Transcript
Speaker: What do Anne Frank, Leonardo da Vinci, Mark Twain, and of course, the man himself, Marcus Aurelius, have in common?
Speaker: Yes, they were great.
Speaker: They were successful.
Speaker: They're now famous people.
Speaker: But one of the things they had in common was that they journaled.
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: Why do you think this is?
Speaker: Well, journaling is a process of sitting down and reflecting upon your day, thinking, okay, what did I do?
Speaker: What did I achieve?
Speaker: And what did I learn from going about achieving whatever I did?
Speaker: How can I do things better?
Speaker: So this is what reflection is all about.
Speaker: And reflection is key to success.
Speaker: But why is this?
Speaker: And how can planning help you?
Speaker: How can it enhance the process of reflection?
Speaker: One of the main reasons that reflection is so beneficial to success is that it allows you to learn from your mistakes.
Speaker: Borrowing a concept from the corporate world, the non-conformity report,
Speaker: What the non-conformity report is, it's simply a report of a non-conformity that happened.
Speaker: And a non-conformity here means something that went differently to how you wanted it to go to.
Speaker: Now, in all of our lives, there are a bunch of things that we feel should have gone somewhat different.
Speaker: Maybe it was something that we did.
Speaker: Maybe it was something that happened in that environment.
Speaker: Maybe it was just something that we couldn't have ever expected.
Speaker: A black swan, so to say.
Speaker: All of these things, if we simply go through life without noting them down,
Speaker: There's multiple harms that this can bring about.
Speaker: One of them is, of course, the victim mentality.
Speaker: Because no one has a life without adversities.
Speaker: No one has a life without unexpected things that happen to come along your road.
Speaker: But what differentiates these people that you named, these successful people, from the people who simply feel like the universe is battering them from day to day,
Speaker: is that they learn from their mistakes.
Speaker: They learn from the mistakes and they simply learn from the way the world works.
Speaker: Because if things go wrong, it isn't necessarily something that you did wrong.
Speaker: That is quite often the case.
Speaker: But also other times it's simply that you had a wrong understanding of the universe or the universe simply works in a way that didn't facilitate the thing that you were trying to achieve.
Speaker: Now, there are some important things that I'm naming here that we'll get onto later, namely, you wanting to achieve something and that being the reason that you're reflecting.
Speaker: But just to summarize, one of the core reasons why you should reflect is to learn both about the external world and about your internal world, both about how life works,
Speaker: how things go and also about how you work and the decisions you make and the mistakes you make in certain situations.
Speaker: And of course you do some of that implicitly already by simply living, existing and being a human being.
Speaker: You learn some lessons and when someone punches you, you learn probably to not go and spend time with that person again.
Speaker: But what reflection does, what proper reflection does is it allows you to make that process systematic.
Speaker: And when I say proper reflection, Sebi, why don't you just give a bit more substance to what I mean there?
Speaker: What is proper reflection as opposed to just like implicit reflection?
Speaker: Well, I think one of the first things would be intent, right?
Speaker: And the second thing would be you set aside a significant amount of time to actually engage in this process.
Speaker: So it's about sitting down, taking time and making sure that you're consciously reflecting upon that which has happened.
Speaker: But it's not just about thinking, okay, X happened, Y happened, but thinking a bit more deeply, thinking, okay,
Speaker: what did I intend to achieve by doing action X?
Speaker: Did I achieve this?
Speaker: If not, what could I learn?
Speaker: If so, what could I still learn?
Speaker: Because I think it's also very important to note that
Speaker: You don't just learn from your mistakes, you learn from your successes, because everything you do in life, you gain some sort of feedback.
Speaker: Say I write, I'm successful in writing an essay.
Speaker: I can still learn from that process because likely I gained a better understanding of how to write more efficiently.
Speaker: Maybe I improved my vocabulary.
Speaker: Maybe I definitely learned something from this success.
Speaker: So I think just on a side note, it's very important to open up your mind to the kind of the great extent of things that you can learn from.
Speaker: And it's not just things which you fail, it's also the things in which you think you succeeded at.
Speaker: Because I think a lot of people, what
Speaker: What I think perhaps separate those people we talked about at the start of the episode from everyone else who engaged in reflection is that these people were learning from everything.
Speaker: They're using every single opportunity that they can to further understanding of themselves, what they want and how to do things better.
Speaker: And I think actually this leads to a more deeper understanding of what actually reflection is all about.
Speaker: I would like to say that reflection is about becoming the master of your fate, taking full control of your actions, because what reflection enables you to do is take full control of the information that you gain from your actions and
Speaker: everything that directs your actions.
Speaker: So your intentions and all your motivations.
Speaker: I agree.
Speaker: And the reason that you need to do that, of course, is so that you can achieve the life that you want to lead.
Speaker: And as we know here at WAIT, that's what we're all about.
Speaker: We're about defining, first of all, what is the life that we want to live and then taking systematic action towards that.
