But the topic I want to talk to you about today is reflection. And the reason, hello, Katie. The reason I want to talk to you about that is this, you know, this time of year, we get super busy, right? It's the last quarter of the year. We're trying to get a lot of stuff done. We're also managing family and relationships. and we've got the holidays and shopping and all these kinds of things. And so we're super busy, but we're also already kind of gearing down for next year. We're trying to kind of get things started before everyone else. We're trying to get organized. And what happens is we fail to lose probably the most critical thing we could possibly be doing, not just in our business, but in our life. And that's taking some time to reflect and this topic of reflection. And the reason this always comes up for me in the December timeframe is one of my best mentors I've ever had, Robert Stuburg, always talks to me and tells me he takes the last two weeks of the year off. And it's counterintuitive to what you would think because most people are like, let's get going and get started ahead of everyone else. but there's so much importance when you put to this idea of reflection or recovery, which are two different topics. I want to talk about the reflection today, but like anything else, you can't grow unless you have the recovery part. When you're working out, you have to stress your muscles, but you got to recover because the growth is in the recovery. The growth is always in the recovery, even in your business. When you step back and assess things, that's when you grow. It's not just because you're going and going and going. growth will happen, but true quantum leaps happen when you do reflection. So the reason I wanted to bring that up is I wanted to make sure that whether it's a day, an hour, a weekend, a week, whatever it is, that you're taking some time to reflect. And the most important thing you've got to do is you've got to ask yourself questions. Because this is the time of year, of the month, of the quarter of your life that you've got to you've got to assess where you're at because you may have great goals and passion and everything. And that's great because those things are going to be happening anyway. But you have to ask yourself some key questions. You know, am I where I want to be? And, you know, by nature, most entrepreneurs and individuals that are professionals are going to say, no, I don't want to go to other things. But you got to dig a little deeper. You know, am I where I want to be? Why am I where I'm at? What do I really want to accomplish? you know, it's that old adage, is your ladder up against the right wall? Because you could be, you know, not where you want on the first rung or the second rung, but the ladder's not even against the right wall. Or you might be really climbing the corporate ladder, climbing the professional business ladder, but at the end of the day, you're going to end up in the wrong place. So it's very important to take some time for reflection for a couple of reasons. The first is so that you can assess, and that's probably the most important reason, you can assess where you're at. That's where you ask these questions. Am I doing what I want to do? Am I where I want to be? Is my life going the direction I want? Am I on the right path? Do I have the right? And I'm talking about, this is a time of reflection for life too. So, it's the whole package. Am I around the people I want to be around? Am I working with the people I want to work with? Am I doing the type of things that I want to do? And this isn't just rhetorical questions. I mean, I really encourage you to sit down and kind of write this out and journal this out. Who is my ideal customer? Am I even talking to my ideal customer? You know, Lisa and I had a conversation about that the other day. It's like, what's the target person? It's not who can you sell the most? It's who can you impact the most? Who can you bring the most value to? Are you working with your ideal customer? If not, why? When did you stop? Why did you stop Are you gravitating towards different individuals people business tasks items because you afraid and you doing the easy stuff Are you the kind of person that does a checklist every day so that you can accomplish a lot of things versus the most important things? I mean, it's really, really important that you ask questions and assess. Now, I do this kind of on a bit of a daily, weekly, monthly basis at different levels, right? Because you've got to constantly be assessing. But the other reason is because, remember, you're trying to design your best life and you're trying to create your plan for next year. And a lot of us get the right idea and we plan and we try to create an end vision of where we want to be, but we haven't asked ourselves enough questions and we really haven't assessed where we are now. In other words, we're so busy trying to figure out where we want to be that we haven't tried to figure out what's keeping us where we're at. And keeping you where you're at, your personality, your environment, the people you surround yourself with, the habits, the skills you have or don't have, because maybe where you want to be requires a completely different skill, but you're stuck in this comfort level of the skill that you're doing, right? So, reflection is so important, and you have to begin by assessing where you're at. And you can see what I mean as I kind of talk about it, your mind's probably going. It's one thing to say, am I where I want to be? Where am I going? Am I on the right path? But this whole nother thing to dig deep, deep, deep, a much deeper level on that