A grounded, modern guide to closing your year with intention
- Pauliina Hallama
- Dec 10, 2025
- 5 min read
Can you feel it, friend? Another year is wrapping up. Not just a date on the calendar, but a whole chapter of your life. And if there’s one thing the last few years have taught us, it’s that time doesn’t just pass, it shapes us.
Some people greet the new year with relief:“I’m so glad this year is over.” Some with awe:“I can’t believe how much happened; I’m still processing it all.” Others set bold resolutions, while some quietly decide to skip the ritual altogether. And then there are those who retreat into deep reflection, journaling, or a full digital detox to start fresh.
This guide is for everyone in between: those who want more than doing nothing but don’t quite need a full retreat. Think of this as a self-coaching ritual: simple, profound, and totally doable in under an hour.
Find a cozy place, silence your notifications, take a deep breath, and grab your notebook. Ready?
1. Begin with gratitude (the grounding ritual)
Gratitude is more than feel-good fluff. Modern psychology continues to confirm that it boosts resilience, emotional well-being, and even physical health.
Write down everything you’re genuinely grateful for from this year:
What arrived in your life that you once only wished for?
What moments — big or small — brought you joy, connection, or relief?
What challenges unexpectedly strengthened you?
Let yourself stay in the feeling for a moment. We often chase the life we want and forget to acknowledge the one we already have.
2. Map your year on a timeline
Instead of declaring your year as simply “good” or “bad,” try exploring its shape. Every year has its own rhythm — moments of momentum, pauses, pivots, dips, and gentle stretches of normalcy. Mapping these out helps you understand not just what happened, but how it felt.
Begin by drawing a long line across a sheet of paper. Let this line represent a neutral emotional baseline. Above it, you’ll place the experiences and periods that felt uplifting or energizing. Below it, you’ll capture the moments that were difficult, draining, or disruptive.
Start at the beginning of the year and move forward slowly. Pause to remember how each month unfolded. Some periods may come back to you vividly, while others might feel blurry or uneventful. Both are meaningful. If memories feel scattered, browse through your calendar or photo roll — these often reveal forgotten moments that shaped your year more than you realized.
As you fill in the timeline, allow emotional memory, not perfection, to guide you. You’re simply giving shape to your lived experience here.
3. Key questions
With your timeline in front of you — or simply with the year in your mind — turn inward and move into reflection. Let your pen write freely as you consider the following questions. Resist the urge to craft perfect answers; just let whatever wants to be said emerge.
What did you succeed in? What worked well or brought a sense of satisfaction or progress?
What challenged you? Where did you stumble, struggle, or feel stretched beyond your comfort zone?
What did you learn — about the world, about others, about yourself?
Where did your time and energy actually go? Not where you intended them to go, but where they truly went.
If you could rewrite one part of the year, what would you change or add? In what ways did you grow?
How did your perspective, your skills, your relationships, or your identity shift?
Looking at everything together, what theme ties your year together? What story does it tell?
These questions are not about judgement but about honesty. They help transform scattered experiences into personal insight and a foundation for wiser choices in the year to come.
4. The Pizza of Life (a 2025-friendly check-in)
Once you’ve reflected on the events and themes of your year, it can be grounding to step back and look at the broader landscape of your life. The Pizza of Life is still one of the simplest ways to do this. Imagine your life divided into its most essential areas — your health, your work, your relationships, your personal growth, and so on — and imagine each one as a slice of a whole. (If you’d like a guided template for this exercise, you can download our free Pizza of Life workbook in the toolbox.)
Take a moment to evaluate how satisfied you feel in each area right now. Give each slice a number between 0 and 10, not as a scorecard but as a snapshot of your inner experience. This gentle check-in often reveals imbalances or unmet needs that you may not have noticed day to day. You might discover that certain areas have quietly flourished while others have been waiting for you to return to them. Sometimes we realize that the areas we have been worrying about are actually doing better than expected, while others have quietly slipped beneath the surface of awareness.
Look at your pizza as a whole. Which slices feel nourishing and full? Which ones are asking for more attention, support, or intention as you move forward? This exercise is less about fixing and more about seeing clearly.
5. Closing the year with respect
After mapping, questioning, and observing, give yourself the gift of closure — something our culture rarely teaches us to do. Begin by acknowledging everything the year brought you: the joy and the heaviness, the movement and the stillness, the clarity and the confusion. All of it contributed to the person you are right now.
When you feel ready, consider what you would like to release before stepping into the new year. These might be habits that no longer support you, thought patterns that weigh you down, or expectations that no longer fit who you’re becoming. Write them down. Then choose a small ritual (tearing the paper, burning it safely, or simply closing your notebook with intention) to symbolically let them go.
Next, turn your attention to what you want to keep. Every year offers gifts: strengths that solidified, relationships that deepened, routines that grounded you, or insights that changed your trajectory. Imagine gathering these into a kind of backpack, one that you will carry with you into the year ahead. These are the resources you’ve earned through experience, and they will travel with you whether you notice them or not.
Think of this moment as a door closing softly behind you — not shutting the past out, but honoring it. And as you turn toward the new year, consider stepping forward not with force or pressure but with steadiness, clarity, and a sense of companionship with yourself.
A toast to your year!
Whatever this year held, you moved through it. You learned, you adapted, you tried, you survived, you grew — often in ways you did not expect. That deserves recognition.
Here’s to closing your year with intention. To beginning the next one with consciousness and courage. Here’s to you, exactly as you are, stepping into what comes next!
This reflection guide is our small greeting and gift to the world — from all of us at the World Coaching Organization. May it support you in closing your year with clarity and stepping into the next with intention.
