4 self-reflection loops for your journey to self-actualization

For many years, I didn’t spend enough time self-reflecting. Then I experimented for years. Now I am equally focused on sawing (doing things) and sharpening my saw (reflecting on what I have done). If you think you don’t have time to read this article, you are either one of many people being so busy sawing that you don’t take the time to sharpen your saw, or you already have adopted excellent self-reflection feedback cycles. I see self-reflection as the core of personal growth and the path to fulfillment.

A turning point for me was my flight to Singapore in 2013. I left behind my 3 co-founders with our restaurant business, which was facing many challenges at the time, to enjoy a five-month exchange semester. During this flight, I read the book The Big Five for Life. One thought experiment in this book got me hooked. What if at the end of our life, a museum would be built, in which everyone could see pictures, notes, quotes, and video-clips of the things we did in life. Every visitor would see us the way we were. Not how we wanted to be, not our excuses why we couldn’t make something happen, but how we actually were. How would you feel going through it after you die? Ask yourself every day: “Was today a good museum day or a bad one?”

During this exchange semester, I started my journey of continuous self-reflection. And ever since, I have been experimenting with frameworks and iterating on reflection cycles. I wrote this article to share what I learned. I started reading about self-growth, psychology, the purpose of life, and the like. You can find a list of some of my favorite books at the end of this article.

Begin with the end in mind

“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.” Lucius Annaeus Seneca

In life, we often get bogged down by small things or other people and, as a consequence, struggle to feel a sense of fulfillment. Or we might be on autopilot, unquestioningly following preset paths and not even realize that life is passing us by. Until, maybe, one day we wake up realizing that we are not living the life we actually wanted.

There are different philosophies of what one needs to be fulfilled in life. I believe it is essential to have (1) a target personal identity as well as (2) a purpose in life. To make my purpose more tangible, I break it down into (3) 5 life-goals. These three elements guide me whenever I have to make a difficult decision. They help me to prioritize my day and limit feelings of envy, and rather let me experience satisfaction, thankfulness, and fulfillment.

The focus of this article should be self-reflection loops rather than going deep into the topics of identity and purpose. Hence, the following few paragraphs are only a short introduction to the topic.

Start by defining your target identity and a clear purpose.

1. Take a moment and try to imagine your funeral. What would you want your family and partner to say about you? What would you want your best friends to say about you? What would you want your colleagues and communities say about you? This should be the core of your target identity.
2. Next, think about “What can I offer to the world?” What are rare and valuable skills you have or want to build? When we master a skill, it will become our passion. Finding one’s passion without investing time to become good at it is a myth. So think about “What process of learning a skill would I enjoy?” These thoughts will be the foundation for your purpose, the purpose that you are on planet Earth for.
3. Now you can derive 3–5 concrete goals related to your purpose and identity. Think about different areas in life such as your relationships, profession, hobbies, and places you would like to spend time at, the impact you want to create, and most important, your health.

Taking the first steps is hard and talking about it can seem abstract and hard to follow. So I will provide my examples to help you get started.

This is my purpose, my big 5 goals and my target identity as of the beginning of January 2020:

Continuous course corrections to stay on track

Your purpose and target identity are neither ever done nor ever fully accomplished.

Their job is to provide you with guidance to stay connected with the things that motivate you. The 5 concrete goals are linked to both your purpose and target identity and should give you clarity and motivation to get going. Without defining your goals, you might not know where to get started and how to bring your purpose into action. Pay attention that your goals are connected to your purpose and underlying identity, since fulfillment comes from becoming that person capable of achieving those goals not necessarily from achieving the goal.

As we progress through life and deal with our day-to-day challenges, we easily get off-track from our long-term ambition. This is normal and okay. And this is the reason why you need to continuously reflect and take a moment to check:

1. Where am I right now?
2. What happened in the previous period?
3. What was good/bad?
4. What did I learn?
5. What do I want to change to get back on track?

