The Power of Reflection
Our willingness to reflect is the speed limit of progress. Long-term reviews are one of our highest ROI opportunities as elite performers—yet we skip them or don't take the practice seriously.
Have you ever tried traveling to a new place without using a map? That's what life feels like without regular reflection. We lose sight of where we are and have little sense of where to head next.
It doesn't need to be this way. Reflection can be your springboard for making your dent in the universe.
In this free training session, Chris Sparks shows how to leverage the potential of long-term reviews. You will walk away with a process for celebrating your wins and revealing your biggest opportunities.
This training is a preview of Review & reVision, a workshop where Chris leads you through his time-tested process for revealing your most valuable lessons, clarifying your long-term vision, and accelerating progress towards your goals.
Video recording above; audio recording, resources mentioned, and the audio transcript below.
Resources mentioned:
Additional Forcing Function Links:
Experiment Without Limits (peak performance workbook)
Conversation Transcript:
Note: transcript is slightly edited for clarity.
Chris (00:00): Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Power of Reflection. It's great to see some familiar faces in the room. I'm very excited to have you here. My name is Chris Sparks, and before I dive in, just a quick introduction of who I am and why we're here today.
So, at Forcing Function, I teach a select group of twelve of the world's brightest executives and investors my framework for becoming an elite performer. And at Forcing Function we have four elements of performance. So this is how I support my clients that I work with. These four elements are vision, prioritization, systems, and presence.
So, when we talk about vision, I'm thinking about how can we design a life in alignment with our top values? So, two components there. Knowing what is important to you, and knowing what a life looks like where you live in alignment with that.
Prioritization. So, moving your most important goals forward. Having the things that are first in your life come first.
Systems. We talk a lot about systems around here. In a broad sense, it makes the things that you want to do easier to do. Especially the things that we are doing on a regular basis. Can we streamline them, get more leverage from them?
And then finally, presence. And it's inherent to the word, but being in the present moment, showing up as your best self consistently, every day. What do you need to have in place so the best version of you is here in the room?
Today, this training is to celebrate and preview our inaugural cohort of Review & reVision, a new workshop that we've put together, which we're really excited about. The first edition kicks off on June 29th, the end of this month. And you can see what we're trying to accomplish here. We want to help you celebrate your wins, reveal your opportunities for improvement, get clarity on that vision for the future, and use that to create your actionable roadmap so you can put that vision and take it into reality. Choose your own adventure, as we like to say around here.
So today, we're going to step back, and we're gonna review the six months of 2022, and help you create that roadmap for the second half of the year.
Now, the idea with this workshop is that not only do you ensure that you show up—as Woody Allen would say, that is eighty percent of the battle, is getting yourself to show up, put pen to paper, do some of this work. But also, we want to make sure that you get the most out of this process. We've been doing these reviews on our own as part of our company philosophy. Any time we do a quarterly review, this is really core to the way we do things, and we've really iterated a lot on this approach to make sure that we get the maximum amount of learning and value and actionable lessons in the minimum amount of time and effort. So by showing up, we will ensure that you get the most out of this reflection process.
Also, the wonderful thing about making this as a workshop is that you will be surrounded by other wonderful teammates to support you, inspire you, and give you feedback. More details on that later, but if you're interested, hope you can join us, check out reviewandrevision.com for more details.
Before I kick off, just a couple logistical items for those of you guys who are new around here. I'm gonna be talking about twenty-five minutes today, sharing some of my best practices for reflection. We're gonna have a short Q&A at the end. If you have a question, go ahead and use the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen to submit that question; it makes it easier to find. Anyone can go in, view those questions, upvote them. I'm gonna ask whatever questions get upvoted the most. If you don't ask a question, I'm gonna make up questions. So if it's something you wanna hear, anything is up for grabs. Let me know. Definitely gonna be leveraging the chat a little bit today, hold you accountable, putting this framework into practice.
So, some of you guys are in there already. If you haven't been already, you know, don't make this awkward. It feels a lot better if I feel like I'm talking to some other humans on the other side. Be present, participate, engage, we love to hear what you think. My hope is that you walk away with a little bit of clarity and conviction on what you can do to raise your game this year.
