💌 Ready to reflect on 2022? Answer these 3 questions to get started.

Hi, I'm Miribel, that bestie who tells you what you need to hear when you need to hear it. Soon all your friends will be coming to you for life advice! 😉 Flourish is your weekly source of inspiration & information on all things around life, personal growth, mental health, wellness, and career.

If you find value in this content please like & share above, or forward it to someone in your network. Thank you! If someone forwarded you this email you can subscribe here:

🧘🏻‍♀️ 3 questions to reflect on this past year:

How has 2022 treated you?

It’s that time of the year when we’re surrounded by friends and family, vacations from school or work, and delicious food. It’s also that time when we may want to reflect upon the last year and celebrate all the things that have happened.

It’s time to do an “annual review.”

But here’s the thing. I think annual reviews sound so overwhelming and confusing. So I went down the rabbithole of reading through all the best annual review articles I could find, processing them with my take-no-BS filter, and now digesting and simplifying it for you all.

Today’s topic is focused purely reflecting and celebrating the past year. It’s part 1.

We’re not talking about the future today (aka all that stuff about defining how we want to focus our energy and time in the year ahead… and goal-setting) – that’s for part 2 aka next week. My fellow girlbosses are quaking. I also have some strong perspectives on that topic, especially now that I’ve experimented with many systems throughout the years and am starting to get a hang of what works for me. So we need a separate edition for that talk.

I want you (well, us) to focus purely on celebrating you. Yes, YOU!

You’re still here, reading this newsletter. You’re still alive, breathing, existing, and being. And that alone is enough.

Life honestly moves too fast sometimes. The days are slow, but the months and years are fast. Sometimes we don’t often take the time out of our days to just reminisce, reflect, and celebrate all that we have achieved, persevered, and accomplished over the last year.

Whether you had an amazing, meh, or terrible year – it’s worth taking the time out of your day, whether an hour or a few days (really depends on your style!) to process the whirlwind that 2022 has been.

What is an annual review? And why should we take the time to do it?

Well, for shits and giggles, I decided to ask ChatGPT first and see what its response was.

Here’s a better definition from James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, whom has publicly shared an annual review from 2013 to 2019:

Are you living an intentional life that is aligned with your values?

Are you putting energy into the things that fill you emotionally and spiritually?

Genuine happiness, fulfillment, and success don’t look the same for everyone. In a world where we are bombarded with information and noise from media, people, and everything surrounding us, it can become easy for us to go on auto-pilot and confuse society's definition as our own.

Taking the time to reflect, even if it is only for a few minutes, can help you be more aware of how you are feeling about your life and take note of whether you are intentionally curating a life that is truly aligned with what you value, as well as to acknowledge all the progress and great things that you've experienced over the past year.

In the absence of regular reflection, we move from year to year without celebrating our successes, learning from our failures, and assessing whether what we’re doing in life is what we actually want to be doing in life. Sitting down to review your life, one piece at a time, will uncover hidden lessons and important insights you can take into the next year.

I read all the articles, and I compiled my favorites for y’all down below. But truth be told, an annual reflection is actually quite simple, and I think so many posts make it incredibly complicated and labor-intensive. Boiled down to the essence, an annual review asks you three core things:

1. What were the highlights of the year? What made you feel proud, happy, excited, and loved?

2. What were the low parts of the year? What was hard? What made you feel hurt, disappointed, angry, or sad?

3. What did you learn this year? What do you now know about yourself, other people, and the world at large?

Reference your old photos, Calendar, phone data, previous journal entries/Tumblr posts, and etc. throughout the course of the year - and just take note of them! It doesn’t have to be complicated. However, your future self a few years from now will thank you for it.

A few optional questions, if you want to go the extra mile:

• Did anything surprise you this year?

• What happened this year that stood out to you?

• How have these events changed you?

• What will you remember most five years from now?

If that seemed too simple to you, originally I thought so too.

However, my friend told me something recently about how she was looking to simplify her life in 2023, and that really resonated with me.

How can we make things simpler for us?

As much as I love diving into all the questions from all the reviews, it’s a lot and can become overwhelming for people to even begin. I want this to be simple and approachable. If, however, you want something a bit more structured and in depth that provides more questions, I’ve outlined a few of my favorite resources below.

• The Ultimate Annual Review - It’s very in-depth, takes a LOT of time, and has a structured format that helps guide the process; has Notion, Google Doc, and PDF templates you can use. I love the fact that he writes a letter to his future self.