Just like there is no right zoom level to look at the map of the world, there is not a single routine that helps you to reflect on everything. Sometimes you want to zoom out to see the bigger picture and reflect about it. Sometimes you want to go into the details of a conflict you have and understand why it is happening.

This is why I built the following routines over the last few years. I started by only doing an annual reflection. At some point, I introduced the quarterly session. I struggled for a long time to find habits for a weekly and daily rhythm that would persist. You need to find the right setup for yourself. I will guide you through my setup to give you some inspiration. Don’t over-engineer it. It is better to get started and improve as you go, rather than never getting started because you are aiming for perfection from the start. I follow my routines 95% of the time. I never skip on the annual or quarterly loop. However, on some days, I just miss doing my daily reflection in the morning or evening. And during vacation, I sometimes leave my self-reflection book at home intentionally.

To help me to reflect on the progress toward my goals, I follow four loops of reflection:

1st Loop: The Annual Cycle

Refine your bigger picture

I block a few hours at the beginning of a new year. First, I review my target identity, my life purpose, and the big 5 goals. Do they still feel right? Do I use them to make key decisions and to prioritize the way I spend my time?

Be open-minded to challenge and adjust your goals when your priorities or circumstances change.

I make a few changes to my goals almost every year. For example, for three years, one of my five goals was to travel to 100 countries and make one friend in each country. After having had this goal for three years, I noticed that I wasn’t working toward reaching this goal and started questioning it. I realized that it actually doesn’t matter to me to how many countries I travel and whether I make a friend there or not. I enjoyed traveling, but rather to regenerate, spend a good time with family or friends, or gain inspiration. Thus, I dropped the goal entirely and replaced it with a different one.

Create a list of annual objectives

As a second step, I define 2–5 concrete objectives for each of the following areas in my life: (1) Relationships, (2) Energy, (3) Passion, (4) Profession, and (5) Personal Growth. Using such categories will help you to come up with objectives more easily. Creating a list of objectives matters more than what categorization system you use. The objectives can be: “One-time” activities like organizing a trip with my family; Recurring activities such as doing an improvisation theater course; Continuous tracking of a metric, for example setting a sleep score goal by tracking my sleep with the Oura ring. And most importantly, I try to build or change one to two new habits every year, for example exercising regularly, drinking less alcohol, eating less meat, or meditating daily. To build lasting habits, I define rules and systems for each of them. I will elaborate later how I track the progress of my habits. Understanding the impact of habits and how to deal with them is a key skill. You can find a recommendation for my favorite habit-building-books at the end of this article.

Once you have a list of annual objectives, double check them against your target identity, purpose, and life goals. Sleep over it for a few nights and review them. Talk to your partner, family, or a few close friends and let them challenge you on why you have chosen these objectives. These objectives should be inspired from your inner desires, from your purpose and identity, not from the expectations of your parents or the public image you want to create, but actually don’t care about. Other people can help you challenge that. Make your adjustments based on these inputs and your thoughts.

For example, these were my 18 annual objectives for 2019. I accomplished 10 of them, 2 not at all, and all others to an okay or good extent but not entirely

2nd Loop: The Quarterly Cycle

Check the status of your annual objectives

At the end of each quarter, I block two hours to reflect on the past three months. These should be two hours of full focus. If you are too busy, postpone the session by a few days rather than rushing through not being fully focused. I have a recurring blocker in my calendar for the first weekend of a new quarter. First, I go through the list of my annual objectives and mark them accordingly:

• “Done”
• “On track”
• “I need to keep an eye on”
• “Not started”
• “Changed” / “New”

This is an example of my Q3/2019 review of my annual objectives.

Adaptability over being dogmatic on initial commitments

If something significantly changes that makes an objective unrealistic or deserves a specific objective, then I adapt. In 2019, I didn’t have a lot of such changes. While in the first quarter of 2020, we learned that we are becoming parents, which was not reflected in my yearly objectives. So I added a new objective around making support for my wife the top priority. COVID-19 also affected some objectives, such as travel plans and my plan to join an improvisation theater course. This is why these quarterly reviews are so valuable. They help you to course-correct during the year.