If you have to leave early, no worries. We're recording this. The recording and the transcript's gonna be sent to your email on Tuesday, so keep an eye out for that.
So, let's return to these four key elements of performance. Vision, prioritization, systems, and presence. Because repetition is not redundancy, there's a certain theme that comes up here. What is the commonality amongst achieving all of these elements? In my mind, it's reflection. So thinking about vision, how are you going to achieve your vision if you haven't reflected on what's important to you? Or if you don't regularly check to see, "Am I living in alignment with what's important to me?" Thinking about prioritization, well, first you have to know what your top priorities are. Are you reflecting that these priorities are moving forward? Are you taking a look at where your time is going and seeing, hey, is the way that I'm spending my time a reflection of my priorities? That the more often we are coming back to what we want to achieve in what we are doing, the more quickly we can iterate and move on that most direct path to what we want to accomplish.
Thinking about systems, well, we regularly reflect, "Hey, what am I getting done? How are those things getting done? Can I be more effective? Can I streamline this? What are the eighty/twenty of the things that I am doing? How can I perhaps delegate or at least create some process to make the things that I want to do easier to do?
And then finally, presence. What is the best possible version of myself and what elements do I see that correlate with that? What—I like to think about, I will show up if I create the conditions for showing up. So, this reflection helps to identify when I show up the way that I want to, what else is going on? What are those habits, those rituals, pieces of my environment, people around me that support me in being the best possible version of myself? That's why we say around here that your ability to reflect is the speed limit for your improvement. That you will only grow to the extent that you are willing to be self-aware, to take a hard look at yourself.
The Improvement Loop
This is probably my favorite image in Experiment Without Limits, for those of you guys who checked out our peak performance workbook. It's deceptively powerful. So, first, the concept of a feedback loop is that the outputs feed back into the inputs. Right? The classic saying is, "Garbage in, garbage out." So everything that we do, we receive feedback from reality. This is how things are going, and we incorporate that feedback into what we do next time. We're always checking in. "Hey, this thing I'm doing, how is it going? How am I doing?" That measurement, that feedback changes our action. And something that I like to say is that your speed of growth is proportional to the tightness of your feedback loop. How quickly you can say, "All right, this is how things are going, I'm reflecting, and all right, based on that reflection I'm gonna change my approach," how quickly are you able to pivot, iterate, and incorporate the feedback that you are receiving into upgrading your approach so that all the time you are continually approaching a idealized process?
And another thing that really helps here is that there are a lot of paths towards achieving our goal. A classic example that I give is, hey, if you want to become a standup comedian, you could do that by watching every single Netflix special ever created, or you can hop on stage and start telling jokes. One of those is a little bit more of a direct path. And receiving this feedback allows you to track most closely to your intended destination. Because most actions that we do have little or no effect.
So, looking at this improvement loop, let's start with planning. Before we do anything, let's decide what the best thing to do is, and how we're going to do it. And then we put that plan into action. We do what I call experimentation, which is I am going to try things and I am gonna see what happens. I'm being aware, I'm paying attention. And then based off the results of these experiments, we reflect. How did that go? What did I learn, what can I do differently for next time? And that reflection becomes incorporated to improve the plan for next time, allowing us to choose the version of reality that we want to create.
And when we think about how we achieve what we want to achieve, I like to say, we optimize for the derivative. I know it's been a long time since college math class, but the derivative is the speed of change. It's not just, "Am I changing?," but, "Am I changing faster over time? Am I accelerating?" So thinking about what is the curve of your trajectory. Not only are you improving, but are you improving faster? I like to think of myself as this product in perpetual beta, where my goal is to minimize the length of my iteration cycles, where Version Chris 99.0 to 99.1 doesn't take much time. I'm much further along in the shipping version than others who are around me. So, we plan, we experiment, we reflect, we're continuously in every dimension of our lives in one of these stages, and we're trying to move through these stages as quickly as we can.
So, why do we reflect? Well, I like to think that a good review does four things. First, we deconstruct success. So, very simply, what is working? And I ask this question to you guys in the email of, if you know what's working, that's the best place to start. We always wanna think about, hey, these are all the other things that I could be doing. It's like, well, you're—This thing is already working for you. Can you do more of that? Why don't you start by doubling down what we already know works?
