Season 1 Chapter 10 -Power, Reflections, Victories and Celebrations

Welcome to the Synergy Life Podcast. Our purpose is to help multiply the positive experiences of your life in all areas. Dr. Janowitz, best selling author of the Synergy Health Solution, is the creator of the Synergy Success Cycle, a framework that helps uncover what makes top achievers successful in areas of their life. We interview amazing people who are excelling in light and help our listeners gain valuable insights so they can apply them to achieve their best life possible.

Chapter 10 Power Reflection, Victories and Celebrations. Today we're discussing reflection, victories and celebrations, all essential parts of life. In today's society, we're so busy that we most.

Today we're discussing reflection, victories and celebrations, all essential parts of life. In today's society, we're so busy that most of us are lacking in the area of reflection. Dr. Janowitz, tell us how important it is to reflect and how to do that effectively.

No doubt. So it's so interesting. You know, we are human beings, not human doings. And you know, as an achiever, I'm so guilty of doing so many things. You know, achievers get a lot of emotional value, a lot of emotional juice from doing things. I love to get things done. There's just a major emotional sense of accomplishment in that. And so reflection is a way where you can actually take a step back and observe and learn and recognize.

What you've done and more importantly, who you have become or who you are becoming. And so reflection is that process. And so it's something that far few of us do, far few of us take time to take a step back. And it's really important with our health especially, and just in life in general. General. I mean, when you reflect back, a lot of times we're just gonna be, you know, critical of the negative things that happen in life. Like, it's so easy to look back at what's happened in life and, and see what, what went wrong because beat.

Yourself up about it.

Yeah, we're our, you know, you know, I tell people if we talked to other people like we talked to ourself, we probably would have very many friends.

Exactly right.

And so reflection is an intentional way where you can ask yourself a different question, like, what was good about the day? What were my victories? What were things that I brought me closer to my goal and see the wins. Because if you look for wins and you recognize the wins in the past, you'll be able to recognize opportunities in the future too. Right. And so reflection does that. And it's important that you do it really in two ways. One way is you Want to have near time reflection. The benefit of near time reflection, which is that night. Right. Or maybe during a lunch break or wherever you got time, but on a daily basis to step back and really get that assessment because you can really, you're still in that emotional state. So you want to be as close to that emotional state because your emotions can give you cues as to what you're learning and what you're experiencing. Right. So the emotions can serve us to help us in that and can shift us by asking these questions. But then it's also important to see how you're doing on a quarterly basis and how you're doing maybe on an annual basis. So I mean, you know, in essence it's almost treating your life like a business where you have to have a quarterly review and an annual review and an annual report of how things are.

It's your self progress report.

Yeah, it is. You know, I mean, because your life matters and your life is important because progress doesn't always happen incrementally, day by day. You don't see it. It's like no one got super overweight overnight, no one got low energy overnight. This doesn't happen overnight. It's a dripping faucet. And so just like the seasons change on a quarterly basis, our health and our lives change on a quarterly basis. So who I am now is going to be different than, than who I will be in three months and who I will be in a year and certainly who I will be in a decade. Right. And so having that time to look back and reflect and say what is it that I want? How does it align with my values? How does it align with my vision and my goals and am I around the people that support me in that? When we talk about the people quadrant, all this plays a role. But if you don't reflect, then you don't know and you'll just be busy doing life and you'll wake up one day, you'll look at the ceiling and you're 10 years older.

Yes, absolutely.

And potentially sicker and lower energy and not where you want to be because you didn't take that small amount of time to reflect or to celebrate.

I think it's important too to not look at it as a chore. It's actually a very self motivating process. If you're doing these self progress reports, a lot of the times you, you get to see that you've actually done a lot more than you gave yourself credit for. I know I've had these moments because I'm an Overachiever. I'm constantly on the go, just have these really long, busy days. And I always feel like I'm never doing enough. I'm never accomplishing enough. But when I actually sit down to reflect on the things that I've done, and I'll do it in increments of time, what did I do this week, this month, the last four months? Like you said, you can do it on a quarterly basis. And I make those lists, even if they're just mental. Then I realize, oh, my goodness, I did so much more than I gave myself credit for or realized that I had even done. So I think it's a way of patting yourself on the back or correcting behavior that happened that shouldn't have happened.

