Hi, I'm Ryder creator of the Bullet Journal Method and today's question comes from Lisa on YouTube. "How do you incorporate reflection in your BuJo practice in a way that's functional and carries through to weekly and monthly reflection?" Good question. Let's dive in. Let's start by taking a step back and looking at what reflection actually is. Reflection is an ancient practice found in many religious, spiritual, and secular traditions around the world. Each have their own tools and approaches for me, reflection is simply taking the time to study my life. Now, why would somebody want to do that? For some, this may seem like an unnecessary distraction at best and an exercise in masochism at worst. Yes, we can very easily get stuck in the past. And we can find endless examples of how imperfect we are when we take a closer look at our lives. That however is not the point of reflection. Reflection serves as a way to explore our lived experience from a place of curiosity, instead of judgment. The problem is that most of us rely on our memory to reflect if we reflect at all. Our memories provide us with a terribly inaccurate account of our experiences. In BuJo we use our notebooks to capture what we're thinking, experiencing and doing almost every single day. over time. This creates a pretty accurate record of which activities, people, experiences, and actions nourish us, and which ones don't. Cultivating this self-awareness through regular reflection can help us make better choices. That's why reflection is such a core part of our BuJo practice. In BuJo we have rituals that help us reflect in yearly monthly, weekly, and daily intervals. Each ritual is designed to help us tackle one of the most challenging aspects that I found when it comes to reflection: perspective. All of our thinking unfolds along a timeline. We can roughly categorize stretches along this timeline by short, mid, and long term. This is true for our future, as well as our past. We can access the past with our memory and we access the future with our imagination.

Both of these thought processes are more closely related than we might be comfortable to admit. Old memories fade and it's filled in with our imagination, and big visions tend to be vague. The closer in time, something is to the present the more detail it tends to have. On the flip side, the closer we are to a thought or an experience, the more difficult it is to remain aware of the larger context surrounding it. When we make choices from that space, they tend to be reactionary and shortsighted. This is why in BuJo we create rituals that help us regularly reflect in different intervals. Each interval helps us think about our life on a different time scale. This grants us a perspective of the past that can help us connect the dots between the short, mid, and long term experiences that we had. We can then use that insight to help us think about what we want to create moving forward in the short mid and long term. This brings us back to the question. How do you incorporate daily reflection into your BuJo practice in a way that's functional and carries through to the weekly and monthly reflection? even if it's only five minutes a day, take the time to look at what you've written down. To see what comes up for you. What are you feeling? What are you thinking? Are any of those thoughts or feelings surprising? Interesting, depressing, exciting. You might experience the following. You sit down to check in with what you've written down and you draw a blank and that's totally okay. That happens to me as well, and the way that I deal with this is by asking questions. Now it's your practice so you can ask whatever questions, make sense to you, but here are a couple that I found helpful for you to try on for size. As you read through your entries, ask yourself: What do I want more of? What do I want less of? What is one thing that I'm proud of today? What is one thing that I could improve tomorrow? Whatever your questions may be, the key is to ask them from a place of genuine curiosity.

If you ask yourself something like, why didn't I do this? Then the emphasis should be on the 'why' and not on the 'I' Focusing on the I is judgemental and self-deprecating. It's also just not useful. It won't help you understand why something didn't get done. When we approach our questions from a place of genuine curiosity, when we're really trying to understand how we feel about the things that we've written down, it can often surface things that we didn't expect. For example, you can notice that a task may scare you or that you resent an experience or that you don't know where to begin. All of those things are far more helpful than simply blaming yourself and give you clues as to how to move forward. Whatever comes up that resonates with you, whether it's good or bad, simply write it down. This is what I call a written reflection. In BuJo we have various different forms of written reflections, depending on the ritual, but for the daily log, I like to keep it simple. All I do is simply rapid log, a few observations in my daily log as they come up during my daily reflection. Some days especially on hard days, this might feel like a waste of time. I I've been there. I submit for your consideration that by the time you get to your weekly ritual, something you wrote down in your daily log will become useful. If not invaluable. This is how our daily reflection powers our weekly reflection, which powers the monthly reflection, all of which powers your BuJo practice as a whole. If you wanna learn more about reflection and about our daily, weekly, and monthly rituals, consider checking out our basics and beyond course where I dive into each in much greater detail and provide a variety of different tools and techniques that you can use. Thank you for your question, Lisa. I hope this helps with your practice. Also congratulations on winning access to BuJo U our members only social network for all things Bullet Journal.

For your chance to win access to BuJo u please be sure to submit any questions that you may have in the comments below. If your question is picked, you'll also get a free membership as a little bit of a thank you for helping us create content. If you found this video helpful, please be sure to sub to our channel and like this video. If you want to continue deepening your BuJo practice, we have a series of playlists here on the channel for you to explore. Thank you for taking the time and happy Bullet journaling. See you in the next one.