Eps 003: How to conduct a weekly Life Review that works

Well then let me introduce you to the Life Pilot Weekly Review.

In this episode I walk you through how to invest 30 minutes of time each Sunday to positively transform your life, habits, behaviours and results.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• What the heck a weekly life review is
• How to conduct one with a buddy or on your own
• What 3 prompts are most important in a weekly review
• The power of reflection to catch and positively change your behaviours and habits

Download the free Perfect Day Exercise Template

Transcript

Have you ever thought about conducting a weekly life review to actually check in with where your life is at compared to where you want it to be? Well then let me introduce you to the Life Pilot Weekly Review, or you could just call it my personal Weekly review.

This is something that I have been doing for about the last six years with my now husband Joshua, and on the weeks when we don’t conduct it, I can tell you the things just aren’t as awesome. So in terms of what a weekly review is, we call it our Sunday reflection, and it’s a process that we have basically inputted into our life since creating LifePilot.

Every single week, we set no more than three goals across six areas of our life, and every single Sunday we basically reflect on how did we go.

Now, the difference between simply looking at your goals or intentions for a week and saying, yeah, I hit them, I missed them, I progressed them. Let’s talk about them. Is now the difference between simply checking back on your goals for a week and saying, oh yeah, I hit that. I. Smash that I missed that completely, or I started on that, but I didn’t actually achieve it, is very different to reflecting on how you felt during the week, what came up during the week and what other parameters, I guess, or things in life may have disrupted you from actually achieving your goals or living with intention.

And that’s exactly what this weekly reflection is, and it’s a beautiful process and I think that you are gonna love it if you start incorporating it into your life. You can do this as an individual as well. You can simply take a journal with you or a notepad, or even just leave yourself an audio message to basically talk about what went well in the week.

So what we typically do is, We will actually just make a little bit of space and time. This can be done over 30 or 60 minutes, and it’s a beautiful process, as I said, and it should be fun.   Take yourself off to a cafe, go for a walk in the park. It’s actually really good if you do a walk and talk on this because you are more in your thinking brain and you can reflect back on the week.

You don’t necessarily have to be looking at your partner or your friend or whoever you’re doing it with, but you get to walk and talk and really reflect and think, because the issue is that most of us go through life just going. You know, what did I do? How did I get on with it? But you don’t actually uncover the underlying meaning of why something maybe is tripping you up or why you are hesitant or not prioritizing something that is supposedly really important to you.

And the beauty of a weekly reflection is you start to notice patterns in your behavior that may be tripping you up, as I said, or holding you back from living the life you really want and really achieving some of those big, hairy, audacious goals. So first off, we actually start with just a check-in. So how are you feeling?

How do you feel this week went? And often it’s really interesting to see Josh’s reflection versus mine. We might be focusing on very different things, or maybe there were some big things that came up in the week that were both really quite important to us or affected us, or that we really wanted to celebrate.

And then we actually use some tried and true prompts that we love and I invite you to use them yourself. They are part of Life Pilot, but here they are for free.

The first one is what were the roses in the week? And the roses is things that were beautiful, not just they smelled good, but you know, positive events.

Things that you wanted to celebrate, things that went well, so it might be that we had a really great night’s sleep. We might have had a really beautiful social event catching up with dear friends, and it just was really meaningful to us. We might have gotten all our workouts in for the week and we were feeling great.

We might have kicked off a project and we were feeling really positive about it and really motivated.

Then we talk about thorns.   So thorns, as you can imagine, they’re thorny, a bit of a thorn, a bit of a pain in your side. So those are things that didn’t go so well. Maybe bugged you, irritated you, triggered you.

They can be all those topics, right? So it might be for you personally, you were just having a down week, or you simply got stalled on all your projects because you were actually a little bit scared about the outcome, or you didn’t create enough time to get it done. And so then you got down on yourself for not doing it.

We’ll talk about that in another podcast, but, It’s the things that didn’t go so well, right? It might have been that you had a really crappy conversation with one of your family members or somebody you were in a relationship with, and it left you feeling really sad and alone and upset. Or maybe you reacted to something that one of your kids or pets did, and you just were like, wow, why did I react like that?

I just felt really stink about it. So thorns, get them out. Get them out there and talk them through with your partner.

Typically in a weekly reflection, we will talk and listen to each other and then add comments or value or insights, or more importantly, ask more probing questions so that whoever is releasing the roses and the thorns can actually think more deeply about what might have been behind that or offer up a reflection or a different lens or point of view.

I’m definitely more the. I, I don’t know. I can be very rational, but I can also be irrational and I’m very emotional, and very passionate and I really care deeply about so many things. So often my lens is a lot more impassioned, and that can be a beautiful thing. It can also sometimes blind me to maybe the reality of what really happened.

