A New, Fun Life Hack: The Monthly Reflection

This is a new habit I am adding in this year: the end of month reflection.

I was surfing Pinterest last week, while I had all that time in bed with covid. Of course, it is Pinterest, so I found tons of cool things and new blogs to read.

Side note: Did you know almost all of Pinterest is blog posts?

Yep. It’s the number one place to search out blog posts on any topic. When there’s something you need help with, Pinterest and YouTube are the places to be. It’s just important to take all those perfectionist Pinterest images with a grain of salt.

While I was pinning, I came across this self-help blog: aimlief.com

She has resources on her blog very related to my own blogging topic: getting your act together, in general.

I wonder if she actually has her act together, or if she’s just pretending to like me…hehehe

Specifically, the article on her site I found so helpful was about doing a monthly reflection at the end of each month.

I created a Pinterest board for “monthly reflections,” because this was the SECOND time in just a couple of days the topic of having a monthly meeting with yourself had come up.

This other post on vishakablone.com I found also mentioned spending time at the beginning of each new month to reflect on the finished month and plan for the new month.

I’m pretty sure I saw it mentioned in passing somewhere else too. This was a new concept for me that kept cropping up, so I figured, hey, maybe God’s trying to tell me something and I should listen.

(The universe doesn’t tell you stuff. The universe is literally space. God does. God tells us things when we listen.)

So how do you do a monthly reflection time?

It is basically a journaling activity. So first, grab your journal, or just some paper if you don’t currently have a journal.

Then you sit down and bleed your thoughts about the completed month onto the paper.

Need some prompts to help you do that? We got you.

You can even print these out. I took some concepts from aimlief.com and some from vishakablone.com, and then added a few of my own to create a printable.

Or if you’d rather have the bullet point questions rather than the printable journal pages:

1. What sticks out in your mind most about this month?

2. Answered Prayers from this month:

3. Challenges you faced:

4. How you felt this month:

5. How are you closer to your goals than before?

6. Things you might improve for next month:

7. Things you got right and new habits you want to continue:

8. What went off the rails?

9. Blessings from this month you are grateful for:

10. What did you learn?

11. How can you plan your goals in a more realistic and effective way?

12. Other thoughts:

I did this for the first time this past Memorial Day weekend, and it felt so helpful!

In fact, I put this down as my new habit I will be continuing.

May was supposed to be about getting the house ready to sell and nailing down a moving plan and hopefully signing a rental lease in our new town.

Instead, Covid came to visit and took over the whole month.

Unexpected tasks arrived. The moving plan changed, and yet somehow, we will still have a lease signed by the end of today. So despite the unexpected challenges, which felt so huge, everything is turning out okay.

This was a fun month to journal about for me because our May was so ridiculously challenging.

You know how I felt? Ugh, I felt worried and stressed like the whole month. Ha!

But in the end, it all came together surprisingly nicely. Everyone recovered from covid, and no one even got very sick. I was probably the sickest because of that obnoxious fever that came with it.

Look at us now though. June is arriving. God answered our prayers about a lease, recovering nicely from covid, and not getting too far behind in school. (The kids missed so much school.)

And you know what? Everything is going to be okay. It’s going to be okay for you too. I hope you enjoy doing a monthly reflection too!