The Value of Reflection, Hitting Reset and Moving Forward.

Finding gratitude in your story with this simple 12 min exercise.

Have you ever gotten down on yourself on where you might be in your life when it comes to your job, your progress or your “status in life” even? It’s easy to do that right now during so much time spent indoors, or away from others who could be speaking a bit of encouragement on how you’re truly doing. Everyone’s really in the same boat. We all feel like the world just hit pause on how we operated our day-to-day. Whether in our work life, social norms and even with self care… everything just got rocked. If you’re like most, these past 10 months since the pandemic became the main thing for everyone, feels like 2 years.

There’s no coincidence that mental health has been the hot topic for the last year. It’s really hot for the last few years. This time at home just amplified the issues that were already there. Many face ongoing comparison struggles through Social Media platforms, and even binge-tempting TV shows. How do you get out of a mental rut? How do you progress when you feel like all you do is stand still? At times, don’t you feel like you’re watching others just fly right passed you? How do you stop comparing where you should be with where you currently are?

We all fight this fight at one point or another. This specific place in time, we’ve been forced to watch people’s lives from a distance more than ever. And we can’t help but compare our reality with other people’s facades on social media and elsewhere. As a self employed, entrepreneur, and creative who cannot sit still, especially when boxed into a sandbox of rules and restrictions, you can imagine where your mind goes in times like this. Maybe your does too.

I’ve never been one to dwell on the past. I’ve never been one to count my failures in a destructive way, meaning I look back, I think back, I take a deep breath and I remember what I learned from these shortcomings. Many times I laugh at what’s happened in my life. Some of the most disappointing moments in my life were not completely products of just my doing, some were obviously, but the truth is, most were not. That’s important to realize.

Try this exercise would take you possibly less than 10 mins at most, and maybe 15 minutes if you’re reflecting type. Though spending 30 mins or so on something like may actually be healing and enjoyable for some. Try it! This freeing exercise will feel like a deep exhale possibly much needed. Depending on your age, you may have to do these in different increments. (Disclaimer — I’ve never read this anywhere or heard it from anyone, this is something I just fell into one morning, years ago… and it reset my thinking in a very good way.)

Get a piece of paper, or type this out… and do this:

• Walk through a timeline of your life in 5-year increments.

• Start from the present… month and year will do.

• Start to walk it back every five years, like mile markers. If you looked at your life in Feb 2021, write down what you’re up to, and then look back at Feb 2016….

Then answer this for every notch: What were you doing, what do you remember, what were you proud of?

• Write down the first thing that you remember about that specific place in time. You don’t need to write it out in sentences, you can list key words.

• The month listed with the year matters. Because if you did this in the fall, it might look slightly different. If you’re younger, do this in increments of 4 years, maybe even in 2 or 3 year increments. (Time happens to be much more condensed the younger you are.)

• Go as far back as when you were 6-8 years old. Since these seem to be the years of clearer recollections, that’s probably a safe stretch to say you remember things somewhat more accurately around that age then you would as a 5 year old and under.

What do you see?

Big leaps in your earlier years I bet… Maybe you jumped from “working at McDonald’s in high school to married and expecting” in a 4 year stretch.

What else do you see?

A slower progression between your last 10 years maybe? What if you broke those down into smaller increments of say 2-3 years. Even slower...? Maybe some take big leaps in there too?

You likely see stability at times, and also what you could call 90-degree or even 180-degree turns per se, are revealed through this little exercise. Take a look at your tendencies, patterns, and the path you paved that have gotten you to where you are now. As a believer, I see God’s hands on my life. I see the times where I got myself into strange seasons in life, but I also see times where He pulled me out and redirected my feet. Though He doesn’t make you do the walking, you do get to see where your life direction changed by just a few degrees, just enough for your trajectory to end up somewhere WAY different from your starting spot. Proverbs 16:9 says “A man’s heart plans his way, But the LORD directs his steps.” Those life changing degree could be represented in meeting someone like your spouse, a good friend or even a good mentor or boss.

The more degrees you pivot from, the more drastic the gap between your years will be.

A few degrees can change your trajectory if, and only if, you keep moving. Go back in your mind… to geometry class. (yeah me too, I don’t remember much of it…) Recall looking at obtuse and acute angles. No matter which angle you call it, those start from one point and open up into two lines, they move further apart the longer they travel. Here’s a drawing that could illustrate this thought… It’s not that great, nor are my “angles” completely on point. But you get the gist.

What’s your timeline telling you? You just panned back a few thousand feet to look at your life from above. This little exercise is actually fun to do around a table with friends or family, on a road trip in a car or even just over a chat with one other person you’re enjoying coffee with. It’s a different stroll through memory lane, depending on who you’re with, it’s kind of fun to know what someone remembers of specific days… say for me, the day OJ was acquitted, or more important… September 11th, 2011. Where were you in specific months and years is easier to remember than you might think.

What this exercise reveals is not where you’re going next. But it reveals what it took to alter the course of your life! That’s good news to most of us and you should take a deep breath right now. If you’ve done the exercise, I’m sure you said something like… “Wow, I can’t believe I was doing that back then… and it was only 5 years ago?” Your trajectory changes with a few degrees of decisions. If you don’t like a specific direction, it’s best to change it quickly than to wait years and years to make a change.

Our seasons in life and our years are precious, let alone our days. Each day is a new one that could be the marker where you change up your life just a few degrees, one small decision could change where you end up. It’s both amazingly good news as well as scary if you don’t pay attention to it.

What does your timeline reveal? If anything. Find gratitude. You’ll see that mostly what you jotted down were good things. We’re not exactly wired to remember crappy parts of our past, that’s how we keep moving, forward, we get a fresh dose of hope and zeal each and every day. When you find gratitude, you’ll adjust. Just a few degrees to get to where you want to end up. That’s why setting goals is very important. Check out my last blog post on what I do to set goals to guide me each year.

Remember that your story is being written, and it’s awesome. It pales in excitement compared to others, because you should love and appreciate what you’ve been through. It’s made you who you are, and it’s making you the person you will be remembered as. You’re unique and there won’t be another you. That alone is a good thought. So look back just for a few minutes.

Deep breath.

And carry on.

T.