The other element is I think we just don't celebrate enough. Very important to achieving anything of any level of ambition is staying in the game. And how do you stay consistent, how do you continue to persevere over time? You have to stay motivated. And that comes from celebrating your wins no matter how small. So this is a really important but overlooked part of reflection, is what is going well? Can we celebrate and build upon that?
The second reason that we reflect is to distill lessons. So, this is looking under the rug, "What isn't working?" And if we know what isn't working, that becomes an invitation to create a new experiment. Something that we can try that perhaps will have a different outcome. That we are collecting this feedback from reality, and reality's telling us, "Hey, you could probably be doing this differently and get a little bit better results," or, "This thing that you thought to be true, maybe that isn't so true after all." And the key is, as—You know, Einstein put it best is, the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results. Is that if we are distilling the lessons that we are receiving, we avoid paying tuition for the same mistake twice. That in my mind is really the only way that we can fail, is to keep failing in the same way. I at least wanna fail a little bit more creatively next time.
The overlooked aspect of this, again, is the mental staying in the game. That when we acknowledge a lesson, we are able to seal the container on it. I know something that I struggled with for a long time was beating myself up, feeling guilty, feeling frustrated about something that happened in the past, and feeling like I needed to continually punish myself so I wouldn't repeat that mistake.
Well, this allows you to keep that in the past, because, hey, I have the lesson from this failure. I'm gonna incorporate that into what I do, but I'm gonna move on. I'm starting fresh, I'm starting back from zero. The question I like is, given where I am, what's next? This is where I am. Given that, what should I do next?
The third is assimilating learning. So this is subtly different from lessons. Right? Lessons, we're thinking about, "All right, this didn't go so well, what can we take away from that." Learning is a little bit more general, is, "Hey, what are we learning as we do things? How do we put those learnings into practice?" And one thing that we are learning along the way is we're learning about ourselves. We're learning what's important to us. We're learning what a good life looks like, what we value, what we prioritize. And coming back to these learnings on a regular basis allows for these learnings to shift.
In my mind, the worst thing that I could do would be to run as fast as I can towards a goal that I no longer care about. So it's an opportunity to check in and say, "Hey, why am I here? What am I working towards?" That these will change over time, and that's okay, but I wanna get in touch with what's going on right now. And if I know where I'm going, I can take that most direct path there and identify those milestones along the way, which starts to create some next actions. Not only am I high confidence, high conviction on where I'm going, I start to reveal some of those stepping stones. I start to see, "Oh, well this is a small step I could take in that direction. Okay. I can do that."
The final aspect that I find of a good review is that it generates creative tension. So, when I think about creative tension, I want you to have an image of this rubber band stretching. And it's really taut, and in physics, they say there's this potential energy. Nothing has happened yet, but the tightness, the stretching creates the possibility for massive action. And what is the rubber band stretching between? There are two sides of this. On one hand, we have a clear picture of current reality. So, if you know where you are, you have a really good idea of where you could go from there. So it's like, what is going on? All of those aspects being really clear about that.
The other image is this actionable vision of what you want to create. Something that we do together in Review & reVision, is where are you heading, but thinking about a visualization of that; what are all the elements of that image? Where are you? Who are you with? What are you doing? How do you feel? Why is that important to you? The more that you can fill in the puzzle pieces of this picture, the more you can start to spot the differences between where you are and where you want to be. And that almost becomes a checklist, is, all right, all of these things need to change in order to get to where you want to be. Where do we start?
That tension, holding these two images in your mind simultaneously, "This is where I am, this is where I want to be," this tension demands resolution. It creates its own energetic force that you start to move without even meaning to.
So that's why we reflect. We know it's going well, we identify what's not going well so we don't repeat those mistakes. We assimilate those learnings, so we can incorporate them, understand ourselves better, and we start to generate some momentum towards where we want to head.
So, great. We are reflecting. How do I do that? I know what I want to achieve. How do I do that? I want to show you guys something. I'm gonna switch my 'share' here and share our worksheets.
So, these specifically, we created for this workshop. These are the first time anyone has ever seen mid-year review worksheets. So you might see, we have four sections here. First one, deconstructing success. Take a look at the areas of your life. And then some prompts that we've found work really well over time to view your life from different angles, to identify the things that work for you, the things that are going well.
