Just recently, I was privileged to be have been asked to do a presentation on my philosophies on learning, growth and ultimately self-mastery, you can find the full talk here.
There is a lot of content in that talk so I wanted to break the main areas down into several posts so I could delve a little deeper into each section.
For context, I have a very structured routine that I follow, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. I start at 4:15 am most mornings and very rarely (now anyway) miss it and do between 2–3 hours.
Now, before you dismiss this as madness, and start telling yourself its impossible to dedicate that much time, hang in there because it is possible and you can build up to it. This is a journey I have been on for many years so it hasn’t happened overnight.
My intent for this series is to outline my routine, the benefits of each part, then discuss some methods and tooling around managing and monitoring your growth as well as, and most importantly, how to get started if you are not doing any (or enough) self-improvement work at present.
There is a saying that there are no new original truths and this is completely true with everything I will cover here, it is simply a distillation of the knowledge that I have obtained and combined over the years and found what worked for me. I am also not professing this is “the” or only way, you have to, of course, find your own path.
Let us start at the beginning, the reason why you should embark on a little or a lot of growth, personally or professionally. In his book, “7 habits of highly effective people”, Stephen Covey talks deeply to this topic (if you haven’t read it, drop what you are doing, order and read it, its a must), his 7th habit is “sharpen the saw” which covers the reason why it is crucial to put time into what he calls “quadrant 2” activities (from his time management matrix), these are essentially activities that expand or grow you as a person.
The miraculous thing about this habit is, the more you do it, the more you want to do it and you can literally feel yourself expanding, your mind widening, and you start to see the world in a different light, everything starts to become a learning/growth opportunity.
So without further ado, let us take a look at what the structure of my morning looks like:
- Write in my reflection journal (some of them featured above)
- Mindfulness
- Visualisation
- Positive Reinforcement/Affirmations
- Practice/Learning/Growth
This structure was inspired by (and is close to) what Hal Elrod covers in his book “The Miracle Morning”. Again, if you haven’t read it, buy it and drink deeply of the cool-aid, it had a profound impact on my life generally.
The focus of this article will be around the reflection journal, I will cover the remainder in future parts.
Reflection Journal
You may perhaps ask, “why do we start with reflection, surely the goal is to learn and grow, not look backwards”. It may seem a little counter-intuitive but it aligns very heavily with my profession, I am in the technology industry and particularly software and through my experience in this industry, I have had a lot to do with the Agile mindset. It is not overly important to understand or know what that is but at the heart of this method/philosophy is a constant desire to continually improve.
This is achieved by holding a retrospective which looks at, over a short period usually 2 weeks, identifying what went well and what could be improved, then creating little experiments to change people, process or whatever to see if you can do it better next time.
A reflection journal serves the same purpose. It is a chance for us to reflect on things like:
- Observations
- Experiences/Interactions
- Thoughts
- Feelings
What is important is it is used as an opportunity to process/reflect on the previous day. I also talk to:
- What I did
- How I did it
- Why I did it
- How I felt
I may have had an interaction that I wasn’t entirely happy with, so I describe it, what I observed, my feelings and thoughts. Then I write about how I might have tackled that interaction a little differently should I encounter a similar situation in the future.
It is also good to celebrate our successes. Too often we hit some milestone, it might be a running/cycling goal, you might be trying to lose a bit of weight (get rid of my Dad bod 🙂), and you hit the goal! But then you move on too quickly and don’t really give it the recognition you should. A reflection journal gives you an opportunity to bask in the glory of your success before you move on.
The other really powerful thing I find a reflection journal is useful for is to see how far I have come. The picture in the title is 2 years of writing, every day, for 2 years. So you can imagine how much happened in the writing, highlighting the good, the bad and the ugly.
I regularly go back and start reading from the beginning of my journals to see the types of things I was dealing with and also some of the achievements along the way. What is really important about this, is you can start having faith that the compounding effect of consistent focus will get you to where you are trying to head. I often find entries where I go “wow, I use to really struggle with that” or “man, I am still not getting that right”, so its great validation that you are growing as an individual or highlights things you need to continue to work on.
In summary, if you just do this practice alone, you will find yourself growing, continually improving how and what you do each day. I recommend it to anyone who asks “what is the one thing I can change to help me grow”, along with lots and lots of reading of course. 🙂
In the next parts, I will cover the remainder of the items, so until then, stay tuned and thank you for reading.
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