Speaker: And reflection is a very important part of that.
Speaker: And
Speaker: And that's why I would like to move on to speaking about how exactly having a plan in place can enhance the process of reflection and make your reflection sessions so much more productive, increase the leverage that you get, your leverage in reflection, the output that you get from doing the same amount of reflection.
Speaker: If you're just doing reflection by writing down purely subjective accounts of things that happened, that can have its own use.
Speaker: This is basically like a slightly better version of doing what you already do implicitly in your head, which is simply noting lessons and drawing something implicit from them for your future, making some implicit improvement for your future.
Speaker: But the best way
Speaker: to reflect is to reflect by improving something that you already have in place for guiding your actions.
Speaker: Because what you're ultimately trying to achieve by reflecting is to gain better control of your life, to gain better control of the things you do, and to make sure that you do the right things that move you closer to where you want to be in life.
Speaker: The best way to achieve that is to have
Speaker: first defined what your current best understanding is of the things that you should do to help you move closer to your goals and to then improve that during that process of reflection.
Speaker: Because without that vessel, without the plan in place first, that you are reflecting about, you are reflecting about, oh, do I think that I could change something in the way that I do things in order to help me move closer to my goals in a more effective, efficient way?
Speaker: Without that plan in place in the first place, reflection can become a bit fluid and fluid in a bad way, fluid in the sense that the lessons do not get applied in a systematic and concrete way.
Speaker: And there's also some other benefits to it.
Speaker: Sevi, what do you think about the whole idea of grouping habits together and how reflection and planning can go hand in hand?
Speaker: Yeah, I think if you want to achieve
Speaker: a great change in your life.
Speaker: The best way to do it isn't necessarily to go and do one single action.
Speaker: It's rather to build better habits, to change your behavior.
Speaker: This is why grouting certain habits together and anchoring them to one another can help you, is so beneficial because it enables you to achieve these behavioral changes.
Speaker: And so touching, going back to the question of like how a plan, how having a plan can enhance the process of reflection,
Speaker: Say, if you already have a plan, it's likely that you're already engaging in a planning process.
Speaker: So likely each day you sit down and you think, I mean, if you follow the way, you sit down and you think, okay, what am I going to do today?
Speaker: These are my weekly goals.
Speaker: These are my life goals.
Speaker: This is what I'm going to do today to be able to achieve that bigger picture.
Speaker: So if you already have a plan, it's likely that you're engaging in the habit of planning, right?
Speaker: And so this is why...
Speaker: planning, combining planning reflections so good because you can take the habit of reflection and then anchor it to planning.
Speaker: So say when you're, you know, starting your day, instead of just thinking, okay, what am I going to do today?
Speaker: Before you make that decision, think actually,
Speaker: Let's think, what did I do yesterday?
Speaker: Was there anything, was I successful?
Speaker: Did I set out to do what I intended to?
Speaker: Is there anything that I could have learned?
Speaker: And explicitly tying this habit of reflection to an existing habit of planning enabled you to do it better.
Speaker: And the reason why I talked about
Speaker: Changing your behavior being so important is because it is how you actually achieve these changes in your life.
Speaker: If you already have a habit which you're very good at sticking to, tying
Speaker: a new one to it makes it easier to stick to that.
Speaker: So basically planning and tying and reflecting at the same time as which you plan helps you better stick to that habit.
Speaker: And ultimately goes both ways, right?
Speaker: Because if you already have a planning habit in place, adding a reflection habit to that
Speaker: is easier because you already have a habit and you're sticking the other habit to that.
Speaker: It's you're connecting them together.
Speaker: But also you're piggybacking off of one habit to bring another one in.
Speaker: But also if you build a habit out of reflection, that also helps you stay on track with planning.
Speaker: Because what is reflection?
Speaker: Reflection ultimately done in a systematic way is updating your plan.
Speaker: It's keeping your plan up to date with the latest updates that you learn from the outside world and that you learn about yourself.
Speaker: And if you keep reflecting and you keep improving your plan and you keep learning the lessons in a systematic way, this makes you much more confident in your plan and it makes you want to keep going with it.
Speaker: This is linked to what we talked about in a previous episode regarding why it's not very good
Speaker: to have your plan written down with pen and paper.
Speaker: Because this reflection process allows you to bring the dynamic nature of life to your plan, to reflect it in your plan, which is ultimately a reflection of how you model your life.
Speaker: hopefully your way.
Speaker: And by reflecting and bringing those two habits together, you sort of boost, they boost each other because you already planning helps you stay on track with reflecting and you reflecting helps you feel more confident about your plan, makes it feel fresh and just purely makes you want to stick to that plan more simply because
Speaker: You know that it's up to date, you know it's the latest lessons and it's not just some old piece of paper that you wrote months ago.
Speaker: So just regarding how exactly we do reflection here at WAI, what are sort of the core components of reflection in the WAI planning process?
Speaker: Yeah, so I'd say it's about making reflection an explicit part of your daily routine.