Then we go to distilling lessons. Let's look under the rug together. What's not going so well? Try to see, "Hey, what are all the things that we could potentially improve?" Not that we aren't good already. We're already doing great. But if we changed some of these things, maybe things would be going even better. And again, some prompts to try to get at, "Hey, how can we shift towards better approaches to what we're doing?"
Then we shift to vision. This is probably my favorite section, getting a sense of why we're here. What do we want? Because at Forcing Function, we're always trying to think about the meta: if we know what we want, we can create the conditions so that we automatically make progress towards achieving this vision of what we want. So, some questions about what we value. Who do we want to be? What are we committed to? What are we moving towards? How do I prioritize, how do I show up?
You can see that a lot of this is very visual. You're thinking about, who is the person that I am going to be? And what I like about this is that we write it as if it's already happened. This is not a hypothetical. This allows us to visualize it much clearer.
And then, hey, this is all very high level, we're all up in the clouds, hey. It'd be great to do all this stuff. How do we get there? Boom. We start planning it. We start making some objective milestones so that we can know how we're making progress and track along the way. "Hey, I'm right on track to achieving this goal when I thought I would." What are those action steps, the things that I can do on a regular basis to get me there?
Everyone loves to skip this step, because hey. These goals are just gonna get us there on their own, aren't they? Well, not in my experience. My experience, the more specific you are about what you want to achieve and what it looks like to get there, the likelihood of achievement skyrockets, and you probably get there much faster. Just saying. So, we've been doing this for a while, and we've identified some best practices that I would love to share with you. I'm gonna scoot back a little bit. Some of them are shared here, some of them we like to keep secret. So, because you're here live, you are fortunate to hear them. A lot of these we try to solve in the creation of the workshop.
So, the first most important thing is the environment. We think that all behavior is contextual, so set up an environment that is conducive to a reflective state. Don't have distractions. Do this in a place that is away from your normal work context. You're sitting at your work desk, you're probably reflecting a lot more about work. You spend the whole time thinking about your job, you're probably doing it wrong. You can operate at a higher level of abstraction.
I like to go somewhere that inspires me. Outdoors are great. We're gonna be on a computer, so maybe that's a little bit hard, but some area of your house, apartment that inspires you, that's quiet, that you can be in this reflective state.
And preparing. Putting yourself in the place to look at yourself and sometimes come up with hard realizations about how things are going that might be different from the way you'd like them to go. So, we created this space for magic, and we're putting ourselves in a mental place to take a hard but gentle, necessary look at ourselves. And something that I really like to do to prepare is to look back at things that are more long-term for me. One of those is our top values exercise, which you guys can do, which is to identify what in life is most important to you, and to have these values in mind. I also like to look at my super long-term goals. I have this vision of what I want to do in twenty-five years. It's super ambitious, man, it'd be crazy to even get a part of the way there, but it puts me in this mindset of, "Wow, I can do anything. I literally can do whatever I want. What do I want to do?" Versus, "Oh, man, it'd be really nice to—." It's really cool to start up at the stars and work backwards from there.
I also at one point wrote out my obituary, and that's another interesting exercise. It's like, well, time is limited. You know, what do I want to do while I'm here on this earth? Like, all of this is just expansion. Getting ourselves in the place to think broadly, deeply, expansively. And the key to a good reflection is to think of it as a brainstorm. So that's why we put, "Keep the pen moving." Just keep writing. Do not judge what you write down. Just because it's on the page doesn't mean you're committed to it, doesn't mean you're going to do it, doesn't even mean you think about it again, but you are externalizing things that are bouncing around your brain, and then once it's on the page you can decide later whether it's resonating or not.
So the more that you get out of your head, the more that you get out of this exercise. And I find when I do this on my own, two minutes in it'll say, "Well, I don't really have anything else to say here, maybe I'll check my email, maybe I'll move on to the next question." And at this workshop, we force you to keep writing. Sometimes that thing you come up with at the minute four, fifty-nine seconds is the thing you needed to hear, that you needed to know to get yourself to that next level. So this mindset is really key. So, we're trying to create curiosity rather than self-judgment. We're trying to create a gentle touch of, "You're already doing well. These are some things you could be doing to do even better." As my spiritual teacher likes to say, to know yourself is to be at peace. The more that you reveal in this workshop, the more you will feel at peace about where you are and where you're going. That's—I can't put a price on that.
