The Retrospective
Seven years ago, on December 4, 2012, I sent an email to my six closest college friends.
We were a year and a half out of college. In our senior year, we had started a Tumblr blog (that dates us!) that served as our virtual collective diary: a place to share our experiences as we pursued life post-NYU, scattered around the world; a safe harbor for venting about the challenges of adult life, expressing our learnings as we matured into adults, and to wonder at who we were slowly becoming, and how it dovetailed (or not) away from our expectations; and a way to stay connected across the various cities we had scattered to after New York City.
(Us, in 2016)
I had always been very into documenting moments and trying to capture the ephemeral. I had also always longed for ways to connect people more deeply and truly than our world usually offers.
This email was my attempt to do both, for some of the people I loved the most, and at that moment in 2012, was missing the most.
I reached out to my friends, asking for their help creating something that I called ‘The 2012 Retrospective’:
The email said:
HAPPY DECEMBER GOONS! ITS THE END OF A YEAR!
I am putting together a 2012 Retrospective of the Goons and of this wonderful, momentous, tumultuous year of our lives. I would love if you wanted to participate in it and provide your input on the past year and the year ahead.
I am really interested in cataloging and chronicling our lives right now – both to recognize how awesome they are and as a future keepsake and memento of this crazy time. I’m putting together a little “virtual Christmas capsule” for us and I need your own input into it :) I hope it will be a nice surprise for everyone. Also if you don’t want to, there is NO NEED to respond! I love our open sharing and thoughts on the blog, but as we all know, it can be really hard to get out there and put it all down. I love the spirit of sharing that we are building as a tradition - it's hard to believe our blog has been going strong for over a year and a half. I feel closer to you guys than ever and I want to build upon that.
I would love it if you answered the following questions for me and sent them back to me directly! If you don’t feel comfortable doing so, no worries. This will remain completely private.
Below are my attempt at thought-provoking questions. Feel free to write long form, bullets, answer directly, answer some, all, don’t answer at all… or ADD YOUR OWN!
What did you learn from your biggest challenge this year?
How have you changed or grown this year?
What are you grateful for?
What are your intentions for next year?
Please reply back to me before January 1st; I will collect them all into one document and share with everyone!
Love,
Stephanie
Because my friends are amazing, they all said yes to participating, and a few weeks later, I began to receive their reflections and intentions.
I was overwhelmed by what they shared. Into my hands was delivered beautiful, thoughtful, wise, compassionate, curious, and vulnerable letters, stories, thoughts, and musings. They were dispatches from the heart, so bold and authentic, that connected me directly to my friends in such a powerful and intimate way. The distance between us - and the resulting loneliness - had vanished. Reading their emails, it was like I was sitting there with them; not only in that moment, but in every moment that they had described.
When I pulled myself together enough to put it in a document, along with pictures from the year and an opening note, and sent it back out, I heard similar expressions from my friends.
One described it as “the most thoughtful and meaningful gift that anyone could ever give”, and another said it was “the most incredible thing I’ve ever received.”
To date, I think that the retrospective is the very best gift I’ve ever given.
I’m not sharing this to brag about what a good friend I am. I share it to show just how insanely powerful and wonderful it can be to give the people you love the space to reflect and to share those reflections together, as a community, in a loving, secure space.
The retrospective unlocked something that I never knew existed: it translated the intimacy of one’s most personal thoughts, fears, musings, and dreams (something that often happens only in one’s head, or maybe in a diary) and brought it into a space where it was received with joy and total support.
In a crazy turn of events, this retrospective has become the safest place that we have as friends. Secrets are disclosed. Life-altering news is shared. And even though our lives have taken us in very different directions since that day seven years ago, I am so much closer to these women because of the retrospective: we come back together every single year to hold space for one another’s reflections and dearest wishes.
It is, undoubtedly, my most favorite tradition in my whole life. And this year will be our eighth year!
Over the years, we’ve added a few other components to the retrospective.
The first is what we call the ‘cultural time-capsule’: a piece of art, culture, music, literature, or similar, that meant a lot to you in that year.
The second is ‘an offering of love’ to each member of our community. We offer a sentence or two up to each person, which could be something like an affirmation, a song, a quote, a link to read, or something we think will mean a lot to that person. Through those offerings, I have learned some of the most important things I now know about myself; it’s so funny how sometimes those we love can see us more clearly than we can see ourselves.
The Impact of the Retrospective
Time seems so elongated when you are bursting out of college with dreams and hopes. Little did we really know how quickly it would speed up, or how times would change, or different priorities take hold at various moments. (Little do we know in this exact moment, how much faster time will go and how much more precious time is right now; how far away this moment will seem soon!)
The retrospectives are so precious because they capture a brief moment in time: a reflection, done in December, encapsulating the prior year. In addition, each of the questions helps to address specific elements of well-being, driving an impact both in the short term and in the long term as you train your mind to focus on these questions.
What did you learn from your biggest challenge(s) this year?
How have you changed or grown this year?
