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?
Be as specific as you can
.
Make a note of which activities you are still doing
and which you
stopped, and when.
Ask yourself where else you get those feelings now in your life, and
how often.
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?
Really listen to your answers to these questions.
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.