The discipline of personal reflection is the secret to clarifying your personal values. Understanding and living your values is a must if you are going to fulfill and live your potential. Regardless of your chosen career: artist, author, leader, business entrepreneurial or a stay at home parent, you want to be the best you can be at what you do. And you can only do that by doing the things that matter most – values. Getting clarity of your values at times seems complicated but it’s not, it’s simply a matter of building the discipline of personal reflection into your daily life.
Personal Reflection Brings Clarity
Personal reflection gives you an opportunity to sort out things that are distracting and keeping you from living your values. The more consistent you are at spending a little time daily in personal reflection, the more you will be able to live your life with absolute clarity both personally and professionally. Complicated situations and decisions will be much easier to navigate with the clarity that personal reflection will bring. You are created as God’s masterpiece and although you can learn from the example of others, the clarity of what your life looks like when you are living out your potential as His masterpiece must come from your core values through personal reflection. This daily discipline will give you the clarity to know who you.
Personal Reflection Keeps You Living Your Priorities
It is so easy to get distracted throughout the day with the tyranny of the urgent at the end of the day to discover that you have not spent the day living according to your priorities. Personal reflection time helps you to stay focused on your priorities and to let go of the busy things that steal your time and get you off course. One of the hardest things for most people to do is to narrow their priority list for each day and for their vision. (This is especially true of leaders and organizations) Often it seems like everything is the #1 priority, but there can only be one #1 priority. Personal reflection time will give you the ability to truly prioritize – you can’t do everything in life and you sure can’t do everything today. The more visionary you are the more important it is for you to spend time in personal reflection to prioritize. Personal reflection will save you from spending your day in busy activity with nothing to show for it, at the end of the day.
Personal Reflection Brings Self Awareness
Personal reflection will make you keenly aware of the effect your decisions will have on other areas of your life or organization. As an artist I work to make sure that each of my paintings have color harmony – otherwise one color can stand out and ruin the entire painting. The same is true for you in your life. You cannot make decisions void of self awareness, hoping that somehow each decision is a stand only decision that has no effect on other areas of your life. Personal reflection time will help you to be self aware and able to connect the dots of each decision you make, giving you wisdom to navigate each decision with greater ease and confidence. The more self-aware you are the more consistent you will live life as the masterpiece God created you to be.
How To Spend Time In Personal Reflection
There is no one way to have a time of personal reflection. What works for one person will not work for another. The primary thing is to schedule time for personal reflection. For me, I tend to want some time first thing in the morning before I head to prepare my heart and mind. I also take a few moments at night to prayerfully reflect on as to whether or not I lived according to my priorities throughout the day. I have a fire pit in my back yard and I love to light a fire at night and spend time alone around the fire in self-reflection. The idea of sitting around the fire may not work for you, discover the environment you need and the times that work best for you to get the most out of personal reflection time. You will also want to come up with a few quick questions that you can measure your day by. Again, each of us will have different questions based on what we are trying to do and become.
Another way that I spend time in personal reflection is to set aside a longer amount of time once a month or so. For me, it is spending a few hours out in the desert, uninterrupted with just me and God and a pad and paper. Beyond that, I want to have an extended time perhaps once a year, for maybe a full day or more, depending on how well I feel I’m doing and whether or not I have been able to keep up with personal reflection on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. My greatest breakthrough and most creative ideas have almost all resulted from these times.
Spend Some Time Today In Personal Reflection
Take some time today, schedule it now, for personal reflection. Begin by asking yourself a few short questions: Are you content with where you are in life? Are you satisfied that you are headed in the right direction? Do you feel you are making the most of your time and potential here on this earth?