There is a powerful process that has 3 steps to create your New Year. I call it 360 Year in Review. It’s a simple and fun way to turbo charge your ability to create the new year ahead more powerfully.


Great goal setting for the year starts with looking back over the past year. Looking back before setting goals for the New Year gives us a great foundation from which to create the year ahead. New goals can be potentially exciting, and possibly meet a dream we’ve had for ourselves that we have yet to accomplish.

360 Year in Review

My husband and I have been doing this 360 Year in Review exercise together every year since 1992 during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. This exercise is a tradition that helps us witness each other’s joys and deep disappointments in a meaningful way that living through it didn’t quite do. Reviewing together also helps us understand how best to help support each other in the year ahead. I really love doing this together every year and am happy to share it with all of you.

Getting Started to Create Your New Year

My recommendation is to answer the 360 Year in Review questions below by yourself first. Then share your answers with someone you love and who you want to support you in the year ahead. All of my clients do this exercise with me every December. As their executive coach, this exercise helps me understand what’s most important to them. It also gives me information about how they can use their greatest strengths and inner resourcefulness when times get challenging during the year ahead.

Step 1 To Create Your New Year – Identify what’s most important

Take a piece of paper and break it down into categories of your life that are most important to you. The ones I typically use for my clients and myself are the following. Feel free to add categories of your own. This is not just a New Year’s resolution but a much more powerful process.

  • Personal Health and Well-being
  • Work/career
  • Family
  • Friends and Relationships
  • Community, Volunteer, Giving Back
  • Financial

Step 2 To Create Your New Year – Personal Self-Assessment

In this step, answer the questions for each category you created above, making sure not to miss one. Remember this is about you, not your spouse, or your partner, kids, or family members, just YOU!

  • Accomplishments and Prides

Make a list of your accomplishments and things you were proud of this year. Just to be clear, these would be things that you have accomplished. This past year in the area of work/career, I am proud of developing the Advancing Women Leadership Program with my friend and colleague, Terrie Lupberger for organizations committed to developing a stronger pipeline of female talent. And also developed The Women’s Leadership Lab for individual women who want to step into their full potential and up-level themselves as bold leaders.

  • Disappointments and Shortfalls

Make a list of things you were disappointed in about yourself in each of the above categories or where you fell short and wish you had not. Think about things that just didn’t go the way you had hoped. This past year in the area of personal health, I did not reach one of my health goals and I was not happy and a bit more stressed as a result.

  • Opportunities

Make a list of the opportunities and possibilities you see for yourself in each of your categories. Personally, I can see a path forward for my personal health and started by re-hiring Jake the trainer and found a new physician who I think is going to be awesome.

Step 3 to Create Your New Year – Set New Goals

There are many ways to do this part. You can make a list of 2-3 goals in each of your categories that you want for yourself for the year ahead. You can also go smaller and more focused by identifying one goal, one dream, one thing that’s important to you that if you were actually do it, would be awesome. My focus for the year is to help others figure out who they are and do it on purpose! Over and over again. Boldly! For me this year, my one BIG goal is to raise my intuitive abilities and emotional intelligence skills to the next level and use them more often in my work.

Powerful Process to Create Your New Year

Once you have completed this process, you have revisited what’s important, what worked, and what did not. It’s time to start over. However, if you didn’t reach some of your goals, check out our previous blog post. This information allowed you to take an honest look at the health of areas of your life that matter most to you. This process has revealed to you things you might have wanted to avoid and highlights the shining light in ourselves that we often forget to acknowledge. This powerful process will help clear the way so we can focus forward and create our best year yet.