Speaker: So in the way, and obviously you can read more about our planning process through the article, The Ultimate Guide to Planning, which we'll provide a link to in the description.
Speaker: But it's about making reflection an explicit part of your daily routine.
Speaker: So with the way, what we do is
Speaker: Instead of you just setting your focus for the day, your daily focus, which just amounts to your plan of what you want to achieve today, how you're going to achieve those high-level sub-goals, those high-level goals today, it's also about consciously thinking, okay, what were the sub-goals, what were the actions I intended to focus on yesterday, right?
Speaker: And how well did I achieve them?
Speaker: And if I didn't, is there anything that I can learn?
Speaker: And so that's kind of how we do it in the way is yeah.
Speaker: Is there anything that you think I'm missing?
Speaker: I think that,
Speaker: There is a very good explicit link to agile in how we reflect that way.
Speaker: And just to recap, what I mean by agile is the practice of keeping your plan up to date constantly and not thinking too much ahead, too specifically, to the point where it makes it hard for you to actually keep your plan up to date due to having to change so much so often.
Speaker: So reflection is a core part of the agile loop, of the agile planning loop.
Speaker: What Agile consists of is one, doing something.
Speaker: Well, first, planning what you're going to do.
Speaker: Two, doing it.
Speaker: Three, observing the feedback that you get from it.
Speaker: And then four, implementing that to do the next thing better.
Speaker: And the plan...
Speaker: the way planned specifically, at the center of this reflection loop, because that is what tells you what to do, and that is where you improve what you're going to do next.
Speaker: It's the vessel that you can constantly put your learned lessons into to make sure that the thing that looks at you tomorrow from the calendar is better than what you were looking at today in the calendar.
Speaker: But to outline this link to Agile explicitly,
Speaker: When you're creating a life plan, it is very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you need to perfectly outline everything that you're going to do at all times.
Speaker: But why would we even bother to go about life if you already knew exactly how everything is going to go?
Speaker: There's no point in that.
Speaker: One of the most beautiful things about life, one of the most beautiful things about life is the fact that it is dynamic, the fact that we never quite know what comes next.
Speaker: And the process of reflection is sort of like a beautiful meditation on that dynamic nature of life.
Speaker: It's the process where you look at the world and you say, hey,
Speaker: Well, this is what I gave to you.
Speaker: This is what I threw out of me.
Speaker: This is the energy that I put out into the universe.
Speaker: What did I get back?
Speaker: Did things go how I expected them to go?
Speaker: Did things move closer to my ideal state of being?
Speaker: Or did I move further from it?
Speaker: And it's the recognition, it's the conscious recognition of this dance between what you put out and what you get back from the world.
Speaker: And it's listening to this reflection.
Speaker: It's listening to this echo that the universe shouts back at you and using that in the most optimal way to make sure that the next moves you do on the chessboard of life are better.
Speaker: Because ultimately we have no duty to move closer to where we, the goals that we've defined for ourselves.
Speaker: We have no absolute duty.
Speaker: No one is going to come and punish us if we don't go after the life we want.
Speaker: That is, in my eyes, at least all the more reason to do it.
Speaker: But what I'm trying to say here is that only by listening to your dance partner can you have the most fluid dance and, uh,
Speaker: and do it in the most beautifully choreographed way.
Speaker: And the choreography that I'm talking about here is your plan.
Speaker: And the part that I'm talking about is the external world.
Speaker: And you need to listen back to the feedback that you get from the external world.
Speaker: And you need to consciously create the habit of reflection to not just listen to that feedback, but to also journal about it, to think about it, to internalize it so that you can then apply it to your plan and thereby to the actions that you take.
Speaker: I would just like to clarify also that what a plan ultimately is in way terminology, what a way plan is, is your best understanding of what you have to do in order to move closer to your goal.
Speaker: And what better place to apply the learned lessons to, the reflections that you've internalized to,
Speaker: than your current best understanding of the things that you need to do to move closer to where you want to be.
Speaker: Because ultimately, the only thing that matters is the actions that you take and the outcomes that they bring.
Speaker: And yes, while a plan alone is already very useful because you probably already have some idea of the things that you need to do in order to achieve your goals, only by reflecting can you complete the loop and make sure that you're not just pushing out into the universe, but also listening back to the echo
Speaker: And living this beautiful life where we have a chance to grow and learn in the most optimal way and making sure that you utilize that echo towards your goals, not someone else's goals.
Speaker: That ultimately, you live your life your way.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: That's it for this week.
Speaker: Thank you very much for listening.
Speaker: Be sure to check out our social media pages and website, links in the description, for more on how you can live your life your way.
Speaker: Also, if you thought that you gained something from this episode, whether it be a small insight or transcendental reality-shaping piece of enlightenment, then feel free to share this episode with your friends, family, whoever it may be, for there is no better gift than that of a good idea.
Speaker: Thank you very much, and I'll see you next week.
