundane things you have to do in order to grow and improve your life.
Part 2 | Long-term Reflections
Now, let’s shed light on how you can best set the stage for 2025 by engaging in more intensive, long-term, focused reflections. Here are three core reflection prompts we will be zooming in on:
1) What was the most challenging or unexpected aspect of 2024? Have I learned to find the hidden gift in it yet, or am I still working through it?
2) What parts of my personality or way of being in the world began to evolve and change this year?
3) In 2024, do I feel like I moved one step forward and three steps back in any areas? Going into 2025 with this awareness, how will I challenge myself to navigate this?
For the remainder of this post, I will answer those questions and explore the deep meanings that you can find behind them if you give yourself permission to take the dive within, maintaining as much of an open heart and mind as you can muster.
1) What was the most challenging or unexpected aspect of 2024? Have I learned to find the hidden gift in it yet, or am I still working through it?
The groundbreaking psychologist Carl Jung once said, “Whatever is rejected in the self appears in the world as an event.” I would expand on this conversation by saying that these unwanted events come up in our lives so that they can be our teachers.
When we talk about finding the hidden gift in the darkest periods of our lives this year, we are shedding light on how the most negative experiences, in hindsight, were actually both trying to aid us in the process of self-discovery and be our catalysts, albeit painful ones, for new dimensions of growth.
When I reflect on 2024 from my perspective, I notice that each day was like the flip side of a coin: one side representing eternal, infinite love, and the other representing the intensity, anger, and anguish one often needs to work through after a negative incident to come back to a state of infinite love. How all of these energies mirrored my life experiences was, well, I experienced more anger and rage than I ever had before. It got to a point where I decided that I needed to seek new resources that could give me fresh perspectives on what I was going through.
I read a book this year called The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren that was remarkably wise and supportive. McLaren delineates how all emotions are charged with necessary duality that helps us to grow, highlighting that many people deem emotions like ‘anger’ as toxic and ‘sadness’ as a sign of weakness, when in reality, it is actually more toxic and weak to put labels on our emotions and push them down than it is to experience them, express them in a safe way, and truly, flow with them. As such, the most unexpected gift of 2024 for me was learning that my explosive anger was not ‘bad’ and needed to be bottled up or ignored, but rather, that it was my intelligent body’s way of signalling to me that my boundaries were being violated. McLaren defines anger’s role as “The Honourable Sentry”, stating in The Language of Emotions that, “Anger can bring you the strength you need to be vulnerable and honest; when anger appears, connect first to your values, ground yourself, and set your boundaries.”
While this insight of McLaren’s was truly the antidote I needed in order to view my anger as a helpful emotion rather than one to feel shameful of, it wasn’t until later in the year that I noticed the events appearing in my life bringing me anger were actually trying to teach me that it was time to redefine my relationship to my emotions and honour my needs to a fuller capacity.
Before we move on to the next question, I want to gently remind you that it is okay if you have not yet found the hidden gift in the challenges you went through this year. All of our journeys are unique and lead us to somewhere different; there is no time limit, for personal growth is not an assignment with a deadline.
If you haven’t yet found the gift in your greatest challenge this year, I invite you to treat this prompt as a way to acknowledge the challenge has indeed occurred. Taking the leap from denial or distraction into acknowledgement and acceptance is more massive than you might realize. You don’t need to put pressure on yourself to have all of the answers right away. For now, just hold space and bear witness.
Let’s move on to the second long-term reflection prompt:
2) What parts of my personality or way of being in the world began to evolve and change this year?
I think this question is absolutely necessary to reflect on. I would go as far as to argue that if you do not look back on your life every year and notice that parts of yourself have evolved or changed, you are not living as full of a life as you could be.
Automatically, this question reminds me of a concept that I love to shed light on, which is shadow work. Consider this quote on shadow work by author, international speaker, and thought leader Teal Swan:
“We are all born whole, but as we grow up, parts of us are rejected, suppressed, or hidden away. Shadow work brings these hidden parts into the light of your awareness – leading to profound personal growth and transformation.”
I like to think of the relationship between shadow work and our personal evolution this way. We are all born as the divine child, whole and brimming with unbridled potential. Yet traumatic life experiences, even on a small scale such as being rejected by peers for not fitting in due to our uniqueness, can cause us to lose a connection with our inner riches.
This discussion is also reminding me of a concept that I came across in my Psychology studies this year, which is what the influential psychologist Carl Rogers defined as the “Fully functional person”. When our true, authentic self aligns with our ideal self – the version of ourselves that our parents or primary caregivers want us to be – we become a fully functional person. But, if our authentic or true self does not align with what our parents or primary caregivers wanted of us, by default we become non fully functional people. Our authenticity gets cast in the shadow rather than put into the spotlight as it was always meant to be.
For example, if your true self is to be musical and your parents always wanted their child to be a musician then you probably will not have your gift hidden in your shadow. However, if your parents did not want their child to be a musician when you had this proclivity then you most likely repressed that talent/interest.
