A Reflection Practice to Start Taking Control of Your Life

Do you know how a reflection practice will help you achieve?

In our lives we’re constantly shifting through various courses of action, sometimes by choice, other times because we must. No matter the reasons for a course of action everything leads to a result. It’s these results if ignored that are doomed to repeat. This is where vicious cycles are born, the ones that keep us in self-defeating patterns. If we are to break free of repeating outcomes we need a reflection practice to help trigger the change in actions that lead to undesired results. The question is, how do we recognize our actions and their outcomes to break the cycle?

 Vicious Cycles VS. Reflection Practice

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We all have our own vicious cycles. Those particular triggers that instigate specific destructive actions. They build into one another, killing our productivity, straining our relationships, and beating down our self-esteem. It’s frustrating because we know they’re there. We experience their pain again and again, yet we can’t break the cycle. In fact, if a cycle is around long enough our minds become predisposed to react automatically when a trigger  appears. Our actions in response will be the ones most commonly taken, even if they’ve always lead to an undesired result.

Don’t worry, our brains aren’t trying to sabotage us. It has our best interests at heart. It’s utilizing a system of creating an automatic responses to make sure we have the resources available to react to events in the immediate vicinity we aren’t familiar with. A process that’s essential for survival.

But it comes with a catch, it makes no distinction between a good or bad results. So, If the response we’ve built into an situation creates an undesirable outcome, or if we’re in a situation where we’re forced to take actions. Each time we action with this automatic response, a pattern is established, solidified, and the vicious cycle continues!

To achieve what you never have– you must do what you’ve never done.

To stop and reprogram these automatic reactions we must catch ourselves in the moment of a vicious cycle. This is extremely difficult and in order to achieve it a reflection practice is vital because it allows us to setup a plan to stop the automatic response when it’s triggered. We can reflect on many different levels, but the best place to start is in reflecting on the past year. This higher level view will help us see the bigger patterns we have, the good and the bad. Once we see them we can action on them!

What do you think? Want to give it a try?

Start by looking back on the past year to figure out what went well, what didn’t, what you enjoyed, and what you learned.

With these insights, you can create your benchmark and lay the foundations for the plans that will help you design your best year yet.

STEP 1 OUTCOME 

Complete this step to consolidate your learnings from the previous 12 months and create your baseline from which to plan your year ahead.
With your reflection complete, you know exactly where you are starting from and it’s this clarity that will help you setup the year ahead for success.

ESTIMATED TIME: 20 – 30 minutes
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: End of Year Reflection Worksheet
TOOLS NEEDED: End of Year Reflection Worksheet

Why Reflect?

The 10 Step framework to your Best Year Yet kicks off with reflection.

This is one of the most important stages of the entire process – because you can’t move forward until you’ve first looked back.

Reflection is about the best way to consolidate everything you’ve done and learned in the past 12 months.
If you put your foot on the gas without reflecting, you’ll miss out on all the insights and knowledge the past 12 months have gifted you.

In turn, you’re more likely to make needless mistakes, move forward slower, and even make the wrong decisions.

That’s why reflection is a skill promoted and practiced by some of the world’s top performers and athletes.

They know it can help you learn from your mistakes and make better choices and decisions in the future.

It’s the reason football players (for example) spend WEEKS pouring over every minute and analyzing every play of every game. By understanding who played well and why, they can make informed adjustments going forward – and keep improving their performance.

And you can do the same.

It’s why reflection is an essential component of your best year yet 🙂

So let’s put this theory into practice with an Action Step that you’re going to like a lot.

Action Items

This reflection exercise is one of our FAVORITES.

It’s something we always do at the end of a year – and if a 13-week road map has been particularly significant, we’ll do it again.

It’s a quick and easy way to sense check where you are and give yourself a springboard from which you can move forward powerfully.

To help you reflect, we’ve prepared a worksheet for you to download. It’s called the End Of Year Reflection worksheet and you can download a copy below.

You’ll see from the worksheet that we’ve broken your reflection down into four simple categories.

For this step, you’re going to reflect on FOUR things:

• What brought you JOY
• What brought you SUCCESS
• What made you DISSATISFIED 
• And what FLOPPED!

To make your reflection easy, grab:

– Last year’s calendar
– Any SELF Journals you used over the past 12 months

Then go through them – week-by-week – and pull out any events you want to list on your End of Year Reflection.
Your goal is to create your best year yet so think about all categories – not just your work achievements.

This might include:

– Your relationships
– Your health & well being
– Your personal growth
– Your financial situation
When you’re finished, look for your patterns. For example, is there a correlation between what brought you joy AND success?

Finally, analyze your results by answering the final two questions on your worksheet:

1. How far have you come over the past 12 months? 
When we’re hustling after goals, we can spend too much time thinking about where we still have to go. As a result, we overlook and undervalue the distance we’ve already traveled.
So take a few minutes to appreciate the progress you’ve made.

2. Secondly, get a sense for how you feel about your current trajectory. 
If you were to change nothing, would you be happy with where you’d end up in 12 months time?
For example: How would your health be?  What about your business or your career? Or your relationships.

Here’s why.

To create your Best Year Yet, you have to fill it with things that bring you joy.

Living a life you love (and a life that makes you proud) happens when you craft your day-to-day around the things you enjoy (and the things you’re good at).

Why fill your day with stuff that drags you down if you don’t have to!

Remember, you’ll always do your best work, have the most fun, and enjoy the most success when you’re motivated and energized.

The opposite applies too…

Tasks that leave you dissatisfied absorb a disproportionately large amount of energy – because you will need to dig a lot deeper to get things done.

What’s more, you’re more likely to procrastinate and squander your time. You probably won’t do your best work. And you’ll feel more drained at the end of the day too.

So for a better performing year, you’ll need to proactively double-down on the things that bring you joy and success. And swap out things that flopped and left you dissatisfied.

It’s a super simple formula that lays the foundations for your best year yet.

https://blog.bestself.co/productivity/journals/reflection-practice-taking-control/
by James Calderon