Episode 47: The Process of Regular Reflection

Tapping into the process of regular reflection.  How we keep our goals in front of us. 

Intentional Optimism - Your Vehicle for Personal Growth:

1. Optimistic = The hull, the vehicle that gets you from island A to island B.
2. Present = The centerboard - keeps you upright, focused, centered.
3. Energetic = The sail - captures & harnesses the wind, propelling you forward.
4. Courageous = The rigging - holds everything together in proper tension, resilience. 
5. Wise = The rudder - keeps you on track, heading in the right direction.
6. Intentional = Setting everything up to properly capture the wind.

Topics discussed in this episode: 

PURPOSE OF REFLECTION

1. Helping us remember what we said we were going to do or become - because we forget.
2. Keeping us from getting distracted by circumstances or opportunities that take us away from our goal - because we get distracted.
3. Providing regular time stamped mile markers that provide proof of progress or point to the need for a trajectory adjustment - because we get discouraged.

YOUR TURN:   Give yourself the gift of looking and learning

1. Walk through what you have
2. Review where you are now vs where you wanted to be
3. Give yourself some grace

NEXT STEPS

• Remember
  • Write them down
  • Schedule regular review times
  • Find a buddy and do it together
  • Accountability Partner or community
• Distractions
  • Keep your goals in front of you (post-its)
  • Decide what you will and will not pay attention to
  • Turn OFF things that you know distract you
• Discouragement
  • Share the load with others
  • Recalibrate - instead of step 10 you might need to go back to step 5
  • Do some weeding - thoughts, attitudes 

