Episode Transcript

Hey what’s up? What’s up? What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys. Welcome back to five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome back to the show predicated on the journey of life in business. Well, guys, today I want to talk about reflection.

And What I mean by reflection is this is reflection is looking back over my life, at the actions, events and decisions I’ve made and learning from them. And not just my life, the time period can be, it doesn’t have to be specific to your life, it can be shorter amounts of time, it can be yesterday, it can be a month ago, it could be six months ago, three years, so the time period is really up to you to choose from. But the point of this is, I’m looking back over my life at the things I’ve done, the decisions I’ve made, the events in my life that I’ve chosen to participate in and be a part of, and then learning from them. And reflection is one of the best ways to learn and grow, right? If you don’t want to repeat a mistake, if you don’t want to repeat a certain decision that caused unintended consequences that you did not want in your life. Right? The best way to learn and to change that is to reflect to look back and be like, cool, why did I make that decision? What were the circumstances? And What was the information I had, that I operated on to make that decision? Did I actually collect any information? Or was it an emotional decision? Was it logical?

Right, and going down this path to look to learn? And then oh, cool, I don’t want to do that. Again, Here’s are the series of actions and events that I did that I participated in. And here are the series of decisions that I made here are the series of actions I took here are, Here’s all the information that was around at the time. And this is the result, I don’t like that result, I don’t want that. And I’m going to decide to do something different. Now this is true in the same firm, everything in life, everything in life, is built off reflection when it’s scientific. So this, you could say is a scientific method to learning about how you think to learn about how you decide things to learn how you act in What actions you should take, and how to make better decisions.

This is how marketing is done. Marketing is very scientific. We did this What were the results? Okay. It’s the same thing with sales. We did this. What were the results? It’s the same thing with building processes in a business, we did this, What were the results? So there’s two types of reflection, in my opinion, there’s an entrepreneur reflection, which is actually reflecting on the business’s, hey, we implemented the systems and these procedures, What were the intended consequences? Did we accomplish What we attended to, and then What were all the unintended ones, the ones that we didn’t see that we never really intended to have in our lives, but they showed up anyways. Right. And that’s reflection. And it’s so important.

Now the things that you have to have in your life, the things that you have to have personally in order to reflect in, and this is universal, whether it’s an entrepreneurial reflection, like looking at the business reflecting on the decisions and actions that are made, or personally, these are required, okay, you have to have humility, you have to have the ability to be wrong, because if you cannot be wrong, you will lie to yourself. And you will not be honest with yourself about the actions you took about the decisions that were made about the planning. If you don’t have the ability to be wrong, the only other option is to lie to yourself or avoid it. So you won’t even do this. But then if you start to do this, you’ll start lying to yourself. Right? And that is humility that requires humility. The next is ownership is a deep, deep, deep belief that I am absolutely 100% responsible for everything that happens in my life. Nobody else is I am if events happened, if circumstances happen in my life, I’m 100% responsible for them. Right? The next is curiosity, how could I have done it differently? How could I have done this differently? And if you don’t ask yourself how you could have done it differently, you’re not going to learn, right? Because a curiosity is from the learning side, the curiosity is actually What propels you to learn to improve to get better to make adjustments, and to course correct if needed, right.

And now I’m not saying that you should not celebrate wins. The point of reflection isn’t to kick the crap out of yourself and tell you how bad you are and all this other stuff. That’s not the point. The point of reflection in the purpose of reflection is to learn to grow and improve. And so it’s not just to sit there and kick the crap out of yourself. Well, real quick before the episode ends. I want to give you guys two things that I think are very important to daily reflection questions. Just personal questions that I think are very important. I asked myself these constantly. I asked myself these daily they’re taped on my wall. Did I get closer or farther away from the man I want it to be? That’s question number one. Did I get closer or farther away from the man I want to be and question number two is did I get closer or farther away from my goals today? And that’s it. Alright guys, I’m way over. I’ll catch you later peace