These questions give us a reason to pause and reflect and to begin to make sense of what we have been embodying up until that point. Taking a step back and reviewing your year, as well as the year ahead, help you to construct what psychologists call a ‘life narrative’. A life narrative is the way that you make sense of the things that happen to you and how you fit into them - essentially, the story of your life.
Many people haven’t taken advantage of the power that our story holds to influence our well-being; specifically, the power lies in the fact that we can be the author of our stories, that we can change the way we interpret and understand events, making sense of them in new ways that are more beneficial to our overall well-being, goals, and relationships.
One example from my own life is experiencing a very traumatic health crisis back when I lived in New York. At the time, as I was experiencing it, it was nothing but horrible. But as I have made sense of that time over the years, I have come to see that it was an event that led me directly to where I am today: my focus on happiness, health, and positive relationships all resulted directly from that moment. I changed the way that this ‘chunk of life’ fit into the story I want to tell about my life.
Greater well-being is correlated with feeling as though you have control of your story, that you are the author. Writing a retrospective, or any other practice that helps you to make sense of and transform events, is a powerful tool for giving you that sense of authorship. Authorship is the opposite of helplessness, which is a classic symptom of depression.
Studies have found that having a cohesive life narrative - which means feeling like it is part of a unified whole, that the pieces connect and fit together - is strongly related to experiencing psychological well-being. Having meaning in your life comes, in part, from this feeling of cohesion.
One longitudinal study found that over twelve sessions of therapy, themes of agency in participants stories increased over time, and that those feelings of agency preceded improvements in overall mental well-being. The study author describes the impact: “It’s sort of like people put out a new version of themselves and lived their way into it.”
What are you grateful for?
Every retrospective’s answer to this question, across all of us, every year, reflects on the same things: the simplest and also the most profound parts of life - loved ones, health and the opportunities we have to help other people. We don’t need much more than this to be happy, but it is easy to forget that sometimes in the hustle and bustle of daily life.
Reflecting on what you are grateful for is tied to a host of positive outcomes, too many to list, but that include: better relationships, better health, better work outcomes, and better equanimity and resilience.
Positive emotions like gratitude do not just feel good in the moment, but also have the power to enable greater future well-being and growth over time. This is called the Broaden and Build Theory. When you experience a positive emotion, your thoughts and your actions are temporarily ‘broadened’ – your thinking becomes more flexible and creative. In addition, this momentary emotion ‘builds’ your psychological, physical, and social resources over time, leading to downstream benefits like greater resilience and altruistic behavior.
What are your intentions for next year?
For an exercise like this, I like to use intentions rather than goals. Goals intimidate people, they seem binding, and they aren’t gentle and open. Intentions tend to be wider, allowing for things to happen and life to unfold as it does. They also can include what I call ‘becoming goals’: the articulation of the type of person we want to be, which is far ore important and impactful to well-being than the types of goals that we want to accomplish, which often end up not satisfying us in the long-term.
Recent research has found that we seem to be driven by the future, by visions of ourselves. Crafting intentions helps us to tap into and articulate those future best selves, imagining who we might be (which ties right back into the life narrative!)
Each year, my intentions have included to become more loving and to embody the emotion of love. Articulating it to my community makes it real, cements its importance to me, and helps to hold me accountable.
My Invitation To You
As the most important ritual in my life, I want to share the love, in case you would like to do your own retrospective with your community. I can absolutely vouch that it will transform your relationships and your own personal well-being.
Here is a quick list of the steps you can follow to bring the retrospective to life.
1. Choose the community that you would like to share the retrospective with. List out their names in an email. (It is best if those people know one another and have strong connections between them, too.)
2. Send them an email with the information. Here is a template you can use:
Hi [friends/family/team/coven],
I read an article this year about doing a retrospective, which is a kind of group reflection of 2017 and intention setting for 2018. I thought that this might be something fun for us to do together to bring us all closer together. If you want to participate, I’d love if you could fill out the answers to these questions below and send them back directly to me. From there, I will put them into a document and share with all of us. This will remain private between all of us. My hope is that this is a wonderful way for us to connect and share as we move forward in our journey together as a family.
What did you learn from your biggest challenge(s) this year?
How have you changed or grown this year?
What are you grateful for?
What are your intentions for next year?
Let me know if you have any questions or concerns. If you are interested in participating, please send before January 1st, 2019.
Love,
[YOUR NAME]
3. Send!
4. Write your own reflection and wait for responses.
5. When you receive people’s responses, compile them together. I have made a template for you based on the one I use with my friends.
6. Send out (password protected, ideally!) and watch the magic happen.
What if I don’t have a community that I can do this with?
That’s why we’re here. Let The New Happy be your community. We love you and want to be there for you and support you in your reflections and the future brightness coming to your life.
Send me your retrospective at stephanie@thenewhappy.com and I will share mine with you, too. If I receive enough, I’ll compile them together and share out in next week’s newsletter (anonymized, of course!). I am here for you. Let’s grow and evolve together.