FREE Self Reflection Exercise
Take 20 minutes out of your daily schedule, when you won’t be interrupted. You may have to get up early or go to bed 20 minutes later, use commuting time or forgo something you feel you can do without, once or twice a week.
1. Write a list of at least 10 things you enjoyed doing as a child.
Our interests are usually much broader when we are younger, so
don’t feel you have to stop at ten things. Include everything you
can think of. Ice-skating, biking downhill hands-free, reading,
writing and putting on plays, doing chemistry or other experiments,
sports, ballet, climbing, learning something new, let your
imagination and memory run wild, put down anything at all.
2. When you have written this list, go through each one and remember the feeling it gave you.
- How did you actually feel when you did those things?
- What was it you liked so much about it?
- What did it give you a feeling of?
- Thrill? Contentment? Risk? Enchantment? Curiousity?
Self-Reflection Exercise Part 2
If there are activities in your current life where you get these feelings, how often do you engage in them?
- Why don’t you engage in them more?
- What’s stopping you?
Find a way to engage in these activities again, occasionally or more regularly depending on the activity. Or find activities that you want to do now that will give you those same feelings/rewards.
Notice how you feel about the activities that make up most of your time. We all have things we have to do, commitments to ourselves and others that are part of a larger thing that we want. But it is still possible to increase your sense of satisfaction and contentment with yourself and your life, one small building block at a time.
This exercise will help you start to re-connect with who you are, and your unique and individual engagement with and response to the world, and it will help you to start thinking more actively about what sort of very specific things make up a sense of contentment and satisfaction for you.