<aside> 🔥 Welcome to The Annual Reflection: 7 Simple Steps to Maximize Your Growth.

My name is Craig Lovelace and I create content and resources for church and business leaders. I want to leverage my gifts and story to maximize your gifts and story for God’s Kingdom.

Here’s why I created the Annual Reflection

As a busy leader, I try to reflect at the end of each year to capture the wins, losses, and lessons from the year so I can get the most out of the year as it ends and prepare well for the year ahead.

But I’ve always had a problem. I’ve never had a solid plan for how to do my Annual Reflection. Journaling is helpful and I always learn something but in the past I struggled to get a full picture of my year and it’s difficult to connect my discoveries to my goals, priorities, schedule, and habits.

If you fully commit, this tool will help you:

• Reflect on the peaks and valleys in each month of the year.
• Find meaningful moments, wins, and losses.
• Analyze how you’re doing in crucial life categories (Health, Relationships, Vocation, etc).
• Commit to what you want to change going forward.
• Rearrange your goals, priorities, and habits to help you get where you want to go.

As a leader, it’s crucial for me to be learning as much as I can from my experiences and actually change to become the best version of myself for others.

This Annual Reflection tool is the combined result of all my best insights for learning, growing, and goal setting. If it works for you please share it with others.

Download The Annual Reflection

• If you want to use it in Notion — *the format I recommend — *****just hit the Duplicate button on the top right corner of this page.
• If you’d rather have a Google Doc, click here. </aside>

Share the Yearly Review with your friends & family!

<aside> <img src="/icons/share_gray.svg" alt="/icons/share_gray.svg" width="40px" /> If you know someone who could benefit from this forward it to them! Click HERE to get the URL and share it to social media or email it.

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I have to give credit where it’s due…

The content and the prompts for this tool come from my experiences doing my own reviews and reflections. But the format and design in this resource were inspired by The Yearly Review by Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole. These guys are great inspirations for writing and online business content. If you want to learn to write online in 2025, look no further than these two guys!

Alright, let’s get started! But first, a few tips:

• Give this the time it’s due! I typically spend 4-8 hours on this process every year. Don’t do it in one sitting.
• Go for a walk when you get stuck. Studies show movement can help unlock insights you won’t get staring at a screen or journal.
• Don’t get stuck with “doing it in order.” Feel free to jump around.
• I put my life categories in (health, relationships, purpose, and soul) but you can swap them out for any category.
• Finally, don’t feel like you have to write digitally. Feel free to write in a journal and only reference this page for prompts.

Table of Contents

Step 1: Peaks and Valleys

<aside> <img src="/icons/search_gray.svg" alt="/icons/search_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Life is full of peaks ⛰️(high points) and valleys 💔 (low moments). We should relish in the high moments and endure the low moments but know that God is with us either way and He can use all of it for our good (Rom. 8:28)

What matters is what can you learn from your peaks and valleys. This section is all about identifying the peaks and valleys you’ve experienced in the last year. Each “month toggle” below opens up to allow you to make a list of a couple of peaks and valleys for each month. There’s no right number, just reflect on what was significant to you.

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January

February

March

April