And then Josh is much more kind of low key level-headed. Like, these are the facts, this is what happened. Maybe you’re reading into that little much. So it’s good to have that balance. Right. And the third thing that we talk about is bananas.

So bananas are surprises. Surprises in either a good or a bad way, or just simply surprising.

So it might have been that somebody came to visit you outta the blue and it was a banana for the week because it was actually really wonderful, but you weren’t expecting it. A banana might have been that you got sick and it totally derailed you from your plans. It might have been that you got an unexpected source of income and it.

Allowed you to imagine doing different things with your time or being able to buy something you really wanted or have an experience now that you’d been holding off on, like going on holiday. So bananas are quite fun, and they can be very, very small. They can be quite large. And so your week essentially becomes this reflection on those three things.

Roses, thorns and bananas. We do have different prompts that will switch it up from time to time, but these seem to have worked the best for us and kind of recapping on the week. And once we’ve gone through with that, then we will actually look at our three big goals for the week and we will say, how do we get on with it?

Did we hit it? Did we progress it or did we miss it completely?   And the real gold comes from analyzing that, not just going, oh bugger, you know, I missed it, but hang on a minute. I’ve had this all my goals for the last three weeks and I’ve missed it every week. Is it the right goal to be setting? Is it even important to me or what’s holding you back from achieving this?

And that is really where the true power of these reflections come from. It’s allowing the other person, whether it be, as I said, your bestie, your husband, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your sister, you know, just a trusted friend and confident, and to reflect back at you what they’re hearing, what they’re seeing, maybe what’s coming up for them that they’ve noticed in your patterns.

Without truly reflecting on what’s happening, we can’t make a plan for the week coming forward. We can’t at least make an effective plan that actually is going to be different and give us different results. So I highly encourage you just to take the powerful reflective process. So I highly encourage you to take time out for this very powerful, reflective process.

It will be so insightful for you, and it will reveal a lot about where you’re actually at in life. What is coming up for you? What’s important that maybe wasn’t before? What’s holding you back that you didn’t notice? And really where are you getting stuck and where are you absolutely crushing it and where have you got great motivation and momentum.

It also allows the person that you are speaking with and reflecting on with to get a sense of where they can support you for the week coming ahead. So if you’ve had a particularly poor time of hitting a goal or what you’ve seen that you’ve had, like a lot of thorns. They have the opportunity now to go, well, how can I support you this week in moving past that or getting that block unblocked?

It’s a really, really useful thing to be able to do with somebody else and have them, as I said, shine the light on you and really look at what you’re doing from a different perspective and offering up some advice. And again, if you wanna do this weekly reflection as your own process.

I highly recommend journaling it and writing it down, and then what you can do is as you come into this week’s reflection, which as I said is a really great thing to do on a Sunday before you start into the week ahead,  you can look at what you wrote the week before and see what’s changed, what’s come up for you, maybe what’s repeating itself and how to get to the bottom of that if it’s not a good thing, and how to use more of it or get more of it in your life if it’s a great thing.

So there are lots of different ways to do weekly reflections, but this by far is our favourite. And we actually will note this down in a journal. So we do have our life pilot app, , but we can also note this down in a journal and then we can look back on it each week as well. And by the end of the year, you’ve got kind of 52 entries of, oh my gosh, look at where we’ve come from.

Look at how far we’ve come, look at what came up again and again that we took. Three or four months to get to the bottom of, or look at how much we’ve been intentional about living our life in this way, or look at how our relationship has benefited from this or our fitness or our wealth.

If you couple this with a daily planning session before you start into your workday or before you start on your important creative work, basically before you start into your focused time, it can be absolutely even more powerful.

You now have this weekly reflection. You take the insights from that. You put it into the week ahead to really settle into what is going to be an awesome week because you know what’s been holding you back, where you’ve got consistency and motivation and momentum and what you need to do to focus on the results that you really, really want to have.

I hope you found this weekly reflection process really valuable. I absolutely encourage you to transform it into something that’s gonna work for you.

It may be that you change it to a different day, but I definitely would suggest that you calendarize it so it’s a weekly commitment to yourself and or your partner friend that you’re doing this with.

It really is so much better to do life and design your life with somebody else who supports you on the journey that you’re going on. It also holds you accountable. It holds you truer to yourself if you have somebody there sharing the dream with you, and it’s far more likely that it’s actually gonna become a reality, just a heads up there.

So find yourself a great friend, a partner, a lover. Whatever it may be, and make sure that you commit to this weekly reflection, whether it’s on the phone, on Zoom in person is best, obviously, but whatever way it needs to be for you to make it happen and really lock that in and invest that time in yourself.

It’s gonna give you so many gems and so many insights for the week ahead, and not only the week ahead, but the following month, the quarter, the whole year, and how you want to live your life with purpose so that you can truly create, design, and live the life of your dreams.