65 Reflect to Move Forward on Your Goals

Hi there. Thank you for joining me on RxChill Pill. Meditate your brain to resilience. Meditation is not just about sitting and repeating a mantra to yourself, trying to do something special with your mind. Meditation is also about just learning and thinking about things and analyzing things in a way that makes sense to you. And I'm a lifelong learner because nothing gets me more excited and curious than learning something new. It's just something that I am almost addicted to. I recently wrote a guest blog for the School of Thought about looking back to look forward for the new year. So I started thinking more and more about reflection and doing some research on it, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts with you. For more details, please go ahead and read that blog post. The link is in the podcast notes, and Dr. Jane Shore has amazing blog posts every Sunday. I wanted to talk about self-reflection for self-improvement because every New Year there's a slew of advice on reflecting on the past and setting intentions and goals for the coming year. So, I'm not much of a journaler. I like to buy journals. I've bought many of them in the past, and I haven't really kept them up, um, since I was a teenager. But I really got interested recently in reflecting as a part of Learning. Because I study the neuroscience of learning, I found robust research in reflection as part of something that's really essential to becoming an effective learner, an organized learner. I used to have a motto that I would never look back. For many, many years, especially in my early years and in my early career, I just pulled myself up by the bootstraps and kept marching on without looking back. I know I'm definitely not alone in this. It's a pretty common thing. But this came at a price because I'm pretty sure if I'd asked myself a little more often about what interested me and what really made me genuinely curious, I think it would have probably saved a lot of time and unnecessary suffering. This was a defense mechanism I had back then, and it probably served me well for a while. When I left my high school in 3 years because I wanted to leave a difficult home situation, and I got to college at the age of 16. From there on, I went to medical school and there wasn't much time for self-reflection or anything else for that matter. For me, it was just about not really facing any emotions and just surviving and, and to be honest, doing well without it. But I know for a fact that I could have benefited from the occasional reflection. It serves me really well as a teacher too, because I've just started a recent formal practice of reviewing and reflecting on my teaching videos. This was definitely a silver lining, one of the highlights from the Zoom era of teaching. I was able to watch my videos and kind of debrief on them and take notes on my teaching, and it was painful, to be honest with you. I really didn't want to watch myself, but now I love it. So it has helped me get organized and given me a lot more confidence as a teacher. I also make sure to include reflection in most of my classes for my students too, and I know it's been a much better experience for them. So there's robust evidence that reflective practice optimizes the neural networks of learning, whether it's in math or reading, sports, music practice, or even in our relationships. Just this increase of a general self-awareness allows us to coach ourselves. There are formal frameworks for reflective practice, Ooh, that's a tongue twister. And they're standard teaching tools in medicine and in education, but we don't often think about it when it comes to general life happiness, relationships, money, health, and even our time, what we spend our time on. So most of us aren't really trained to have a structured time or plan to review or to analyze how we're doing in these areas, unless of course when poop hits the fan and you're there seeing a doctor or a lawyer or a therapist. Not that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, most of us probably need to see therapist at some point in our lives. So I want to propose that we can significantly improve our lives and improve the chances of our New Year resolutions sticking if we set aside formal review time. Now, it's really important to actually put it in the planner and block out time for it. We can go over what went well, what went poorly, and what we can do differently next time. This reflection time also allows us to step out of our in-the-moment emotional experience that definitely colors all of our experiences so that we can actually see it in a different light. Lately, I actively invite feedback from friends and family members or mentors close to me, as this has been shown to be a significant advantage in being able to see ourselves and to improve ourselves in any area. One of the more well-known research on this topic is called deliberate practice. This was a study on high-level musicians by Ericsson and colleagues, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell's book called Outliers, where he dedicated an entire chapter on the famous 10,000-hour rule to become an expert at anything, which has been debated since. But nevertheless, there are really important concepts in deliberate practice. One of the significant criteria for deliberate practice is to get immediate and constructive feedback on how the musician is doing with practice. The executive coaching world has the famous 360-degree feedback where you get objective feedback from many different people in your life, including your family and coworkers. And of course, you do have to be careful who you get feedback from to make sure that they are being objective and that they have your best interest at heart. An important idea here is that no one person can give you the truth about you. You need many different people's objective reflections to cover all the different facets that we have. I wrote a more extensive guest blog post for the School of Thought, and I'll put the link here in the show notes. But I want to go over a quick summary and call to action based on the blog post. So number 1 is what I said before. Plan reflection time right into your calendar. I advise you to do this once a week, and oftentimes the most popular vote from my students were for Saturday or Sunday to review the last week. I also advise a mini check-in first thing in the morning and at the end of the day, literally just a few minutes checking in about how things are going. Then you want to add a monthly, quarterly, and yearly reflection. And this goes for any new goals you might have, whether it's exercising more, sleeping more restfully, taking care of your finances or relationships, any personal or career improvement goals. My monthly guest Fiona Murden, who is an occupational psychologist in London who's worked with leaders of all fields and CEOs, does the 360 feedback with them and also recommends a deep analysis of how our lives are going once every 2 years. Our first episode was in January, number 66, and we plan to have her come back every first Sunday of the month. We're going to have really fun themes for each month, so don't forget to check it out. If you don't already use a paper planner or a digital planner to plan out your days, I highly suggest starting that. So the prompts are basically figuring out where you were starting from, where you were in the time that you wanted to compare back to, whether it was a week ago or a month ago or a year ago. And just asking yourself and writing out what worked, what didn't work, what you were struggling with. And it's just as important, or sometimes even more important, to figure out what did go well and what your strengths really were. After reflecting back, you would use your imagination for the future. Where do you want to be later? Whether it's a week from now, a month from now, or a year from now, or 5 years from now. Ask yourself, how can I adapt what I did so that I can get to this goal, this visualization of where I want to be in the future? I do this on a cognitive level by writing it out, and Dr. Jane Shore, the author and creator of School of Thought blog, would say to even doodle it out or draw it out, whatever integrates it for you and your brain. There's also a mental exercise we can do using our imagination. We can do a nice visualization, which is a less formally cognitive way of practicing what we would like to have in the future. So this is very useful when things don't go as well as we would've liked it to go. You can do kind of a mental do-over. I remember the first time I was introduced to this by my mentor, Peg Bame. If you haven't listened to the interview with her, it's episode number 11. She's amazing. She's my mentor and one of the most influential people in my life. At the time when I was training with her many years ago, my kids were still very little. She guided me through this visualization, and it was so incredibly helpful to me because honestly, there are so many things that I wanted to do over. It's where you mentally practice and do something over that didn't go well for you. And the next episode I record will be this visualization exercise. So that's a less formal way, but we absolutely know that mental practice can have real structural neuronal changes. More on that on the next episode. Hey, thank you so much for spending this time with me. So try to apply some of the things that we talked about today and see what happens. Please write to me at podcast@mindbodyspace.com to give me feedback, ask me questions, and maybe suggest topics for the future. And don't forget to share, share this so that we can keep this free information for anyone who's curious enough to positively influence their brain. We have an incredible guest lineup coming up. So until next time, this is Dr. Juna wishing you and your loved ones wellness.