And that the opportunities are already there. If we just walk through life with our eyes closed, it doesn't mean that the world isn't outside because we can't see it. The same way, these opportunities for growth or improvement, they're already sitting there, whether you acknowledge them or not. So if you acknowledge them, perhaps you will move towards them.
And you know, all of this is just a jumping-off point to go deeper. The more that you reveal, everything that you write down is a potential conversational bookmark with yourself, something you can return to as a prompt, as an exercise to create your vision board. Whatever it is, this is a jumping-off point to creating the life that you want.
Shifting back. Okay, checking to make sure we can see the slides again.
So, if you guys did this worksheet, these worksheets on your own, if you self-guided your reflection, that would make me so happy. That's all we want. Key to our values here at Forcing Function is we want to open-source everything that we know. We want to create things that high performers find useful and give them away. So if the only thing that I inspire you to do today is to take the time to sit down and ask yourself some hard questions, to come up with some next actions for how you can reduce the gap between where you are and where you want to be, this has been a success. So, hey, if that's you, when is this reflection going to happen? And if you want some support, these worksheets are free to download. Go ahead and click that link.
But perhaps if I've got you this far, I can encourage you to go a little bit further. So, if you'd like to get the most out of this process, let us support you. Just think about how the right lesson, this sense of clarity and direction, could change your trajectory for the rest of this year. This is why we created Review & reVision, to make sure that you get the maximum out of your reflection. So in this workshop, we set a timer, and you write. And somehow, by having us all together in the room, you will go deeper, more will come up, you will get more out of this exercise just by the intentionality that showing up comes out of it. But along the way, we're gonna give you some subtle encouragement, some subtle reframes or tricks that we've found over the years to help you take that next step and go to the next level in your reflection.
You will also be surrounded by awesome people. Like, I can't believe the caliber of people who show up to these. We're gonna do some breakout sessions, and you're gonna have the opportunity to share some things that you've uncovered. This will be fun, this will be gentle. I've found that saying things out loud, it makes them real, and it automatically starts to shift you towards this posture of, "This is something that I'm doing," instead of, "This is something that would be really interesting to think about at some point." You'll reveal things that you already knew, but you couldn't acknowledge 'til you said them out loud.
So these breakout sessions are really fun, and something that we've found really powerful for taking that first step towards realizing those goals. You'll also be really inspired by other people who will be sharing things that they've discovered about themselves. Things that work, things that didn't work, things that they're excited to try, and you will be able to feed off of some of that inspiration.
So, yeah, we've priced this workshop at a small fraction of other offerings. We want to make this a no-brainer for you guys. It's a four-part workshop. You saw those four parts. First part is deconstructing success, second part distilling lessons, third creating your vision, fourth making that vision actionable with goals. And we do not know any other way but to come at this multiple times as an iterative mindset. That you will be tired afterwards, because a lot is going to come up. You're gonna feel like you went on this emotional journey. So having the separation between the different elements will allow your subconscious to work on it in between. This is how we've found that you will get the most out of it.
So as mentioned before, our first session is on June 29th. The opportunity to join us is open until then, so check out Review & reVision for more details.
That is all for me. So, thank you guys so much for joining. I'm gonna be sticking around, would love to hear any questions that you guys have. I am here to not only help you get the most out of your reflection, but hopefully to get the most out of your life. So I'm really appreciative for your guys' presence and for showing up today.
Okay. First question coming in from Brad, thanks Brad. Brad says, "Sometimes when I approach reflection, it feels like there is so much to do, and I start feeling overwhelmed. How do you manage overwhelm?" This is a great question. I think that a failure mode that we often have is we confuse opportunities for threats. So, we see all of these things that we could be doing, and we feel guilty that we aren't doing them or that we aren't further along. And that's why mindset, the way that we bring ourselves to this exercise is so critical. And that's why I always like to say, you are great. Like, wherever you are, you are great already. Like, things are already going so well. You have so much to celebrate. There's so much you have to be grateful for, so many things you have to be proud of. Anything that comes up through this process of reflection is a potential opportunity. It's not an obligation. Nothing you write down is anything that you need to do. This is just acknowledging, "Here are some possibilities, some things that you could explore, experiment with, and be curious to see what happens." That gentle touch, I find, is so critical.
