How To Close A Chapter In Your Life And Start A New One With Intentionality
“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”
- Steve Jobs.
We’re always opening and closing chapters in our lives. Every moment holds an opportunity to reflect on WHO YOU ARE… and decide WHO YOU WANT TO BE.
This is the true power of INTENTIONAL Reflection. Harness the power of reflection, and you identify helpful patterns and unhelpful mishaps quicker. In turn, you can fine-tune your path and take your next steps with more purpose and intentionality.
Through reflection, you get to catch things quicker and course-correct before hitting rock bottom. Regular reviews stop autopilot and empowers you to be a loving witness of your life.
That’s why reflection is an essential tool for navigating my Intentional Path.
If you’re curious about exploring how to weave more reflection into your life, this article is for you! Keep reading to discover my daily, weekly, monthly, and annual reflection practices - so you decide if they could be useful for you too.
DAILY CHECK-IN
Daily check-ins are a quick and simple way to assess where you are on your path. Here's how it works...
Over dinner, my girlfriend and I rate our day out of ten. Next we explain what contributed to the score - and what took away from it.
A 10/10 day isn’t about creating once-in-a-lifetime experiences. You don’t have to do anything spectacular to have an incredible day. Instead, the rating is less about what I did and more about how I showed up. This means I can have the “worst “day, but still score a ten - if I moved through it with character, strength, and intentionality.
On the other hand, a dream day could get a lower score if I allowed myself to get caught up in self-doubt, critical talk, or an inability to forgive.
What I love about this style of daily check-in is that external forces don’t influence your score. Instead, it’s under your control entirely because YOU get to choose how you show up and therefore how you feel.
“When rating your day, it’s not just about the things you did; it’s about the person you were - because who you are is the Intentionality piece and that’s ALWAYS under your control.”
I pick my score intuitively by checking in with my heart. I start with some conscious breaths and then ask my heart how I feel about today. If I feel proud, joyful, or love, then the day is going to rate highly. If I’m feeling frustrated, angry, or unresolved, I’ll score lower.
If you’re a left-brain thinker, tapping into heart wisdom can feel a bit alien. I’m a scientist with a strong analytical mind, but I’ve also found that the more you lean into and trust the deeper knowing that comes from your heart center, the more aligned and intentional your life becomes.
My daily score gives me a daily pulse on how my life is going. What I also love about this practice is that it’s given me more insight into what makes me feel good. Armed with this wisdom, I’m able to seek out the things that score highly intentionally. As a result, it’s getting easier and easier to create high scoring days.
WEEKLY REFLECTION
Each Sunday, I set an intention for how I want to feel during the week, and then the following Sunday, I reflect on how I actually felt.
For example, if I intended to feel love or prosperity, I’ll look back to see what I did to make those feelings a reality.
I’ve found that the way you approach your weekly reflection is as important as the reflection itself. If you reflect from a low vibrational state, you’ll extract learnings with a similar frequency because negativity will creep in.
"Intentionality is it is about who you are while you're doing the things you're doing."
Approach your reflection from a place of Intentional positivity, and your perspective becomes more upbeat. Choosing to be positive doesn’t mean downplaying the challenging moments or overlooking the hard lessons. Instead, the positive mindset allows you to reflect from a place of optimism and self-love. Optimism pushes off critical self-talk enabling you to extract the week’s wisdom with love - leaving you feeling better and stronger as a result of everything you’ve experienced.
MONTHLY REFLECTION
At the end of each month, I reflect on the top and bottom 5% in three different areas of my life:
Self
Relationships
Professional
Through this approach, I’m able to pull out any unresolved issues that need my focus as well as distilling my learnings from the more significant events and moments.
What works best for me is infusing my weekly reflections into this practice. If you only look at these areas once a month, your reflection becomes about the things you remember, not the totality of the experiences you had.
ANNUAL REFLECTION
My annual reflection is a highlight of my year because it’s when I take my solo birthday pilgrimage.
This is a ritual that’s evolved over the years. It started because my birthday is both a special and a confronting time for me. My birthday used to stir up childhood trauma, and that made me instinctively reflective, but I’d also feel low as I relived memories of my past.
As I dived deeper into the path of Intentionality, I realized I had to figure out a way to make myself feel better on my birthday. In response, I began writing out my annual lessons and sharing insights on Facebook posts. This reflective practise made me feel better because I could see an element of personal growth. Plus, I enjoyed sharing my insights because I could see that provided value to the people who read them.
Then in 2017, my marriage broke down, and I hit rock bottom.
I knew I had to do something different, so I booked a flight to Europe and walked the Camino de Santiago across France and Northern Spain.
This trip happened around my 32nd birthday, I had HOURS DAYS to reflect on myself and my life. In the 25 days that it took me to walk the 500 miles, I reflected on my entire lifetime.
It sounds like a cliche, but I returned home a different man. That period of deep reflection was healing, revealing, and relieving. Away from the everyday, I had the time and space to connect with myself on a level I’d never experienced before.
There’s something about walking in nature that allows you to connect with Source. As you get out of your head, you feel more creative and expansive, and more connected to Mother Earth. When you choose to be intentional and live in the NOW, you drop away from your heavy, over-thinking mind to let go of egoic thought patterns and connect to your true self.
For me, walking creates a bridge between your lower and true self. You get into a different flow, which allows insights and ideas to pop out from nowhere! Somedays, I’d walk for hours and think about nothing, then I’d sit under a tree and something profound would drop in.
My Camino experience was so life-changing, I made my annual birthday pilgrimage a milestone event in my year.
In 2018, I trekked to Machu Picchu in Peru.
I broke my collar bone in 2019, which meant I couldn’t make my usual walking pilgrimage. Instead, I did a silent meditation - an inner walk.
Then this year, I went to Zion.
During my pilgrimage, I reflect on the word I set for myself the previous year - then I choose my word for the coming year.
Pilgrimages are a great way to set an annual intention because there’s space to sink into your heart. I really drop in and feel what my soul needs for next year. This approach means there’s less opportunity for the egoic mind to take over and deliver a word from a place of logic.
For example, I was expecting my 2021 word to be BOLD. I went to Zion believing I already knew that 2021 would be defined by big, bold actions.
But as I sat and walked, a different word got clearer and clearer.
Yes, it’s going to be good to take bold actions, but that’s not the focus for 2021.
My focus is LOVE 💛
Choosing a word for your upcoming year gives you a context through which you can filter everything through.
Imagine how different my year will look through the lens of LOVE instead of BOLD!
I choose a word for each year of my life, but you can do the same moving into a new year - or anytime you want to close out one chapter in your life and start a new one.
Regular reflection will guide your life forward with Intentionality
It’s so easy to get caught up on the autopilot of life. Days blend into weeks, and before you know it, another year has passed, and you’re still not living in alignment with who you want to be.
But schedule regular reflection into your life, and you’re able to observe yourself as you move forward. In turn, you can make aligned decisions and consciously choose your path.
What reflection practices will you commit to after reading this article?
Whichever combination you choose, I promise this Intentionality practice will make a profound difference to your life.