Review the previous quarter

Besides the check-in on the annual objectives, I answer the following 7 questions to do a proper review of this quarter. This is the most exciting exercise every quarter. There is no dedicated order for checking in on the annual objectives and answering the 7 questions. I start with either of them and jump back and forth until I am done because the insights from both are somewhat dependent.

1. Things I did this quarter?
   You list everything worth mentioning in a short list of bullet points. Books you finished reading. “First-time experiences”. Special events at work. Trips you took… I do this by going through my calendar to gather input. Usually, I am surprised how much happened in only one quarter. Things move so fast, that we tend to forget.
2. Highlight of the quarter?
   To be precise, you list 3 highlights:
   (1) The “Me” highlight, which is about your personal growth, health, or about one of your passions.
   (2) The “Relationship” highlight, which is something that happened relating to your family, partner, or friend.
   (3) The “Work” highlight, which is about something related to success in your profession
3. Low Light of the quarter?
   You use the same three categories mentioned in question 2. The low light usually is something that didn’t go as expected or planned, something related to negative emotions and with potential for improvement.
4. New learning of the quarter?
   This can be a skill, an experience that taught you an important lesson or an insight derived from a book, conversation, or similar. Something you didn’t know before this quarter and you are glad you know now.
5. Most interesting new person of the quarter?
   We meet so many people these days and oftentimes struggle to stay in contact. Think for a moment who is someone you got to know, whom you want to stay in contact with and possibly deepen the relationship with.
6. What am I thankful for?
   I answer this question every day. However, once a quarter, we should reconsider and see the bigger picture to not forget all the great things we are thankful for.
7. What do I want to do better next quarter?
   First check the answer to this question from last quarter to see whether you actually improved on the things that you planned. Then you define a few things you want to improve on. In my case, they are oftentimes related to my annual objectives.

Here is an example of my quarterly review of Q2/2020.

Connect annual objectives with your private “To-Do” backlog

Oftentimes, we end up reacting to things that are urgent and tend to skip things that are important but not yet urgent, such as health, family, or reading. To connect my annual objectives with my daily doing, I create concrete actions for most of the objectives and put them in the backlog of my private Could-Do list. More on this later.

3rd Loop: The Weekly Cycle

A week is the perfect period for planning and reflection

When daily planning, it is often hard to balance all the things that are important to you in life. You will have days loaded with work and days focused on private matters. Yet, within a week, you can balance well between time for you, your relationships, and your professional ambitions. There are exceptions such as vacation, but for most of the year, you can build and stick to well-balanced weekly routines.

I struggled for years building a lasting weekly reflection routine

I blocked an hour every Friday for self-reflection. I tried a Monday morning routine and some other formats. At the end, I didn’t follow through on any of them more than a few times. One day, a friend recommended the 6-minutes-diary, which was a game changer for my daily and weekly reflection routine.

The 6-minutes-diary was my game changer

For about one year, I have been using the book 9 out of 10 days. I have been successful most likely because it is a physical book always next to my bed that reminds me to act. The first version of the book comes with a weekly reflection based on five questions that go very deep and a section for some weekly notes. The second version has a much more structured section for a weekly reflection. On one page, you note down:

1. 1–3 successes in your week
2. on a scale of 1–10, how happy you have been this week and why
3. what you have learned this week
4. a few things you want to do in the coming week related to your private and work matters
5. 1–3 things you are looking forward to.

Here is an example page from the book with my answers for the weekly reflection from 3rd week of August 2020.

This takes me 10 to 15 minutes every Sunday evening or Monday morning. In addition, you have a section to track 3 habits every week. This helps me to better keep track of habits I want to change. Mobile apps didn’t work for me to track my habits.

Make time for important things — I know, it is so hard….

The second thing I do on a weekly basis is a short update of my private Could-Do list. I pull all items from my “Sometime” section — which is my private backlog — into the section “Next priorities.” Then I prioritize the items in “Next priorities” and block some time in my calendar for important items from this list that have a good chance of falling through. I consider the Could-Do list rather a “Want- or Can-Do List” that provides me peace of mind and helps me to keep an overview.