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

You're listening to Intentional Optimists, the public house for unconventional leaders, where you'll find inspiration, learn to discover and develop your own strengths, and hear from inspiring women just like you who are making a difference in their community. Who knows? You just might find yourself stepping up as the next unconventional leader right where you are. I'm your host, Andrea Johnson, the original intentional optimist. Hey everybody, welcome to episode 47. This is Andrea Johnson, and I am excited to be back in the solo podcaster seat with you today because I have something really important I want to talk about. This process is something that I find very few people know how to do, and even when they know how to do it, not very many people actually follow through with it. This is the process of regular reflection. Now, we are smack dab in the middle of what my mom would call high summer. Having been already on vacation, which is unusual for me, we went in June, and normally we go later summer, like August. But coming back from vacation at the end of June, I kind of hit July 1st with the force of a Mac truck. Or maybe July 1st hit me with the force of a Mac truck. And it kind of knocked me on my rear end. I mean, six months into the year, I really had to take stock. Now, there are ways in which I was ready to do that and ways in which I wasn't. Some things hit me that I wasn't expecting. And I'll share a little bit about some changes that are coming and some those are they're all really good, right? But let me tell you where I am six months into the year, right? I'm very goal-oriented. I set goals, I I practice them, I set yearly. If you've listened to anything from me, like especially if you're in my Facebook group or in my collaborative community, which is all goal-oriented, you know that I kind of set big goals for the year, and then I break them down into six-month goals and three-month goals, and then I kind of work on a monthly basis where I say, all right, in order to achieve the three-month goal, what do I need to do this month? And in order to hit the six-month goal, what do I need to do this month? And then I break those down into weekly, what do I need to do? Because, man, if I just said I want to do such and such, I'm not gonna necessarily do it. I have to tell myself, these are the steps you need to take. So, what I had done this year for the first time is I put a business retreat on my calendar. And what that means is I have a coach buddy named Lee, and we sit down, we've done it twice now, um, on a quarterly basis, and we do our own business planning in one space. We used a conference room from a friend earlier, and this year we, or excuse me, this month, we actually just went to my church and used my fellowship hall. We don't actually go through each other's stuff, but it means that we're setting aside the time on a regular basis to walk through our own business and our own goals, even if you don't have a business, setting aside this the time specifically to walk through it and say, where am I now? And where do I want to be and how am I going to get there? So even though I had a business retreat on the calendar for July 5th, which was a holiday, which was great, um, I also have a journal that I've shared about before and maybe I haven't shared as much here. But if you're in my Facebook group, I've even shared the exact type of journal I use. So I'm happy for you to drop me a line and say, hey, Andrea, where is that stuff? I can point you in all the right direction. But I get through about one of my journals that I love, just plain ruled journal. I get through one of those in about six months. So by the end of June, I knew I was gonna need a whole new one for July. So I use about two in a year. But as I picked up that new one, I started looking back to the very beginning of my first one. And I looked back at my goals that I wrote in December, and I realized, oh my goodness, I forgot I wrote some of that stuff down. Wow, I already accomplished that. Or, wow, I already did that thing, or man, I don't know that I was really serious about it at that time, or I know I was serious about it then, and then I totally forgot, but I got serious about it three weeks ago, right? So some of the things I had accomplished, but some things I hadn't. I hadn't even worked on some of them, and had three really big ones, and I'll tell you about one in a minute, but the problem that I saw was I wasn't actually, even though even though I planned to do it, even though I knew I was going to do it, and I knew how important it was, I didn't properly reflect on a regular basis to make sure I was on the right trajectory with at least one of my goals. So the question for me that I have for you and that I want to help you with today is how do you keep your goals at the front of your mind? How do you make sure that you're on track on a regular basis? Well, you have to do regular reflection. It's just something we need to do. So today we're gonna walk through why we need to do it, the purpose, how we do it, because I want to encourage you to reflect now. I don't want you to wake up in October and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, where did the year go? I want you to be able to wake up in October and say, Awesome, I have accomplished the things I said I was going to do by this time, and I have three months left in the year, and I'm gonna really sprint for it, right? That's what I want you to be able to do. So, first I'm gonna walk through three reasons or benefits of why we need to reflect. Let me tell you what those are. You ready? The first one is we forget. Yep, all the time. None of us has the memory we think we do. Like I said, when I went back to December of 2020, looking at the things I wrote down, just reviewing that, just looking through it, saying, all right, I'm about to start a new journal. What did I write in the old one at the very beginning of it? Showed me what I had forgotten. So tell me, can you name all the goals that you set in January? Maybe you sit down in December as well, so go back to December. Or can you name the goals that you set in June? March? Any of them? I forget if I don't rewrite them and redo them every month. So the first thing is we forget. None of us has the memory we think we do. The other thing is, y'all, life happens. Sometimes dramatic life. We are hopefully returning to more of a normal life after 18 months of a global pandemic. But that has affected all of us. I heard someone the other day talk about on a podcast how she said going into the pandemic was kind