In Chapter 7 of Onward, Elena shares 5 practices to train your brain and direct your mind and emotions to focus on the bright spots. Early this week, we shared how to Set Intentions to Direct Your Mind, Take an Inquiry Stance and Open Your Mind, Engage in Appreciative Inquiry, and Deal with Emotions – Explore RAIN. Today we are going to share the fifth and final practice for reflecting and gaining clarity.
From Onward: Reflection involves pausing to think about our experiences and considering our further choices of action, emotion, and interpretation. It’s an underused tool for understanding our emotions, building resilience, and increasing the joy in our lives. How do you reflect? Productive reflection leads you to deeper insight into yourself and others. It clarifies further actions and your own behaviors, and helps with decision making. Mulling things over is a component of productive reflective practice, but you can maximize your practice by taking two further steps:
- Talking: Reflecting aloud with someone else
- Writing: the ultimate reflective power strategy
Writing forces you to put your experiences into words and commit them to paper, enables you to keep a record of your experiences and to recognize patterns and trends over time, and helps solidify the neural pathways that you want to strengthen.
Try it now and notice the clarity emerge.