Skip to main content

Reflection Time

By
Ferris Bueller said it best, "Life moves pretty fast.  If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."  Tonight as I sit here in a very quiet house while my son spends the week with his father, I know that reflection is a good thing.  To say the past two years of my life has been a whirlwind is an understatement.  But as I reflect back on my life today, I realize how much I have and how very lucky I am.  I wasn't unhappy yesterday, I just wasn't fully aware of how truly happy I am.

If we can't even stop to realize whether we're happy or not, how do we make decisions that impact our lives and all those people who work with us and depend on us?  If you are not taking time to reflect at work, how do you know where you are, where you're going, and how you'll get there?

Carve out 15 minutes in this week's schedule to seriously reflect on what you want to achieve in the next five years.  Make as many notes as you can during that time.  Don't edit yourself, just let it go.  There are no right or wrong answers.  It can be about work, personal, or both.  Just keep writing - set a timer.  See what you end up with.

Did you write down something you hadn't really thought of before? What surprised you?  What is taking up a lot of your time that isn't leading to anything on the paper?  What will you change this week  because of your reflection?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What an Extraverted Intuitive Needs to be Productive

By
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is based on the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung. Jung observed that people have inborn preferences for gathering information and making decisions and that these preferences guide an individual’s behavior. The mother/daughter team of Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers expanded on Jung’s theories and created an assessment to make the combined work accessible to all individuals. Today, the assessment is used by most Fortune 100 companies and over two million people worldwide, annually. The assessment identifies an individual’s inborn preferences on four dichotomous scales: where you focus your energy, how you prefer to take in information, how you make decisions, and how you deal with the outer world. Type is best used to understand other people, improve communication, and develop individual skills. The first dichotomy is Extraversion (gets energy from other people) and Introversion (gets energy from reflection).  The second...
1 comment
Read more

What is True Self Awareness and Why is Important for Personal/Professional Development?

By
You know my opinion that when it comes to professional development , you get out of a program what you put into it.  So now you get my opinion on the single most important element of personal/professional development. 
SELF AWARENESS 
 What is it?  Self awareness is knowing your strengths and how to maximize them, knowing your weaknesses and how to buffer them, knowing that you have blind spots and being open to feedback about them, and being willing to do the necessary reflection and work to constantly improve yourself. I have observed so many people in leadership development programs (1 hour to 18 month) listen to an amazing instructor describe an action, reaction, or career derailer and immediately speak up and identify someone else who has that quality.  You would not believe how often, that person has the same quality.  However, they often even follow up with because of my experience working with that person I make a point to not do this.  Awkward....
Post a Comment
Read more

What Do Elmo, Colbie Caillat, and Daniel Goleman Have in Common?

By
"When your monster wants to throw things and your monster wants to shout, there's a way to calm your monster, and chill your inner monster out."  We laugh when we play this for our young child and the cute little Elmo turns into a monster and we dance with our little one when Colbie Caillat melodically sings "Belly Breathe."   http://youtu.be/_mZbzDOpylA   Toddlers are notorious for meltdowns.  All the research says it is because they don't have the words to express their feelings and guide the parents to stay calm. But what about when you are at work and YOUR monster wants to throw things?  The Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i), a popular emotional intelligence assessment, includes Emotional Management and Regulation as one of composite scales with Stress Tolerance and Impulse Control as subscales.  In other words, how well can you chill your inner monster out? In his book  Emotional Intelligence , Daniel Goleman, posits that 20 percent of an in...
Post a Comment
Read more