How to pause and reflect

Reflection is an important component of a healthy happy life. If you don't reflect on what's working in your life and what you have, you won't be grateful for the blessings in your life that time will inevitably take from you. Furthermore, if you don't take time to reflect on what's not working and making you truly unhappy or unproductive, you'll unlikely change your circumstances.

Alas, everyday, it's important that we take time to pause and reflect.

But how and when?

That's the real problem, isn't it? Without a plan, I think many people only take the time to truly reflect on their lives on birthday's and holiday's and the first week of January. And, at least for me, that's simply me pondering over what I did this time last year (Birthday's, New Year's and most holidays), or being grateful for my FFF (family, friends and feast) as we sit down to have a literal feast on either Thanksgiving or Christmas. Other than that though, I very rarely make time to deliberately reflect on my life and the direction it's going, let alone the things I should be grateful for or what's working or not working in my life. 

Sheena Greer has a better strategy. She writes that she regularly takes time to reflect by jotting down two lists in a notebook once a month. The first lists what was awesome and the second lists what sucked and took away from that awesome. Then she picks the top three from each list and reflects on them. The "positive" list forces her to acknowledge both what she should be grateful for as well as her successes, no matter how small. The "negative" list shows her what's not working and what she may need to change in her life moving forward. 

I think that's a really great strategy for taking time to reflect on your life, even better if you can do it once a week or every day. It kind of goes back to something Steve Job's said in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech, when he said:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

If you take five or ten minutes out of your day to pause and reflect on what's working/what's awesome and what's not, I think you'll find that you'll be a lot more productive and happy in the long-run. Not only will it give you joy from the act of celebrating what you have and the small victories of your present, it will keep you ever-mindful of what's not working and what absolutely needs to change before it cannibalizes your future. 

Certainly a habit worth the time and effort.