of easy. It was just we rally the troops and we do what we need to do. But coming out of that pandemic, it's like, I'm a totally different person. How do I relate to all these other people who are totally different people, right? This is dramatic changes in your life, and it causes us to forget some of the things that we said we were gonna do. I also have changes in my family, some really good ones. But that's drama, right? I mean, it's not drama drama, but it's like dramatic, it's big, it's good stuff. We went on the first vacation we'd been on in two years, and we went to Hawaii, and it was gorgeous, but getting there was 23 and a half hours, and then we went on this amazing trip around the Nepali coast that took us about two days to get over. So there's a lot of stuff that happens in life, and it causes us to just completely forget. The New Testament writer James takes a really interesting look at how we forget. He likens the inability to remember what the gospel is or the teachings of Jesus or however you want to describe that. He likens that to looking in a mirror, studying all the details in our face, and then walking away and forgetting our eye color or our hair color or the shape of our nose, all of that. And you know, life is 360 degrees. It's body, mind, soul, and spirit. And as a life coach, when I work with people, that's how I approach it. So when I think about my inability to remember things, I am literally that person that James is talking about. I look in the mirror and I am surprised by what I see. I'm still surprised. I've talked about that before. I might totally forget my eye color or forget the fact that I have all these blonde highlights in my hair. So that's body. I'm surprised by what I see. But when I talk about mentally, do you remember what you studied in high school? I don't. I don't remember half the stuff I studied in grad school. I don't remember the stuff I studied to take the latest certification exam that I took. Now, granted, I know how to do what I am certified in, but I've forgotten what the individual answers are. And then spiritually, that's what James was talking about. James tells me that as a human, that's what I do. I forget things. That's 75% of my whole life experience. So it stands to reason that I would also forget what's important to my soul, to move me forward, to be fulfilled. We forget. This is why we need to reflect. We need to go back and say, wait, what? Right? Number two, we get distracted. Again by life, but really, I mean, we're all emerging, hopefully, completely from this pandemic, but there's big, happy stuff going on in my family. My dad is getting married four and a half years after losing my mom. This is a big happy thing for two families. There's babies being born in the next generation of my extended family. This is all amazing stuff, and it's all very distracting. We get distracted by new opportunities. You know, I'm a John Maxwell team certified speaker trainer and coach, and there are big changes happening there. Amazing opportunities for really good leadership training and teaching others and equipping and empowering others. And gosh, if I tried to take advantage of every single thing that they offered, I wouldn't get anything done. But I've been asked to be interviewed on other people's podcasts. I've been asked to speak at conferences. These are all amazing opportunities. And if I'm not careful, they can distract me from what my initial specific goals are. But you've heard this before, and I know I'm not alone, but I am a shiny object lady. I really love to be able to go, I don't want to. I don't want to be the person that likes to get rich quick schemes. I love the idea of an overnight success, but the reality is that's never how it works out, right? And so what happens is we follow these shiny objects rather than sticking to the path of our goals. Fortunately, I have really dear friends who are really good about saying, hello, shiny object thing there. I also have a business coach who is literally understands my disc type because that's something else I do. And he he said to me on the call the other day, he said, Andrea, I know that for this next big transition that you're making, you are a high eye, right? I'm a high influencer, and because of that, I love to be doing all the things. I like to have my finger in all the pots, just really make it fun. And he says, So I think we need to focus on one thing. One? Only one, I said. Really? Because I have like ten. I just want to do at least ten. And he's like, let's just do one. Then you can do number two and then number three and number four. He said, You'll get there, but you need to be careful to focus on just one thing. So not only do we forget, but we also get distracted. And third, and this I know is very real for many of us, is that we get discouraged. Again, life. Now, many of you have suffered hard things in the last six to 18 months. I do not at all underestimate what some of you have been through. I know I am blessed. I am blessed to have a supportive spouse, an intact nuclear family, a job that I can leave of my own accord and my own volition and my own decisions, which is that's my other big main, my other big main goal that I wanted to accomplish. And that's actually happening this year. But some of the goals that we set may not be reachable. Maybe your plan was just off a little bit. Maybe it was something that you needed like five other steps in there to accomplish rather than just, you know, maybe you set for five steps, but you really needed 10. And maybe it was something that you needed a different skill set for and you thought you had it, but so all those things go into whether or not a goal is reachable. Maybe your circumstances have changed. Perhaps you no longer have the time or the money to be able to pursue this goal that you've set for yourself. And sometimes you just have a new challenge. Maybe you're no longer the big fish in a small pond. Maybe, oh gosh, maybe you started a podcast last summer when people were saying, What's a podcast? And this summer they're saying, Oh, I'm listening to five different podcasts. And you realize there's 50,000 new podcasts out there, and you think, good grief, I'm gonna be discouraged because there's too many podcasts out there for people to listen to. Well, here's the deal: you're listening to me because you want to listen to me, and you're my audience, but it's so easy to get discouraged with all those things. And here's what happens: when we don't reflect, when we forget, when we get distracted, when we get discouraged, we neglect our goals and our dreams, and the natural order takes