If you resonate with this, the good news is that at any stage in our life, We can reclaim these lost parts of ourselves over time through looking into our shadow side, noticing what is hidden, and gently challenging ourselves to reintegrate. When we reintegrate all more and more lost parts of ourselves over the years, we not only become whole people with multiple strengths and gifts, but imbued with a higher capacity for self-awareness and self-compassion. We can see what we are missing, yet choose ultimate self-love rather than self-neglect or hatred.
The true crux of integrating the parts of ourselves that we hide in our shadows is that we become BALANCED! So, when looking at this deep question, you could also reframe it by simply asking yourself, how did I become more well-rounded this year by either building upon something old or weaving in something new that was hidden?
For myself, I noticed this year that multiple areas of my life were out of balance by having become obsessed with productivity at the expense of relationships for several years. Sometimes I can focus too narrowly on one hobby or project and neglect other areas. However, my divine child truly does love people and wants to trust them, play with them, and make long-lasting memories. So this year, I challenged myself to be more social. I wasn’t always as successful as I wanted to be because this part had been hidden for so long, but when we think about those lost parts of ourselves, it’s almost like teeth. If you don’t tend to your teeth and avoid the dentist for too long, cavities will form and rotting will ensue. But, going back to our discussion on short-term goals, if you do something small consistently to take care of the part of you that needs your nurturing, you will prevent that part of you from becoming damaged beyond repair.
Whether you are in the stage of acknowledgement and accepting what is right now, or a state of active repair, just as we say in the Walking the High Road series, take it one letter, one day at a time. If you’ve made it this far into this exercise, that’s no short of a remarkable feat for your self-love journey.
It’s time for our final reflective prompt:
3) In 2024, do I feel like I moved one step forward and three steps back in any areas? Going into 2025 with this awareness, how will I challenge myself to navigate this?
Now. Let’s be real. It is important to be humble and acknowledge when we are wrong. Such a simple statement, but if we’re honest with ourselves, how many people do we know, including ourselves, who are too stubborn or unyielding to the damage we cause ourselves or others, operating from a place of moral superiority or a my way or the highway mentality? Phew!
When it comes to taking accountability, it is helpful to view your actions and patterns from the lens of a beginner’s mind. With a beginner’s mind, you take a top-up as opposed to a bottom-down approach as much as possible, meaning that, rather than looking down on new ideas or other people thinking that you are right, you are open to the possibility that you have not already gathered all of the information and understanding you need. As a result, you are open as opposed to closed, and can both take responsibility and receive newfound awareness. Similar to the growth and thriving mindset that we discuss so often here at Thrive, we must be open to life rather than assuming that we already know it all because of our age, occupation, or other self-identifying labels. The moment that we become too attached to these is the moment that we become closed to evolving.
Having the humility to take accountability when we are wrong, even though our ego would rather us battle it out, is paramount. In every year that passes, all of us would be lying to ourselves if we said we are totally making wanted progress in all areas. I can say with certainty that the perfectionist hiding in my shadow would like to claim otherwise, but alas!
Now that I have expressed why this question is so vital to ask ourselves, I’ll get vulnerable and share one of my answers. The area I fell out of touch with this year was maintaining a more positive state of thinking. Many people assume that being a writer of self-help automatically means that you are on a pedestal above them because of all of this knowledge you have, but in reality, struggling to translate negative thoughts into more growth-oriented ones has been a lifelong journey for me. Writing always helps me to find a positive perspective and that is why I love it so much, but translating theory into action can be a different story under different contexts.
Notably, there is a difference between having negative thoughts and acting on them. Still, I think that my negative thoughts in 2024 often caused me to choose less self-loving actions, and taking my own medicine, and remembering to bask in my own words and love myself through them, is something I foresee as being majorly important in 2025. There is no need to be hard on ourselves when we are doing our best, after all.
I’d like to share a final exercise that can help tie up all that you learn when or if you choose to do one or more of the reflection prompts offered in this post. It is always helpful to do a summary of what has been learned – not just in academic studies, but in spiritual ones, too.
Create a brief, one or two-sentence statement of what you have learned by reflecting, and how you think your reflections can be your guiding north star going into 2025.
I’ll give you an example of what mine looks like. After engaging with the prompts I created, here’s what I feel has been illuminated: Doing a daily 3x3 practice, and continuing to foster relationships to balance my proclivity to workaholism, appear to be some of the antidotes for a fresh future trajectory.
That’s one sentence that wraps up the most major points, and truly, that is all that is needed. This statement can be put on a vision board or a list of goals you have for the new year if that’s something that resonates with you.
Here Are Your 2025 Reflection Prompts
Your 3x3’s - A daily 2-3 minute short-term goal practice:
1) 3 Things You Accomplished Today
2) 3 Things You’re Grateful For
3) 3 Things You’re Inspired By
Your yearly reflection: A 30-minute long-term goal practice:
1) What was the most challenging or unexpected aspect of 2024? Have I learned to find the hidden gift in it yet, or am I still working through it?
2) What parts of my personality or way of being in the world began to evolve and change this year?
3) In 2024, do I feel like I moved one step forward and three steps back in any areas? Going into 2025 with this awareness, how will I challenge myself to navigate this?
Wishing you all the best as we head into the new year, and until next time, keep on Thriving!
