I’ve been on a bit of a self-reflection kick of late. My job change (which I detail in my blog post from a few weeks ago, “P* Management”) left me feeling adrift and looking to re-ground myself in my personal values and principles. I’m looking to define myself beyond my job title. It turns out that a title is either too stagnant or too mercurial and rarely a good thing to hitch your identity to. I’m doing a lot of different exercises and readings, some helpful, some not, so I thought I’d share today one activity I found really insightful and one I didn’t, in case you are also looking for some self-reflection.

Top Activity: Word for the Year

This is essentially a replacement for setting a new year’s resolution. The intention is that this word or theme can guide your decisions and prompt you in a positive way, rather than being a looming and questionably-achievable goal for you to feel guilty about. CGP Grey actually has a video about doing this that I enjoyed. There wasn’t a pre-defined suggestion on how to pick a word/theme, so here’s what I did:

1. Set a timer for 5 minutes, and brainstorm as many ideas that feel like something you might want to do. My list included things like “year of reading,” “year of writing,” and even some contradictory things – I had both “year of caring” and “year of not caring” as well as “year of yes” vs “year of no”. If it popped into my head, I wrote it down, even if my reaction was “lol no” (one auto-no for me was “year of cooking” but I wrote it anyways).
2. Set a timer for 1-2 minutes, and cross off ones that don’t really resonate. I crossed off auto-no’s, like “year of cooking,” but also crossed off ones that sounded good but didn’t feel exciting, such as “year of advocacy” and “year of health.”
3. Of what’s left, group them – since the goal was to write down all the things off the top of your head, there are probably some repeat themes. For example, “self-care,” “mindfulness,” and “mental health” all spoke to the same desire for me, and I grouped them together.
4. Name each group. The groups I ended up with were “Self Care,” “Courage,” “Focusing,” and “Letting Go.”
5. Write 2-4 sentences for each group on why this theme stuck out for you (why didn’t you cross it off?) and how you think it might influence your choices throughout the year.
6. From that, pick the one that resonates most strongly, or if they all feel good, maybe pick the one you think might have the greatest impact.

I picked “letting go,” where my intention is to let go of expectations, practices, and activities that are not helping me so that I can focus on the ones that do.

A small example of how this is guiding my actions: letting go of the mentality that I must exercise on certain days (thus feeling guilty when it doesn’t happen). My schedule is very flexible right now, so I just exercise whenever I feel like I have the time and energy. Some weeks that’s 5/7 days. Some weeks it’s 0/7. If there are a lot of 0/7 weeks, that may be a signal that I need to change something – do I not like the exercises I’m doing, or has my schedule changed, or am I lacking energy on a continuous basis? This gives me more information and ways to change than “I put exercise on my calendar for every Tuesday at 6pm but never do it.”

I hope that changes like this throughout the year will help me to be more flexible and adaptable.

Bottom Activity: Work View vs Life View

This is an activity out of the book “Designing Your Life,” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, where the goal of the book is to apply principles of design thinking to critically examine your life. A big part of this, of course, is work – not just your money job, but also things like caregiving, housework, or volunteering. One activity was writing essays encapsulating your philosophies on work and life, then examining them to find where they clash. They had prompts such as “what is the role of work in society,” “what does work represent for what we mean to each other,” “what is the role of a god or other spiritual beliefs,” and “why do we exist.”

Deep shit. Not being a philosopher or a writer, my responses ended up sounding a bit like the ravings of an atheist, communist lunatic. 

The goal of the activity, I think, was to identify dissonance between what you think good work is and what work you actually do. For example, if your view on work was that the only point is to create value for shareholders, but your view on life was that it’s important to be in service of others, then you might not feel that your work is helping you live a good life. Having done some reflection on this in the past, however, my “views” aligned with each other and I didn’t learn anything new. Plus it was a lot of writing.

If there are any self-reflection exercises YOU find value in, let me know! As you know, I love a good brainstorming session.