back over. The easiest place to see this is someplace like, you know, on the big dramatic scale, like the Amazon, where the ancient civilizations there built beautiful cities, and now it just looks like mountains and hills, right? They're no longer tended, and so nature has just taken right back over. Personally, the last six to eight months, I have been really working hard building my business and doing all the things on top of my regular job and being a pastor's wife and being a mom. And I have not tended my garden. And I got out there last. Well, I have a lot of gardens around my property, but I got out there last Saturday morning and I had to literally take out the edging stones because the weeds and the grass had grown in between the stones. They took over. It looked like I had lawn inside of my flower bed, and that makes me very sad. But as I was pulling those weeds out, I thought, gosh, this is exactly what I have to do on a regular basis because all of those thoughts that we don't need, those are the weeds that grow. Those are the weeds that take over and they tell us, nope, this was never there. You never had this dream, this was never an opportunity for you, this was never a goal. And the reality is, it is a dream. It is a goal. And when we reflect and we pull out those weeds and we take back over the landscape that is our destiny and where we want to go, you can see the flower bed, you can see the shape of it. Now you can see the perfectly round shape of it around my sidewalk. And I mean, within minutes, my son comes out, he goes, Whoa, that's amazing, mom. I'm like, I know, look, you can see dirt. And I mean, I haven't even mulched it, but the ground is now tilled back up. It's ready for putting new plants in. It's a beautiful sight to see without all the weeds. So as we look at all of these things that cause us to not reflect or why it's important to reflect, let me wrap it up and say with those three things, the purpose of reflection is that it helps us remember what we said we were going to do or become because y'all, we forget. Number two, it helps us from getting distracted by circumstances or opportunities that take us away from our goal because y'all, we get distracted. And number three, it provides regular, time-stamped mile markers that provide proof of progress or point to the need for a trajectory adjustment. Because y'all, we get discouraged. We're humans, we live on this planet. This is how it works. So these are the tools that we need to cultivate and to move forward and to make sure that the point on the horizon is exactly where we want to be. And sometimes, you know, if going back to my sailing motif, if you if you think about all the wind and the rain that can come through and all the circumstances, it'll take you off that mark. If you've got clouds on the horizon, you may not be able to see. But once you clear that off and you can see, then you know exactly where you need to go. So now it's your turn. It's time for you to take some time to reflect. Please, I beg of you, as we are sitting in this beginning of the second half of 2021, set aside at least 30 minutes and give yourself the gift of looking. Even if you don't like what you see, even if you haven't accomplished any of your goals, give yourself that gift of looking and learning. First, just walk through what you have. Even if it's a social media feed, if you don't have a calendar or a journal, or if you didn't write down your goals earlier in the year, this is a great time to start. Where are you now in July in relation to where you had hoped or you wanted to be when you looked at July from January? When you looked forward in January or December and said, Where do I want to be in the summer of 2021 or in December of 2021? Where are you in relation to that right now? Then give yourself a little grace. We all need it. Even if you've suffered no ill effects from the pandemic, your job is intact, your family is intact, um, all of that stuff. Just give yourself a little grace, right? Next, move forward with a few important steps. How do we do that? Okay, first, if we're going to remember instead of forgetting, you need to write them down. Write every goal down. I like having a journal where I write things on a monthly basis. I like having a calendar that has, or a planner that actually has a spot that gives me the opportunity to write down my goals at the beginning of every month. And next, in order to remember, schedule yourself regular review times. Just take that one little step of discipline and make sure that you have time to review. Third, find a buddy and do it together. My friend, my coach friend Lee and I, we don't actually go through each other's businesses. We don't really coach each other, we don't do anything. We're just in the same space, knowing that we're both doing it. And we might say, I'm gonna do this for the next four hours or two hours, and then we're gonna take a walk, right? We'll share. I'm gonna work through this, and then when we get it done, we say, Yay, and then we go take a walk, right? But find a buddy to do it together. And if you don't have a buddy to do that together, maybe, or maybe you do have that, but you need something a little more intense, find yourself an accountability partner or a community. Having an accountability community really helps. And I'm gonna tell you about one in just a second. Okay, so that's the first way in order to not forget, but to remember, that's what you're gonna do. The next piece is how do you manage your distractions? Well, number one, you keep your goals in front of you. I have a client who's so totally into having post-it notes on her mirrors and on her dresser. We joke about it. She is a professional woman. I mean a high-powered professional, very successful woman. And she said, Andrew, I can't believe I need to have post-it notes. I'm like, why? To me, if all I needed was post-it notes, I'd be thrilled. So, whatever it takes, keep your goals in front of you. Next, decide what you will and will not pay attention to, right? I'm a high eye on the disc scale. If you don't know what you are and you find yourself very distracted, you might be a high eye. I can help you with the disc thing, and that helps you understand how you communicate. But for me, I have to pretty much say, all right, I'm gonna focus on one thing. And when I get that one thing done, then I get to move on to the next thing. I don't like being linear. I literally talk about being linear as a fault. But sometimes I have to do that in order to accomplish it. So, what is it that you need to not pay attention to? Maybe it's great opportunities coming in