When most of us look in the mirror we recognise our appearance as one which we are familiar with (and quite often we exaggerate those imperfections only we can see) however, how often do you give yourself the time to look inward to become more familiar with your own operating system made up of your values, beliefs, thoughts, feelings etc…

Against the backdrop of 2020 there was no shortage of new experiences and challenges about how we work, how we learn, how we think and how we live. It is so important to make the most of these as we do not learn from the experiences themselves, we learn from reflecting on our experiences. Only then can we start to make sense of what that means because, in the words of Ralph Emerson, “to be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment”.

I recently ran practical workshops for both Glasglow Girls and SWIB which gave the participants the opportunity to be ‘healthily selfish’ by taking time out to explore what was important to each of them, their happiness and their well-being. Through using the concept of Ikigai I gave participants a framework to enable them to make structure those reflections in a way which helps to reset the now and refocus the future.

While we’re nearly at the end of January 2021, consider what time you’ve given yourself to reflect, reset and refocus, to define the impact you want to make this year and to identify what you need to do to make your dreams into plans…it’s never to late to start!