to say, well, why am I here? And what is keeping me there? And why do I keep doing this? And what are another one that I like to do is I'd like to acknowledge and identify. So you're assessing, but then you're identifying patterns. You have to identify patterns. And you can only do that at this point in time. Wayne Dyer says, when I looked back on the tapestry of my life, I got perspective, right? I paraphrase that a little bit, but you get perspective because the things in your life, you can see how they fit together, but you can also take it a step further and say, I can see the cycles. I can see the cycles of what's happening. And you can only see those cycles. That's why I like at the end of the year to go back over journals. What I was mentioning before, Robert Stubrick, he'll take a couple of weeks off, but he'll take his journals from the year and go through them. Because remember, when you stop and assess in the week and the month and everything, you're just in that moment, right? You don't really have any perspective. You don't have any detail. You only have what you're dealing with right now. You know, I've done this and I've gone back to my journals and I've thought, what in the hell? Like, am I thinking that same thought? Like, I've done that like six times over the last year. Why do I keep coming back to that? That's when I recognize the cycle and I identify why it's happening. See, you might right now be dealing with certain things that if you look back on your notes and things like that, you're dealing with something, but there might've been something that you've had happen over and over and over again in the month that you're not dealing with right now. So when you're assessing, you're not identifying it. So it's so important because our habits are what make us who we are and they create the results. We have our actions are what create the results. We have our focus and our perspective is what creates our energy. And if you don't get a proper reflection and assessment of that, there's really not a whole lot that you're going to change, right? Because we want to create more action, better results and things, but you have to change your actions because what you've done at this point has gotten you where you are. Doing more of it or more intense of it or more focused of it isn't always the answer. The answer is identifying what your wins have been, identifying your losses, learning from them, identifying cycles, identifying everything around you that's influencing you, and shuffling that deck so that you can create a really good plan for next year. See you notice everything I just said had nothing to do with what your vision what your daily rituals what your action plan your strategy your unique talent your goals your process your strategy your marketing, like all that stuff's good. But you have to have this foundation, this piece that has to be adjusted. The foundation might be cracking, the foundation might be warping, but see, you're still trying to build on top of this foundation that you haven't analyzed. And so that's why I want to bring that up is because reflection slash recovery, recovery, different topic, but it's usually in the times of recovery, downtime, thought, mindfulness, and things like that, that you can do assessment. But assessment is a totally different thing. It's a real hard look at where you're at, what you're doing, what's influencing you, what your character traits are, your cycles, all those things. And you got to write that stuff down because you won't remember it, right? When it's just like this topic. The reason I brought this topic up is I can mention this lots of different times, but if you can take this topic and spend some mindfulness time thinking about it and drive deep into it, you're going to come up with, you know what? Yeah, there are patterns I do. There are certain rituals that aren't like you might be doing some daily rituals right now that are not helping you. They're not hurting you and they're keeping you consistent. And they might be keeping you going. And that's better than not. You're not going backwards, but you're not going forwards with them. Meaning I've always told people like they'll make this list of like five or 10 things. And Tim Ferriss said it best. He's like, man, you got to check three boxes and call it a win. Don't be like, I have 10 things I'm supposed to do. I only did three. I really didn't accomplish what I wanted. But which three are you doing? That's the most important thing. I might be like, I always get up and I meditate and I journal and I work out. Well, you know what? Maybe that's not what you need to be doing. Maybe what you need to be doing is jumping on the mastermind or jumping on, you know, or working out with a partner or whatever, right? Or pay for a trainer so that gets you pushed because going for a walk every day is not getting you what you want. You need to push yourself out. You know, daily rituals are supposed to also be designed to get you out of your comfort zone. Are you consistent? That's another question when you're assessing, are you, how much of your time are you in your comfort zone versus out of your comfort zone? How much of your time are you doing new things versus the same old thing? And, you know, that's the key. So I always start with this idea of I need reflection, right? Number one. And the goal of reflection is assessment, identifying cycles, creating awareness. And because if a life is worth living, it's worth analyzing, right? And then I move into the idea that perspective is going to help me. So having perspective. So really, I want to just kind of end with just a thought of