• How to Complete Your Own Annual Review (And Why You Should) - super data-driven, I also like how this article dives into categories; I think it’s insightful how it asks you to pull data and other sources from your phone/mobile apps, and overall has some great questions you can ask yourself.

• Your Own Annual Life Review—How to Do It? This article dives more into how to do it and how not to do it!

I’m excited to do this exercise with you all and reflect on the past year!

Remember: the goal of this exercise in part 1 for this week is to purely focus on reflecting, celebrating, and enjoying the past year. Don’t start goal-setting just yet. That’s next week!

🔮 Weekly Finds:

• Have you all ever been with someone and then saw ALL the red flags… and still decided to engage with them anyway? *raises hand* I never understood what that was (only that my friends told me it was not good), but now there’s actually a term for it: repetition compulsion! Explained in this video here. Here’s more information and strategies on how we can manage it.

• 3 signs you’re the cycle breaker in the family. To learn more about what it means to be a cycle breaker in your family, you can read this article. I also really liked the questions that were asked in this resource to help me process a lot of my generational trauma.

• How to say no (from someone who always says yes). Practicing boundaries in our lives doesn’t mean we’re rude or apathetic. Perhaps instead, we actually care deeply. Saying “no” isn’t only about creating just enough room to breathe, either—but about rethinking this mindset entirely. Our schedules don’t always have to be at full capacity. How would our lives look different if we said “no” to a lot and “yes” to a little?

• Why nothing changes in your life: the 7 killers of change. Do you think you should be further along in life by now? let’s look at the seven deadly sins that kill all the positive changes you want to make in life. Find out what holds you back and eliminate it.

• Stop Looking for Your Authentic Self. I’m guilty of putting intense pressure on myself about becoming as “authentic” and aligned with who I am. Reading this recently helped me understand that there is no mysterious "authentic self" that needs to be discovered. The ideal of an "authentic self" is unattainable and creates further frustration in the form of your self-critical voice. Everything you need to know about who you are is available today.

• Have a “contract talk” with yourself (and your partner, if you have one!) as you consider how you want to “balance” your priorities, such as work and family. Nathalie Walton (CEO of Expectful) discusses more how this helped her and her husband take on the many challenges of building a startup. I went down a rabbit hole of the original source of what this “contract talk” was, here are my favorites so far: 1, 2, 3.

• Letting People Down In The Workplace Is Just Fine, Actually. You know that your health is more important than your job, but just a reminder that even if you’re letting someone else down, it’s okay.

• 10 self-care activities that help reduce stress—and cost little to no money! My favorite ones are: creating an album of old photos that bring me to good times, recalling a favorite memory, and lighting a candle. What are yours?

🗞 In the News:

• Stephen 'tWitch' Boss, a former Ellen DeGeneres Show DJ and So You Think You Can Dance all-star, died by suicide on Wednesday at age 40. His death brought a renewed focus on the conversation of mental health and suicide awareness in the Black community, which has seen an alarming rise in suicide rates in recent years.

• Gov. Jay Inslee (Washington) and other top government officials are pitching budget increases and a series of potentially transformative policy proposals aimed at curbing long psychiatric-related hospitalizations known as “boarding” among the state’s youth.

• Jewel Explains Why She Prioritized Mental Health Over Fame: 'I Didn't Want to Have a Breakdown'. Jewel is opening up about why prioritizing her mental health — while living in her car as a teenager and after exploding onto the music scene — has helped keep her the "happy, whole human" she is today.

• A Three-Week Vacation in 2023? Yes, You Can. Here’s how to strategize and ask your boss for the time to take that dream break. This isn’t comprehensive of all the industries, especially where there may be stricter cultures around vacation (e.g. finance, healthcare, etc.), but this is a good start to that article!

📝 Reminder:

🎉 A few things to look forward to from Flourish:

• I'm interviewing and chatting with different folks who are taking sabbaticals and writing a post about how to take a sabbatical.

• I'm exploring the concept of: “what is it when someone decides to quit without another plan?” There’s definitely a term for that and I’m going to write about it. I’m so inspired by my friends and colleagues who are doing it!

💌 Happy holidays! Thank YOU for being here until the end and allowing me to grace your inbox with this newsletter. I truly hope it provides some value to you, because I do know that it does bring me so much joy curating this for you.

That’s it for today — hope you have a wonderful time spent doing the things that give you life and love in the holiday season. And cheers to the new year!

Please reply to this email or submit here if you have any feedback.