That's right.

And getting back on track.

That's right. I mean, think about it right now. What are you. What are three things that you're grateful for? What are those things that are special to you? Who are the people in your life that you're grateful for? All these things change our pattern, change our emotional state, make us to be resourceful, to live a life of happiness and abundance and see possibility versus limitations. And. And so it's so important to do that reflection. I admit this is probably one of my weakest points, something that I have to work on. We all have things that we have to deal with. This is an area, because I'm just such a full blown achiever, that these are important things to do. So I'm gonna watch this darn segment again too, for myself, because everything that I teach, I went through as a process of myself. So don't ever think that when someone's teaching you a concept. I think any author, anyone who's given you personal development or health improvement or anything, don't think for a minute that they haven't gone through the things either. And you know, we're all on this journey together. This is definitely an area that I will be reflecting on myself.

Absolutely. You also talk about victories and celebrations, and I found this really interesting because as a mother raising my child, I used to have these little coupon booklets, you know, that were rewards for my son. Every time he did something good, got good grades, cleaned his room was whatever it was. I was very conscious about celebrating his small victories. But I realized that I wasn't doing that for myself.

So we need to make a coupon book for you.

I need a coupon book.

We need gold stars, right?

We did the star system, too. Where are my stars?

Well, I'll get you one because you've been great here. It's true. I mean, the things that we did for our children and the things that we would do and think about how we speak, encouraging to our kids and just so excited. We don't do that. We don't celebrate, you know, now people don't want to share their age. They don't want to, you know, 39, it kind of stops. Right. And all these things. But we have to find ways to celebrate. I mean, I mean, you know, having a party, doing some ways to celebrate, jumping up and down, all the things that we need to do. Think about what you did as a child. That was a, that felt great to do, find ways to do that. And you need to have celebrations for the big things that you do. But you got to find ways that are congruent with you that can also celebrate small things too. So instead of maybe going out there and getting cake and ice cream, well, maybe you're going to find something that's going to be more healthy, like maybe a date night or do something special or buy yourself some other thing in the kitchen or something that you can do that will be, you know, what can you do to celebrate in your life that will be health promoting or relationship building and life enhancing? How can you find a celebration for that? That's the question that you want to be asking yourself. And how can you incorporate the celebrations that can improve the quality of my health and in my life?

Well, I like how your celebrations have a multipurpose. So yes, they're a form of treating yourself for achieving something great, but they promote good behavior in the future.

Absolutely.

But there's another aspect to that too. You created in the book.

An emphasis on making a connection with that celebration. So when you have that celebration, you're creating an association for that moment in time that you're celebrating so that you don't forget it.

That's right. That's right. A celebration is an explanation point because life is, you know, when you look back at your life, you don't remember all of it. You're going to remember moments.

Exactly.

And so a celebration is a way to, to put an explanation point, to put a stake in the ground to say, this moment mattered in my life. This was something that I worked towards, that I worked hard. I just had an employee get her certification in health coaching. We want to celebrate those things. You want to earmark those because those are things that then will reflect back to you so that when you do have those tough times, you want to have that moment ingrained in your brain. That you can look back at and be proud of. Right.

It's true. Anytime I think back of something big, it's because we made it a big deal.

That's right.

And then the other stuff, you kind of have to, like, really reach far into the memory to pull it back up. So you talked about getting this habit of reflecting more often. How do you break that barrier of going from this busy lifestyle where you just never do it, which is where most people are at, to making it a lifestyle habit. What do you suggest?

Sure. Well.

