Journaling Prompts for End of Year Reflection
Year-end reflection is often reduced to goals and resolutions—a performance of ambition that looks backward at failure and forward at improvement. But there's a richer, more honest kind of reflection available: one that takes the full measure of a year, acknowledges what was genuinely hard, recognizes what changed in you, and asks what you want the next period to actually feel like rather than what you want to achieve. Writing at the turn of a year gives you something rarer than a goal list—it gives you a honest account of who you are right now, and what you actually want next.
Journaling Prompts
What was the single hardest thing about this year—not the most dramatic thing, but the thing that cost you most internally, that you're still carrying?
What did you learn about yourself this year that you didn't know before? About what you can handle, what you need, what matters to you, what you're capable of?
What do you want to leave in this year—a belief, a behavior, a relationship pattern, a way of treating yourself—that you don't want to carry into the next one?
What do you want more of in the coming year—not more achievement, but more of a specific feeling, experience, connection, or quality of daily life?
Write a one-paragraph honest letter to yourself from this time next year, assuming the year goes well but not perfectly. What has changed? What are you proud of? What does the year look like?