What lesson did you learn today?
Every day we have countless experiences. The activities we engage in, people we talk to, and feelings we have are all opportunities for growth. These lessons can be hard to see, and even if we do see them, it can be hard to distill into a single actionable idea. Finding the deeper meaning can feel like the jurisdiction of deep thinkers, visionaries, authors, or philosophers. But the ability to glean insight, even from the most mundane situations, is something anyone can do. It doesn't require unparalleled creativity. All it takes is a properly inquisitive mindset and the right questions.
Preparing Your Mindset
In order to glean insight from these questions, we need to be in a Skeptical Mindset. Meaning we should remove all bias, feelings, or preconceived notions from the picture. What we want to look for is what's objectively benefiting us or hindering us. What this means from a practical standpoint is that when we look at our day, the people in it, the events that occurred, and the feelings we have. Our instinctual and immediate responses should be promptly discarded. Why? Because this is our brain engaging in it's normal but least critical pattern response. These ideas are not newly formed, even if it feels like they in direct response to a current event. Newly formed ideas cannot happen until after we've engaged the brain after these automatic responses have been removed. So take a moment let your auto response engage, discard those conclusions, and you'll be ready to engage in our 10 questions.
10 Questions to Lessons Learned
Select an event that occurred in your day. It doesn't matter what it is, good or bad, big or small. As you answer questions 2-10 below, always follow your response up with question.
- Is this what you want, and if not what can you do to make it more in line with what's desired?
- How did the event make you feel?
- What did you do in response to this feeling?
- Did you intentionally think about your response, or was it automatic?
- Did you have a goal or an intent going into the event?
- Were you successful or did something get in your way?
- What will you do now that the event is over?
- Will anything follow from this event?
- How often does this event occur?
- Can you do anything to make your desired result for this event more likely and repeatable?
With the right mindset and these 10 questions, we can see past the filter our mind creates. We can start realizing the steps to take for improving our daily results and finally get what we really want. These questions aren't the only questions, they are just some you can use until you become practiced enough to develop your own. When you do, we would love to hear what your questions are!