So that's why I try to treat this as a brainstorm. I'm just going to put things onto the page. It's like I'm vomiting onto it, and then once it's on the page I can decide what to do with it. It's like, "Hey, are any of these things that I might want to try?" That's the first step in deciding what we want to do in a day, for example, is, "Here are all the things I could do. Given these options, what's the best thing for me to do given where I am right now?" So acknowledge that overwhelm. If and when it does occur, take a deep breath, take a step back, and say, "I am great. I am enough. Wherever I am is where I needed to be. Given where I am, what might make sense to try next?" And don't feel bad if you get overwhelmed. It happens to all of us. It happens to me all the time. What matters is that very next thing that you do to put yourself back in that level of performance.
That's why we create a lot of space with reflection. Not only between the different modules, but within the day. And the day that I'm going to do heavy reflection to the best extent that I can, I try to avoid going right back to work. It can be like—They say when you dive into the deep water, you need to come back up slowly. David Lynch has this great analogy of, if you want to have big insights, you need to swim in the deep water. That's where all the good stuff is. If you're floating around on the surface, you're not gonna have much interesting come up.
But the deeper that you dive, the slower you need to come back up for air. So on days that I am doing this type of deep reflection, I step away from my normal context to the extent that I can, and I try to create activities afterwards that are self-care related. That are spacious. So I'll go for a long walk without my phone. I'll go do some exercise, like ride a bike. I'll take a bath, I'll go to the sauna, I'll read a really good book. But what I won't do if I can avoid it is hop in and start answering a hundred emails, or go back into that work project that's stressing me out. If I'm operating at this twenty-five-year, five-year, one-year, six-month level, whatever it is, I'm gonna get the bends if I try to come back to the one-minute level of, "Oh, I have to ship this thing before 5:00 PM today."
So, to the extent that you can, again, your depth will be encouraged if you give yourself the space, the intentionality to go deep. So part of getting the most out of this type of practice is what you do before and after. So, come to it with that intentionality, create the space necessary. Hope that's helpful, Brad.
We have time for one or two more questions, if there are questions out there. Anything that touches on reflection, I would love to help. Is there anyone else out there who has a question?
Okay. So I'll share a couple more thoughts off the cuff. The things that have worked for me over the years when reflecting.
First, get away from devices. There's something interesting about physically writing. So, I have my pen, I have my notebook, something that inspires me. And I just try to keep the pen moving. And it's like I'm creating this direct conduit between my brain and my hand, where there's no room for editing, because they're operating at the same speed. I'm thinking and those thoughts are appearing on the page. There's no ability to slow down, edit, judge what I'm writing. And I think this is the best way to harvest my intuition in this way, rather than doing—Writing down the things that I think I should be doing, or the things that I think should be important to me. I'm trying to remove all outside influences and get in touch with what I really want, what do I really think? What do I expect will help me achieve what I want to achieve? And by writing things, it's interesting. That muscle being exercised, there's a full-body resonance that is occurring, where not only do I remember things by writing them down personally versus typing them, but it feels a lot more creative. So, yeah. I'm a little bit of a Luddite, but I like this analog aspect. It's something that I encourage you to do.
Something else that I find interesting, too, is that a lot of my thoughts are contextual. So I'll do things to try to shock myself into a different context.
So, one of the easiest things to do is just to move. Move to a different part of my house, change my posture—You know, I'll go from sitting on a chair to kneeling or sitting on the floor. I have a sit/stand desk, so I'll try standing for a little while, instead of sitting. I'll change the music. Maybe I'll put on something a little bit higher BPM or a little bit more melancholic instead of euphoric. I'll just alter all these variables, and each variable I change I'm bringing a little bit of a different state of mind.
