Reflect On Your Success
Focus on what you've achieved, not what you haven't
We’re all human and as such, we’re pretty hard on ourselves. I’m guilty of this as much as anyone. But as we approach the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, it’s important to take stock of what you’ve accomplished.
I use reflection as a tool in the goal setting process, but the exercise is not about whether you’ve achieved your goals. It’s simply about what you were able to do. Your goal for example may have been to workout for 150 minutes per week, but perhaps you were only able to workout 90 minutes per week. The accomplishment therefore is that you worked out 90 minutes per week. Here’s a framework for how you can reflect on your accomplishments for the past year.
Set aside some time to do this. Thirty minutes is probably sufficient, but block an hour just to be safe.
Write/Type everything that comes to mind and stick to language that describes the accomplishment in a positive way.
I completed a 5K run
I ran 100 miles this year
I walked every day
I swam 500 laps in the pool this year
Accomplishments should include things you’ve achieved in aggregate (ran 500 miles this year), milestones (I ran 10 miles for the first time) and anything else you can point to that progressed your fitness journey (I worked out 3 days most weeks).
Use tools/apps to help jog your memory. I discovered a really simple free app that takes my workout history from my Apple Watch and aggregates the data to show my workout history and stats. The App is called Fitness Stats and by default, the app will display your all-time workout history. You can change the start date to the beginning of this year and it will aggregate things like exercise hours, miles run or biked, swimming distance, calories burned etc. It’s actually pretty cool to see everything rolled up and since the app is pulling the data from the built-in health app, you can just download the app, give it permission to access your health data and voila.
Don’t judge yourself during this step in the process. The idea is to celebrate your accomplishments and not beat yourself up over what you didn’t achieve.
Take some time to enjoy what you’ve accomplished without thinking about missed opportunities. In my next post, I’ll walk through how we’ll use what we’ve done in the goal setting process. So stay tuned!