Journaling

You have a number of choices when it comes to capturing your insights and ideas. You can buy yourself a notebook from the stationery store, set up an electronic document on your chosen device or even download a voice recording app to your smartphone. I recommend placing a number of notepads where you often have great ideas — beside the bed, on your office desk, in the kitchen and in your car.

In 2012 I attended the Behance 99% Conference in New York, where Harvard professor and co-author of The Progress Principle Teresa Amabile spoke about the value of keeping a daily journal. She had conducted an analysis of 12 000 journal entries from 238 senior executives from 26 different project teams, seven companies and three industries across the USA. She asked them to keep a journal every day as a way of reflecting on the day, refocusing them for the next day, capturing the ideas gained, celebrating the wins and what they had learned.

I am a great believer in journaling, and Teresa offered some great ideas to help start the process:

• Start small, setting aside five minutes a day.
• Decide on your medium — for example, a paper journal or an electronic app.
• Write, sketch or doodle.
• Use a set time of the day and set a reminder on your phone.
• Record progress, setbacks, horrors, hassles, challenges, celebrations, confidence boosters and crystal-clear moments.
• Write about whatever you like, but write every day for 30 days!

I have a very good friend and colleague who uses her smartphone every day to note what she is grateful for and what she has learned from the day.

Journaling, then, can take many forms — pick the one that best suits you.

Reflecting

Most people don’t do enough of this. The key here is to take time out of our busy daily life to stop and reflect on what is working and what is not, and to decide what to do about it. Reflecting is also about being still, quieting the mind in order to listen to your intuition, to meditate and relax.

All too often we are so busy being busy that we never truly relax, slow down or are still for long enough to review our progress, correct a course and adjust our direction. Do you ever feel like you are travelling through life so fast that you just don’t know where time goes, what you have achieved in the past week or where the year has gone? Through reflection we can allow life to catch up with us.

There are a number of different approaches you can choose from to use the process of reflection effectively. You can allocate a time each day to meditate, sit in a quiet place, focus on your breathing and be still. Meditation is a discipline that requires patience and practice. It is useful to take an introductory course on it or at least to download a guided meditation audio recording to assist you. Just start off small, taking five minutes out of your day, and work up to 15 minutes. Understand this simple fact: 1 per cent of every day is almost 15 minutes. Don’t you deserve to take 15 minutes off to just focus on you?

Another option is simply to set aside five minutes each day to review, reflect and refocus. Review what is working and what isn’t, and any adjustments you need to make. If you really believe in working on yourself, then I encourage you to take out 15 minutes a week to reflect on the past week, review what you need to improve on for next year and refocus on the goals you want to achieve next week.

Research tells us that each of us has approximately 70 000 thoughts per day. How many of yours:

• lift you up?
• tell you it is possible?
• give you the confidence to step outside your comfort zone?
• encourage you to pursue a new goal or passion?
• tell you to take the next step?

Shouldn’t one of your top priorities be to control and channel your thoughts at least once a day?

To take this concept to the next level, allocate an hour a month, two hours a quarter, half a day every six months and a day a year to working on yourself, defining your goals, working on your plans, realigning your purpose and refocusing on what is important, what matters and what is going to make a difference. This is your own personal self-development retreat.

Bill Gates calls them Think Weeks. A couple of times a year he would spend time by himself and just think about his business, life and family, about what was next, what was around the corner and what was beyond.

From time to time each of us needs to become an Impartial Spectator — someone who can stand outside of ourselves to watch the person within behave, think, react and take action. When you can step outside to observe yourself doing the things you enjoy, the things that frustrate you and the things you need to change, you gain a perspective that can carry you to another level in your life.

Be a spectator of yourself and note where you can improve, the areas you have mastered and the action steps you need to take next time to gain better results. Remember …

IT IS NOT ABOUT BEING THE BEST,
IT IS ABOUT BECOMING BETTER.

Sabbatical

It is built into our DNA to want every goal now, fully knowing that there is a process and a series of steps to achieving it.

The Japanese have a proverb, Ishi no ue ni mo sannen, which literally means: ‘Three years upon a stone’. Too often we don’t have enough patience and perseverance in our pursuit of our passions, goals and desires. In so many cases the act of pursuing our goals has benefits beyond the goal itself; it leads us to discover who we are, who we are not and who we want to be. You may not have to sit on a rock for three years. I have given myself permission to stop and reflect by having an extended break from the work I do, like a sabbatical.

All too often when we become tired or bored with what we are doing, it is not about changing our role or job. It is just about falling in love with what we are doing again. There have been times in my speaking career when I just was not in love with what I was doing. So I took an extended break for two months, freshened up my thinking and fell back in love with my work.

Go and sit on the rock and reflect on what is important
to you.