4th Loop: The Daily Cycle

As with the weekly routine, I struggled to establish a daily routine of reflection, planning, and thinking. The 6-minutes diary did help me to establish a 3 minutes morning and evening routine. I answer 3 questions every morning and 3 before going to bed.

Morning

1. What am I thankful for….
2. What would make today a great day?
3. Positive self-affirmation

Evening

1. What positive thing did I do to someone today?
2. What will I improve on tomorrow?
3. Great things I have experienced today…

Every day, I answer the same questions. They help me to appreciate the little things in life and keep my positive mindset. They support me in developing new habits and pay more attention doing good to others.

The following page, I fill out every day. This example is from 23rd of August 2020.

You don’t need to buy the book to build great feedback cycles. You need to find the approach that works for you on a continuous basis. For me, it was a breakthrough in my personal growth.

Career-based reflection

Two more things you should consider if you want to take personal growth and self-reflection seriously.

Do a structured reflection every time you switch your job (or role)

Over the course of more than 400 job interviews, I talked to many people who have been unhappy or “unlucky” with their jobs multiple times. There can be many reasons for this, but the core should be a solid reflection every time a major chapter in your life ends so you can avoid making the same mistakes again.

At the age of 18 when I finished one of my first major projects, I introduced this simple reflection framework. Ever since, I answer these 6 questions at the end of a major professional period. 1 to 1.5 pages are sufficient. I have always done it when I switched to another company, closed, or sold a company.

1. What was my initial objective with this project or company? Did I achieve it?
2. How did I develop my knowledge, social and financial capital?
3. How did I collaborate with others (my team, stakeholders, peers)?
4. What am I proud of?
5. What mistakes did I make?
6. What will I do differently going forward?

Every time I add such a reflection, it is great to scroll down and read these short reports about previous experiences and spend some time thinking about them.

You can also write down what you think will happen in 18 months’ time whenever you start something new. Comparing that with what then actually happens is a powerful tool to understand yourself better.

Use my template and get started today!

“I find it fascinating that most people plan their vacations with better care than they plan their lives. Perhaps that is because escape is easier than change.” Jim Rohn

Yes, it can be overwhelming and difficult at first. It is most important to get started somewhere. You can use my template and checklist to get started with defining your target identity, purpose, goals, and annual objectives. Schedule two hours every quarter for your review. Try out the 6-minutes diary or any similar books. Get an Audible, Blinkist or any similar subscriptions to start building a reading habit. Find a list of recommended books below. Follow these steps and observe your transformation. Not having time can’t be an excuse. Following the 4 reflection-loops takes 3 hours a year, 2 hours per quarter, 30 minutes a week, and 6 minutes a day. I am excited to hear about your experiences and stories.

Books & Links*

• A template and checklist to help you create your self-reflection loops
• My inspiration to get all this started — Big 5 for Life
• Best book about habit building — Atomic Habits
• Best book about core principles of life — must read for everyone — 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• Inspiring book about living a more health life — Super Human
• Me learning about some basics on psychology Selbststeuerung
• Inspiring book to understand what makes people who live a “original” life Originals
• Challenged my perspective on “you have to find your passion” — So Good They Can’t Ignore You
• The title says everything: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck
• A book full of wisdom on how to live a more principle centered life Principles
• An amazing YouTube channel that helps me creating my book summaries

Some Articles:

• A challenge many of us struggle with in an overload of information we are facing — Stop Consuming. Start Creating.
• The reason I started having a 15–30 second cold shower every morning — Willpower
• The first time I started reading about Mental Models

Other:

• Awesome for sleep tracking Oura Ring
• I use Asana for my CouldDoList. There are many great / better to-do list tools out there; take whatever you are most familiar with. It is not about the tool, rather about the habits you establish.

*Book recommendations contain Amazon affiliate links