How to sum up the past year and start a new life.
Asya Kochergina, systemic family psychotherapist, family psychologist, expert of "Psychodemy", told how to sum up the results of the past year and start a new life.
The year-end results and their summing up are a very ambiguous concept and process. For some, it is a wonderful summarizing practice, inspiring and supportive.
For some, it is real stress, provoking frustration, feelings of anger and guilt. The surrounding world is overflowing with obligations and worries.
Each of us meets the challenges of fate in our own way. However, there is a way to look at the "Year in Review" in a constructive and supportive way, and most importantly, to do this regardless of the content of the year itself and the heights of the peaks reached.
After all, in reality, every year, even against the backdrop of deafening failures and losses, contains many victories and advancements, albeit smaller ones, but in any case moving us in the right direction.
Let's start with the difficult part: how to build on the outgoing year and move into the next one if the results of the year seem unimportant or even really bad to you. SOBT (Solution-Oriented Brief Therapy) will help us with this.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself and use the answers as your conclusions.
How did you manage to endure the bad things that happened this year? Who were your comrades this year? What kind of relationships helped you this year? What did the people who were around you see in you? How did this difficult year not get worse?
What skills helped you not to fall even lower? What gave you the strength to read this article and think about the results of the year? What allowed you to maintain hope for the best? Could things be worse than they are? Why not? What did you manage to preserve? What was important to leave as it is?
Throughout the year, we not only run forward, somewhere we slow down, protect and preserve something, in some direction we are just beginning to turn - but all these are our actions in favor of a better life for us and for our loved ones.
The world teaches us to measure progress in hundreds of kilometers and millions of currencies, but the settings of each are much more subtle, and the methods and means of promotion are more diverse. Now let's move on to a method of more finely slicing the past year and planning the future. I see it as applicable to both a very successful year and just a very ordinary one.
The next group of questions will help to use the technology of small steps - this is an alternative optics to the maximalism we are accustomed to. Such gradation allows you to better track your own dynamics, as well as more safely construct the desired future. Next, we will use two forms of the verb, past and present tense.
So that you can both take stock and plan for the future.
What went/is going better? What worked/is working for you in the right direction? In what situations have you already seen/can see elements of the desired future? In what areas of life have the desired changes been/are they being outlined? What have you done/are you doing to make this possible? Communication with which people has become/is valuable and supportive for you?
What have you learned/are you learning to cope with a little easier? What has become/will become the smallest sign that things are getting better? What helped/helps maintain hope for the best? What did/might moving up one notch towards a better life look like? How did/do others see you during the best periods of the year?
To sum up, the “Year-end results” acquire many meanings and shades if you look at them more broadly than just a summary of numbers and achievements. Another good tool that reduces the importance of this wonderful event and cools anxiety is the intermediate results by season.
The results of winter, spring, summer and autumn. We see a shorter period of time more clearly and in more detail, we distinguish more nuances. At the end of the year, you will no longer have to remember anything, small but important victories will not be lost from sight, and you will be able to connect four fragments into one common, unique year.
