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For me, the last full week of the year has always been the chance to pause, take a break from the grind of selling, and really think about what happened over the past year—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

If you are anything like me and do the same, there are two ways to look back on your last twelve months. You can do so with regret or reflection.

These two opposing lenses are vastly different in the way they affect your view of where you’ve been and where you are going.

Regret

Let’s start by unpacking regret.

Some of you are already feeling regret about goals you missed, deals you lost, opportunities that slipped through your fingers, or the people in your life you may have let down.

Regret is that feeling you get when you look back on something you did (or didn’t do) and wish you could change it.

In many ways, regret is similar to worry, except it’s focused on the past instead of the future. Worry is about what might happen; regret is about what already happened. That’s a big distinction.

Although you can turn worry into action and change the future, you cannot rewrite the past. No amount of regret changes history. All it does is create a feedback loop in your mind where you keep reliving your mistakes, misses, and failures over and over again.

Stuck in the Endless Loop of Regret

I’ve observed so many people get stuck in this endless loop of regret. They keep lamenting, “If only I had . . .”

• “made that call,”
• “handled that prospect differently,”
• “taken that chance,”
• “been there or done that.”

Those “if onlys” can paralyze you. They sap your energy, crush your confidence, and keep you from moving forward.

On one hand, regret can push you to change—you don’t want to feel that kind of pain again, so you work hard to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

On the other hand, regret can become a debilitating emotion that drags you into an exhausting and useless mental loop of “would’ve, could’ve, should’ve.”

But no matter how many times you complete that loop, it doesn’t change the outcome. It becomes an emotional anchor that weighs you down as you start the new year.

Reflection

Reflection, on the other hand, is entirely different—and far more productive.

When you reflect, you detach from your emotions with objectivity to look at your entire body of work from the past year.

• You’re asking the questions, “What went well? What didn’t go so well? What did I learn?”
• You consider the wins that made you proud and the moments you’d rather forget.
• You figure out why you won so you can repeat those winning behaviors.
• You extract value from the lessons of failure.

Reflection isn’t about punishing yourself for what went wrong. It’s about gaining clarity on why it went wrong—and what you can do about it next time.

Reflection Creates Awareness

Reflection also helps you find gratitude in unexpected places. Maybe there’s a hidden lesson in overcoming an obstacle or perhaps you gained a new perspective because a challenging person came into your life.

It’s important to realize that each decision you made over the past year shaped your present circumstances. But you are not defined by these circumstances, only by how you respond to them.

Reflection creates awareness. Where there is awareness there is the potential for change. Awareness is like the sun, anything it touches has a tendency to transform.

The bottom line is that reflection is about learning, growing and transforming. Regret is stagnation.

Why Reflection Matters at Year End

The reason I’m talking about the impact of reflection as we close out this year is because for most of us, the slate really does feel clean come January 1st.

In the sales world, we get a brand-new quota and brand-new targets. There’s an air of possibility as we think,

• “This year is going to be different.
• “This year, I’m going to crush my numbers.”
• “Hit my income targets.”
• “Make it to President’s club.”
• “Get a promotion.”
• “Finally, close that dream account I’ve been chasing.”

But if you don’t take a moment to reflect on what worked and what didn’t, you’re likely to find yourself repeating the same missteps. Reflection is like an internal debrief—a chance to say, “Here’s what happened, here’s why, and here’s how I’m going to fix it.”

Clarity Arises From Reflection

Let me give you a personal example. A the beginning of last year I set a goal for my sales training company Sales Gravy. This was a big, bold visionary goal that would transform our organization and ultimately double our sales.

I proudly and confidently told my team that it was going to happen. And then, in an embarrassing crash and burn, I failed miserably.

Certainly I could have stewed in regret, beating myself up and allowing my self-talk run wild about how I fell short. But that would have been a waste of time and energy.

Instead, I chose reflection. I asked myself, “What happened and why didn’t I achieve this goal?” As I mulled over those questions, the answers came more clearly than I expected.

One of the biggest insights I gained was that I’d set this big goal but didn’t establish system or plan to make it happen. You see, a goal without a system is basically just a wish—as they say, “hope is not a strategy.”

Build a System the Supports Your Goals

If, for example, you set a goal to prospect a hundred potential customers per week, but you haven’t built a disciplined daily routine, built targeted lists, set aside specific times for calls, and created accountability checkpoints, it’s not going to stick. Life will get in the way. Sooner or later, your big, bold goal gets overshadowed by a million other tasks. Without a system for achieving the goal you quickly succumb to discipline fatigue.

This is exactly what happened to me. At the start of last year, I was fired up about my big goal. I was confident, energized, excited and believed that I could make the goal to happen just by saying that it would.

Then my sales team started knocking it out of the park bringing in new clients and the work started to pile up. I was traveling, speaking, training, advising clients, writing a book, running the OutBound Conference and dealing with everyday business firefights. Because I didn’t have a system in place to support my audacious goal, as the grind wore me down and my discipline began to fatigue, I slowly but surely drifted off course.

In my case, I realized that with a goal this big, the hubris to believe that I could just manifest it with my enthusiasm was a failing strategy.

Instead, I needed to hire more talent. To make this goal a reality, I needed people who could lead the way and keep this project on track. I also needed to build a systematic, step-by-step system for achieving the goal.

Upon reflection, I’m grateful for my massive failure because it forced me to change my approach to leadership, add amazing new people to my team, and get much more dialed in with our strategic business planning process.

This is exactly why reflection can be your best friend at year end. It allows you to own your failures without letting them define you, and it helps you leverage your successes by pinpointing what you did right.

Regret says: “You messed up. You’ll never fix this. It’s too late.”

Reflection says: “You messed up. Now let’s find out why, learn from it, and do better next time.”

A Step-by-Step Reflection Process

My challenge to you this week is to carve out time to reflect on your past year.

1. Set aside 30 minutes of silence—it could be your living room early in the morning before anyone else wakes up, your car parked somewhere peaceful, or a walk in a park without your earbuds in. Turn off all of your devices. If you’re like most people, silence is a rarity. We’ve got phones buzzing, TVs blasting, kids running around, text messages pinging, and social media notifications lighting us up. Therefore you will need to be intentional about finding and creating a silent place to reflect.
2. Close your eyes and mentally journey through the year—start in January. What were your big goals? What was happening in your world at that time? Then move to February, March, April, and so on.
3. Celebrate wins—which deals closed that made you proud? Which new relationships or connections had a big impact? What personal milestones did you hit? What did you accomplish?
4. Identify winning behaviors—what were the behaviors, mindsets, and disciplines that led to these wins? How can you turn them into repeatable habits?
5. Acknowledge failures or misses—what didn’t go right? What deals did you lose? Why did you lose them? Which goals stayed out of reach? What opportunities slipped by? Where, when, and how did you fail yourself or let down the people around you?
6. Dig into failure—don’t just accept failure, ask “Why?” Find the lessons and identify the behaviors and mindsets that held you back. Commit to changing them.
7. Embrace gratitude—it’s so easy to fixate on negatives. Instead, identify the silver linings. Afterall, it’s the journey, rather than the destination that makes life truly meaningful. Embracing the journey is a key to developing a fulfilling and optimistic outlook as you enter the new sales season.

Here’s the big takeaway: Regret is the enemy of progress, Reflection is the catalyst for growth.

Get your New Year off to a winning start with Jeb Blount’s popular on-demand course: The Essentials of Setting Winning Goals