So, if I come back to reflection, which I try to do, particularly to the vision section, I'll come back to it as different versions of myself. Maybe one day I'm over-caffeinated, one day I'm a little bit intoxicated, maybe one day I'm excited, I just had a conversation with my friend. One day I just came out of a forty-minute meditation, and I'm feeling super blissed out. That brings all of these perspectives to bear, I'm getting new perspectives on an unfamiliar problem. That's something that I find pretty effective, because I think personally there are many versions of Chris, and I'm trying to bring the whole team to play.
Good, time for one final question. This question is coming in from Martin. "What do you do with all of your analog notes?" Well, you can see the bookshelf behind me. I put all of the notebooks on the shelf, and the main thing that I have to go back to is the date. So I use—Everything I do, I put it on my calendar, so I'll be able to search my calendar. I'll search for 'reflection', for example, and I'll see the days that I reflected, and I'll be able to go to those days in my notes and go back to them, and see what I thought at a different time. Particularly things that are reflection-related, say the worksheets, for example, when I print them out. I put those into specific folders that I have in a drawer. So I don't—Important that I don't look at these things ahead of time. I want to start my reflection from a blank slate, a blank mind, and see what comes up.
It can be interesting to see things that keep coming up, and it can be interesting to see something that came up last time that did not even occur to me this time. There's insights in both. So I come back to previous snapshots of reflection after the reflection. And again, that can help me start to fill in some of those gaps, as well as to illuminate things that have changed in the period since I last reflected. But I think it's important to emphasize that if you never came back to these notes again, it would still be worth writing down. That it's not the accumulation of these, it's the externalization of all the things that are floating around in your brain that I find really useful. If it's something that is truly interesting, important, useful, actionable, once you've acknowledged it, it will certainly come up again.
So hopefully that comes across, Martin, is I'm really gentle in like, hey, I don't need to like have these notes perfectly organized and like come back to them all the time. I try to keep them in a folder, I try to organize them by date, and when I'm—After I've done a reflection, that's the habit afterwards, is, "Hey," you know, "What are things that I thought in the past? Is there anything interesting here that I can mine from insights?"
Yeah, Divya, great question. So, Divya is asking, "How do I manage productivity and my social life without missing one or the other?" This is the age-old question, and this is a really important one for reflection, is, "Is the way that I'm spending my time a reflection of my values?" I like to share a portfolio metaphor in that I have all of these elements of my life. I have my relationships, I have my health, I have my career, I have my impact and mission, habits, spiritual life, all of these different things, and I'm trying to find some semblance of balance. And in a portfolio when you're investing, sometimes things will be going really well. The number goes up. Sometimes the number goes down. In the same way, sometimes you spend a lot of time in one level of your life and you're getting more returns, and sometimes you're spending a little bit less, or you forget about an aspect of your life. Well, this reflection is your invitation to look at, "Hey, where is my time going, and am I over-indexed or under-indexed in any areas?"
So this could go either way. It's like, "Hey, maybe I should be seeing my friends more. I notice that I'm overworking, I don't have a really good separation between my work life and my personal life. I need to set some boundaries, I need to text some friends, I need to set some plans." That happens to me all the time. I was like, "Wow, I have great people in my life, maybe I should see them more." On the other side, maybe you realize, "All right, I'm not making the progress on my career or in my mission that I would like to make." And so I need to be investing more time in these areas. Well, where is that time going to come from? Maybe there are people in your life who aren't supporting you, who aren't giving you energy, who aren't aligned with where you're trying to go. Maybe you shouldn't be seeing them as often. Or maybe there are things you are doing in your social life where afterwards you're like, "Man, that wasn't a good use of time, that wasn't very fun, I didn't enjoy that, I didn't learn anything." Well, maybe you shouldn't be doing that as much.
But it all comes back to this process of reflection, is, "What is important to me? Where am I? Based on these two things, what makes sense to do next?"
That is all the time that we have for today, guys. Thank you again so much for joining. If you have any questions, please, we'd love to continue the conversation. You're on the, we'll call it an "email course" for Review & reVision. We have a couple more lessons to share with you on how you can get the most out of your reflection, whether or not you're able to join us. But if you are, we do kick off on June 29th. Encourage you to sign up and download those worksheets today.
If you have any questions in the meantime, just reply to one of those emails, and I would love to support you in this reflection process.
Thanks for being here today. See you all soon.