Whenever we want to move forward it is vital to look back as well. At the start of a new phase – a new year, a new quarter, a new month a new day- time spent reflecting helps to create bigger changes for the future.
Success
The first thing to do is to look at your successes. Listen to the audio to help you. It was recorded at MarlowFM and has the music edited out for legal reasons. Choose some music you love so you give yourself time to write out your own successes.
What can you learn from your successes? I talk about my biggest success which was the intention to turn a difficult situation into something far more enjoyable. Having been flooded I decided to turn the fact that I had to move out of my house into a positive experience. In fact turn it into the equivalent of a holiday and give myself some ease and peace. What was your biggest success?
Even as I was writing down successes, my mind flipped to things I hadn’t done. There is no point avoiding unpleasant experiences because they are often the place where we gain most insight.
So the next part of the process is to look at things that didn’t go right even if they cannot officially be called “failures”.
Failures
Write down what didn’t go right in the past. There is a lot of information you can use for the future when you simply look at the things that didn’t happen. Get past any feeling of failure and see whether in fact you want to do that thing anymore. Sometimes the timing was wrong and in fact it was a good thing it didn’t work out. Sometimes you decide that it is no longer appropriate and you can let go of it altogether. It may have been too difficult and you had not factored in the learning, the time or the support that you needed in order to achieve it. Very often we don’t want to let somebody else down more than ourselves, so finding a partner to share what you want to do will be invaluable.