Reflect, Don't Deflect

If you want to truly reach your potential and make good on the big vision you have for yourself, you need to get good at receiving feedback. This isn’t just feedback from other people, but also from your own performance.

Improvement is only possible when we make a plan, execute it, review how it went, and then integrate learnings into a new plan. Tom Bilyeu calls a version of this the physics of progress, and the biggest bottleneck to getting that process to work for you is an unwillingness to receive feedback.

And it makes sense… our mind’s sole purpose is to keep us safe. When we make a mistake, fall short, or don’t meet expectations, the mind naturally wants to avoid confronting it. Its intention is to maintain a positive self-image so that we continue to feel positively about ourselves, which is more psychologically safe.

But unfortunately, that safety comes at the expense of our own awareness. We can’t integrate feedback we’re not letting ourselves see, and without it we’re either blindly making changes or stay stuck in the pattern of doing things exactly the same way.

The best thing you can do to accelerate your improvement is to reflect, not deflect.

When you reflect, you curiously observe how things went. You diagnose the conditions, circumstances, and factors of the attempt that led to that particular result. You gain the perspective you would have missed had you unconsciously avoided, or deflected, out of self-preservation.

The way I implement this for myself is I create conditions around my reflections. I measure my daily choices and performance against clearly defined criteria. When I don’t meet them, I simply ask myself “Why?” 

If I didn’t eat healthy… Why? Maybe it’s because I was out at an event and they had a bunch of appetizers on the table. Good to know I’m vulnerable to snacking in that setting!

Or if I didn’t record the training video I needed to get done… Why not? I had a timeblock for it but underestimated how long it would take to prepare the bullet points. Helpful context the next time I plan something like that!

As you can probably tell, this fast feedback loop helps me get better at holding myself accountable. Instead of just ignoring that I didn’t follow through on a commitment, I get to the root of what caused it and can design my life with that in mind.

I’m not perfect… I don’t hit my goals every day… But I do reflect every day on what’s getting on the way, and it’s done wonders for my health, business, relationships, and life.

If you want to see my system for how I measure and reflect on my performance every single day… Check out this video where I show you exactly how it works.

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