Having a routine is important. So I think, you know, and you see a lot of books on it too, and a lot of people talk about it. Most successful people talk about having a healthy routine. And so I think your morning ritual should incorporate some of that information. So finding a way, if it's even writing down three things that you're grateful for, either in your phone or on a journal or something, but having a set time that you do that, maybe it's in the evening, so associate it with something that you do consistently, like waking up, like going to bed or maybe in the shower. So finding a specific thing to marry it with is gonna be really important. Yeah.

Okay. So creating a habit is very important. Being on a schedule, managing your time. This goes back to the rules and being disciplined.

Yes.

There's something else you talk about in this sect that to me was such a light bulb moment. It was just mind blowing that you used this association for the things that may be holding us back. Maybe those memories or activities that, you know, occurred in our lives that do hold us back. You said that we should have a funeral for them. So we went from celebrations to funerals. And I've never heard of this concept before. But, you know, sometimes we have failures too, Right? Especially. Especially if you're an entrepreneur. Sometimes you fail and fail and fail before you succeed. And those can create limiting beliefs and cause fear or what I call analysis paralysis. So tell us about this concept of having a funeral for things that have happened in life. And how. How do we do this?

Absolutely. Well, any person who's successful in life has had a significant amount of failure. In fact, I think your degree of your success in your life is your ability to tolerate failure. Right. And so we're going to have that. But you hit the nail right on the head there by saying that if you have these failures, that you can really become associated with them and they can really set the stage for disempowering beliefs. And so one of the key things is to have a funeral for them. So where you allow yourself the ability to acknowledge it, the first thing in coaching is you have to acknowledge it and then you have to allow yourself to literally grieve over it. Right. I talk about it in the book where I made a very bad real estate decision. And it was in 2008, with the collapse of the real estate market and all this, and. And I lost a lot more money than I'd be comfortable to lose. And it was really tough. And as a physician, we pride ourselves on and we have a standard that we do not make mistakes, like mistakes in somebody's health has devastating consequences. So my level of failure, acceptance of failure in my own professional training is very low. It's like non existent. So to make a mistake in another area of my life really shocked me at the core. So.

I had to create a funeral, metaphorically speaking, where I grieved that loss, where I cried and I got angry. All the steps that you would go through in the grieving process of losing somebody that you care for and going through that process to allow you then to get to a point where you can bury that and say, I've learned what I need to learn from that experience in life and then also see what might have been actually good that came from that too. Because in everything that we have, even when it's a horribly negative experience in life, there is good that we can find from those things. And that's when we can have a funeral. Bury that. Extract the goodness and even the worst of situations, which I wouldn't wish circumstances on anybody. But when you look back at it, the truth is we've grown the most from the most painful experiences and they've really clarified our values in a lot of ways. Our peaks and our valleys. That's why celebrations are there, and our valleys because you can use. They're both highly effective at finding out what you value, where your strengths are, who you are and who you want to become. So you have to take them both, but you extract it. But then you get to that stage where when I bury that failure, I was able to then move on, reduce the emotional charge from that experience, and then be able to create new possibilities in my life.

Is there a specific process that you'd recommend? I know it would be different for everyone and of course the situation will vary from person to person. But is there like a journaling process that you recommend? I know some people create bonfires and they might throw a paper with a list into the fire.

Yeah. I think you have to have the desire of wanting to do that and find what works best for you. And of course, if you're dealing with some deep seated things that you've gone through in life, which many of us have, that's where you need to seek a professional. I am not a therapist and a coach is someone who can help you make your future better and create an empowering vision for future. But a lot of us can have deep seated things from the past and that's where someone really should align themselves with a good therapist, a good psychologist or psychiatrist that can really help them with this and get those strategies. But the first thing is, is try at some level to see if you can be cleared out yourself or with somebody if it's deep seated and get the help because that's blocking you from achieving your greatness and blocking you from the ability for you to be great for other people.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So there you have it. We just walked through reflection, victories, celebrations and funerals all in one episode. This was a very, very, very intense episode. Great information. I hope you enjoyed it. Stay tuned because we have a lot more.