the door, and you just need to, like me, make a list of them and say, all right, as soon as I get this done, I'm gonna evaluate those and see what I need to do next. And then the other piece you can do is turn off the things you know distract you. If it's social media, if it's the radio, if it's certain friend groups, if if it's, um, I don't know, I had to turn off literally things were distracting me, like the fact that I was forgetting that I had a boxed meal service that I was skipping, and then one would just arrive on my door and be like, oh, darn it, I meant to skip that one. Well, finally I just said, you know what? That's a distraction. I'm turning it off. I can always turn it back on if I need to. So there are certain subscription things I've turned off in order to do that. So that's how you manage some distractions. But how do you manage the discouragement that comes with the difficulty or the inability to accomplish your goals? First, share the load with others. It's always easier when the load is shared. You've got to find some people, some ladies, whomever, to confide in and to um and to collaborate with and to lift you up and encourage you. Next, recalibrate. This is a big one. We do this every month in my my community launch from the beach. We talk about recalibrating because instead of step being on step 10, which you thought you might need to be, you may need to go back to step five, right? So if we get to week three of the month and we say, Am I gonna be Able to in the next week make the goal that I set for the month, great. That's perfect. But if I am not, I might need to recalibrate number one, either what I'm doing this week or what my goal is for this month. And I need to be realistic and I need to be smart and I need to make it something that's just on the edge of really pushing it so that it's not something that's too hard and I get discouraged. And then the last piece is do some weeding. Weed out thoughts, attitudes, ideas, things that are not serving you. This is something that life coaches are especially good at helping you do. If it's not me, find somebody who can help you do this, even if it's just another friend. Or if it's just you and a piece of paper, write down some of those thoughts that are keeping you discouraged rather than encouraging you. Find Facebook group communities like The Intentional Optimus, where you can find some really positive stuff and some encouragement along the way. There's all kinds of tools and things available to you. But normally I tell you exactly what kinds of speaking of tools, tools to use, but these this time are all you. The tools are you, your ideas, your brain. You've got to sit down and do this yourself. You have to give yourself the time to reflect. So if you've not been journaling, even if you just write down four things a day or three things a day, what do I want to get done today? I don't care if you put 10 things in the spiral notebook every day, whatever, but write them down now. If you write your goals down now, then you have something to reflect on. Even if it's a wall calendar, I have quite a few wall calendars in my house. They all function for different things. Um, the one I'm looking at now is marking off the days till my last day at my job, which is August 13th. But the one upstairs tells my son which day he gets to pick the movie for family movie night. It's just right there, very clear. That way we know we have it, it's set up, that way we have it right in front of us. It's it's a tool that works. If you need something simple like that, that's all it takes. Now, you might be asking, or maybe you're not, because I'm the intentional optimist. Andrea, where does reflection fit into intentional optimism? Oh, like everywhere, but let me give you just a few examples. It helps you be proactive, which builds your optimism. It helps keep you future oriented. Even though you're reflecting backwards, it helps keep you focused on the future because you say, Oh, I didn't get where I want to be, so now I'm gonna do it this way. It builds your curiosity. Why didn't I get there? How could I get there differently? What kind of goals could I set if I actually changed my mindset? It helps you hone your skills and build your energy. Lordy have mercy. If I had a dime for every scale I had to play in order to be able to play Mozart, I'd be a rich woman. But I wouldn't because I didn't actually play the scales, because I didn't actually get there. But when you hone your skills, like podcasting, right? Constantly doing it, putting it out there, being on a regular schedule, it when you say, I'm gonna reflect and look back, this helps build your skills, right? It also builds your resilience. How many times do I have to go back and say, oh, every month I didn't accomplish that goal? All right, I'm setting it again for this month, and this is how I'm gonna change the way I'm gonna approach it. And it builds your resilience to help you keep getting back up and getting back up. It also helps you plan. When you know that you want to, like me, quit your job so that you can do your business full time and be completely self-employed employed and reach more and more people, then it actually helps you set a plan for accomplishing that very thing. And all of this is just part of the practical application of intentional optimism, which is what I do with my coaching clients and in my collaborative community launch from the beach. Now that's it for today, my friend. But the show notes contain all the ways you can find me. Let me know how I can help you make the second half of 2021 all or more than you could even imagine. Until next time. Hey, thanks for listening today. If you're an intentional optimist and you love this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review with a five-star rating. You can also snap a screenshot right where you're listening, share it to social media, and tag me. This helps others find us and we'll have an even bigger impact. If you're curious what it would be like to work more closely with me, or just to step up as an unconventional leader yourself, we invite you to schedule a free discovery session to talk with me and learn more. Just email me at Android at the intentionaloptimist.com. If you're looking for an encouraging and uplifting community on Facebook, hop on over and join the Intentional Optimist group, women encouraging women from all over the globe. The community and email links are right here in the show description wherever you listen to the podcast. Until next time, remember, you're the answer. You are the future of leadership and the role models for future generations.