How Taking Stock of the Past Can Improve Your Future

The end of one year and the beginning of a new one can be a meaningful transition time when many people take time to pause and reflect on the past year, whilst looking ahead to a fresh new year and all its possibilities. Looking back can be useful as it can help us gain perspective on what we accomplished, learned, and experienced in the past year. We might remind ourselves of how we met major milestones, accomplished important goals, or learned valuable lessons.

Taking stock of the past year, both the positives and negatives, can be beneficial for fuelling motivation to make progress and be more successful with your next set of New Year’s goals. It can also build our confidence by reminding us that we actually can turn our plans into reality.

Checking in with your resolutions from last year and how successful you were can fuel motivation. And motivation can be further increased when we take the time to really appreciate what we have gained, what our experiences have taught us, and the people who have helped us on our journey, even if we were less than successful with last year’s resolutions.

Reflecting on the Positives

Savouring successes and experiencing gratitude for all the positive events and people over the past year is one way to foster an “attitude of gratitude” for the new year. Allowing yourself to first notice and then appreciate the positives that life has to offer is by definition a way to become more grateful. As numerous studies have demonstrated, when people more readily experience gratitude, they also will be more likely to experience several other benefits including higher levels of well-being, lower levels of depression, less stress, better sleep, and even better physical health.

Taking stock of past goal progress can motivate future success

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Lessons From the Past

Of course, not every year is filled only with positive events and people. Unpleasant events, encounters, and experiences are also part of life that can be stressful and thwart progress toward reaching goals. Sometimes, too, it’s our own flaws and shortcomings that create the barriers that slow us down from reaching where we would like to be.

Taking this big-picture perspective of your life over the past year also involves identifying what didn’t work so well. But it’s what you do with these insights that can make the difference between whether you rekindle your motivation to make improvements in the new year, or whether you get trapped in a downward spiral of blame and regret.

“If Only I Had Done Better”

When reviewing the problems from the past year, it can be easy to venture into the land of self-blame. This is often the case when we see our actions or decisions as contributing to a less-than-desirable outcome. For example, if you had a goal to have a healthier lifestyle last year, but instead found yourself gaining weight, eating worse, or moving less, you might find yourself thinking “If only I had eaten healthier” or “If only I had exercised more.”

In this context, counterfactual thoughts have the potential to promote making positive changes in the future. Counterfactual thoughts involve imagining an alternative outcome we desired but did not achieve, as well as the things that could have been done, but weren’t, to make that desired outcome a reality.

In this respect, counterfactual thoughts can serve as a blueprint for either feelings of regret and distress or a plan of action to do better in the future. The difference lies in the nature of the counterfactual thoughts we make.

Not All Counterfactuals Are Equal

In a set of two studies I conducted with my students, undergraduate students recalled a negative academic event they experienced and then generated counterfactual thoughts about this event. The thoughts were coded for how specific they were for the things they could have done to change the outcome. A counterfactual such as “If only I had studied for three hours, four times a week” was considered to be more specific than one that simply stated, “If only I studied more.”

What we found was that across both studies, those who made more specific counterfactuals had healthier study habits and reported greater motivation to improve their academics. In contrast, those who tended to make counterfactuals that were vague felt less motivated after making counterfactuals, tended to brood over negative outcomes, and had more unhealthy study habits and less satisfaction with their academics. This makes sense if we consider that focusing on what went wrong without having a clear plan forward as to how to change things in the future can be demotivating and amplify feelings of dissatisfaction about the event.

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Source: Polina Kovalev/Pexels/Used with permission

Harnessing the Power of Counterfactuals

Here are some simple tips to help you harness the benefits of counterfactual thoughts that come to mind as you take stock of the past year.

1. If you are unhappy about how certain goals turned out, focus on the specifics of what you could have done differently to possibly change the outcome. Use this as a plan to get you started towards better outcomes in the coming year. For example, if you were not able to meet your health goals, rather than simply thinking “If only I had eaten better” think about what eating better looks like in terms of real actions. Better would be “If only I had cut back on my sugar intake, or cut out junk foods, or eaten less meat…” and so on.
2. Make sure you focus on actions that are realistic and/or under your control rather than those that are impractical or under the control of someone else. If your goal was to be more fit last year, thinking “If only I had a personal trainer” when doing so is outside of your budget will only make you feel frustrated and demotivated. Focus instead on realistic ways of achieving your goals that don’t rely on people or resources that are not available.
3. If an outcome that you are unhappy with is related to a “one-off” event in which you regret a decision or behaviour, trying to rewrite this event using counterfactuals can actually backfire and cause more frustration. Counterfactuals work best for situations that repeat, such as goal lapses. For situations such as a relationship break-up or a major political vote outcome, engaging in too many “if only” thoughts can stir up feelings of distress and dissatisfaction without an opportunity to correct that specific event in the future.