In this episode, we talk about the importance of self-reflection and the two questions I use to help me with this.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, where my goal is to give you 10-minute lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones.
In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about the importance of self-reflection. Self-reflection is important because time and decay move in the same direction. If you don’t put anytime into growing yourself as a person, you’re just going to start decaying with time. So if you don’t do any self-reflection, how are you going to know if you’re growing or decay. This is why I like to ask myself this question. “Am I a better person today than I was six months ago?” It’s hard to determine what kind of progress in a week or in a month. There could bet setbacks with your schedule or you got sick. I recently moved from Washington DC to Oregon to start this business and from December to mid-March, I didn’t really make the progress I want to make with Grow With Joe because I had to deal with losing everything from my last job, selling my furniture since I was moving across country, and trying to see people before I left DC. I also got Strep throat in March and that set me back two weeks. I did not want to do anything. Now if I look back six months from, I had a really productive end of March and April and May is looking good too, and I had my idea to start to Grow With Joe full time in December, so I like to stay I am a better person now than I was six months ago. I’ve grown physically, I started running again and just ran slash walked 4.5 miles after not running for the longest time. Mentally I’ve read 16 books from Dec to May, emotionally, I feel great and since I moved back in with my parents, I feel like we’ve gotten closer. And spiritually, I feel amazing because I am doing exactly what I want to do with my life. I document my progress in a journal so I know I have something to refer to when times get tough.
The second thing I have to do is ask myself, “Am I on track to become a better person six months from now?” It is real easy in life to get comfortable and become stagnant. The job is alright, family is good, I think my health is alright, but then we get to a point where we start decay and it’s going to get harder and harder to make progress in your life. When you don’t do self-reflection for this part, we can miss out on track for the life we want. If I have fallen off the path, I need to make sure that I get back on track as soon as possible. I remember playing football in high school and I spent a lot of time working out over the summer to get in football condition. Then on the second day of practice, I tore my ACL on a football drill and my season was over. It took me two months to get off crutches and it took a year to fully recover from my injury. Gains can be lost quickly and the recovery time is always longer. There will also be a setback in life and we lose our gains, we just have to make sure our lost gains are not self-imposed. You should envision what six months from should look like. For me, it will be November 2019 and hopefully I am on track to move to Colombia in January for two years to learn Spanish. So I have to make sure I am doing everything within my power to make sure that dream becomes a reality. This then just makes me more motivated to record my podcast, finish my book, and get more coaching clients because I really want to make that dream become a reality. I would love to speak Spanish and just do travel from Latin American country to country to see what I can learn and experience. I was in Medellin, Colombia for a week and my Spanish improved so much there so I know if I go for two years, I can do it. I don’t want to disappoint myself by not making this dream a reality and by asking “Am I on track to become a better person six months from now?” I’m keeping myself accountable.
The same thing could be asked about your relationships. Is this relationship stronger or just as strong as it needs to be a month ago? I think six months is too long to wait to measure a relationship because a lot of things can go wrong in a month and six months can be too late for damage control in some cases. The power of reflection is snipping things in the butt before real damage is done. And sometimes it can tell you that you need to change a relationship. I am a big believer that you can’t change people. How they are now is mostly how they are going to be in the future. You can set expectations on what you want but don’t expect big changes and communication is important. Just reflect on your relationships and see which ones you need to make stronger and which ones you need to replace. A lot of my failed relationships are because I didn’t do any reflection and didn’t express my expectations so it’s important that you take time just to reflect. I think as a society if we spent more time reflecting, we would be a stronger society but we get caught in a life and forget to ask these important questions. I know my life has improve since I made the reflection more apart of my life.
That’s it for today’s episode, so to summarize what we talked about, make sure you reflect on what’s going on in your life. I like to do this by asking myself two questions, “Am I a better person today than I was six months ago?” And “Am I on track to become a better person six months from now?” If the answer is no, then you have to ask yourself “How is that working out for me?” If you don’t like the answer, then you need to take action and make a change.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode.
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