how to add some structure to that. What I would do is this. And it's worked for me because I have a lot of these great ideas and sometimes I don't do them and sometimes I do. But what worked for me is scheduling it, number one and foremost. I schedule reflection time. I don't lump it into my morning hour of morning rituals. I schedule reflection time. And I do that in my personal life, in my business. And then towards the end of the year, it's kind of a full life assessment. But in my business, I will take every quarter. And we used to go up to Sundance. So we have the benefit of going up the road to Sundance. We go in the right setting, which is my second suggestion. First one is to schedule reflection time. And this year, you got so many freaking holiday times. There's plenty of time to schedule. I know it's busy, but there's definitely time to schedule reflection. But the second thing is pick the right environment. It needs to be quiet. It needs to be distraction-free. It's really hard to reflect on your life when you're in business mode in your office, whether it's home office or work office. It's really hard to work on reflection mode if you're doing it in between things while you're trying to eat lunch, because that's the only time you have. It really hard to reflect on your life if you got nothing to support you with that which is my third thing And that is one of the most important daily rituals which is the hardest for most people is to journal But the reason I really going to double down triple down on journaling right now and I might even recommend journaling a couple of different ways. So I use an app called the day one journal. Well, before I do that, journaling, the reason journaling is so important is because it reminds you of everything and you can reflect back. So I'll give you an example. I use an app called the Day One Journal and it's a free app. I paid the upgrade. I don't even know what it was, maybe 90 bucks a year or something like that, because it allowed me to do audio, video, pictures, and it sends me text reminders and all kinds of stuff. So what happens is I journal in the morning and then sometimes I journal at night. But what I always try to do is I go, I'm on my phone. So I go back over to my photo album, I find a pic of the day that was a memory and I drop it in and I can journal about it. So now when I go back and I look through, I can see memories and successes and things like this. But the other thing I can do is I can pull it up real quick and do a note. See, the more consciously aware you are of your life, the more productive you're going to be. So now I'm so hyper aware that I'll be like, man, I made that same mistake. I'll journal it. This is a mistake I keep making, and this is a way I think I can avoid it, blah, blah, blah, boom, journal entry. And I journal entry all the time because the journal is there to capture your thoughts, your lessons, and things like that. So then when you sit down a week, a month, a year, you can go back. And that's when I said, I realized that there's certain things like I'll say, oh man, struggling with this this week. Man, I've said that like six times over the year. and it's way easier to do because you don't really remember that unless you journal. So journaling is great. And what I also like about that is that it does a, the day one app. And by the way, I don't have like, I should get like an affiliate link or something for that, but, but what it does is it does voice to text. So it'll do dictation. You know, you can, you can, I think it even, I just haven't dug that deep, but I think you can do a voice, You could do a voice to text, but it'll text you and you can click on the text and you can do an entry. So reminders. So if you have a reminder in the morning, the evening, and the reminder comes, just be disciplined enough to when it reminds you. I don't, if it's two seconds, just take a minute and do a journal entry. Now, what's nice about that is it's on autopilot. So you don't have to think about journaling. It's just, whenever you get the reminder, you do it. And it also is on, it's on your desktop. So it pops up on my computer, which is easy for me because I just go, oh, okay, cool. So far today, what are my wins, my gratitude or lessons? I can just hit enter, done. I'm gone. Like I'm into the next task. So I like those little pattern interrupts for journaling because unlike social media tasks, reminders, priorities, and things like this, journaling is going to help me. Journaling is going to track my progress. Journaling is going to keep me focused. It's like the milestone that keeps me on the path because it keeps reminding me to keep going in the right direction. So that's really what I wanted to bring up today is I think reflection is super, super important throughout your life. But it's really important at this time of the year for an objective purpose, an objective purpose of doing reflection, identifying patterns so that you can quantum leap in your life. And it gives you perspective and it gives you priorities. So if you do that, my best tool is really to schedule, find your environment, and then have a tool. If you have a tool like a journal, now there's other ways to create that reflection. Sometimes you do it in a mastermind. Sometimes if you're married or you got a business partner, you go up and you sit back and you say, okay, let's ask some really hard questions. And let's figure out where we're going and what we're doing and why we're doing it and what keeps happening or how can we change it? And that's even a more powerful assessment reflection as well. So that's the message that I had for today.
