Reflection turns experience into insight.
There’s a story behind that.
This is your daily message from Chad number 1085 to upgrade your mental game today by telling yourself a better story, because the most important story you hear is the story you tell yourself. This message is dedicated to Payton Ryleigh for her birthday.
Here’s the upgrade:
Momentum will move you, but upgraded thinking knows that the pause—the moment you stop and reflect—is where growth actually happens.
Here’s the story:
Greg McKeown had one of those moments. He opens his book, Essentialism, with this story. His wife had just given birth to their daughter. She was still in the hospital. The baby was hours old. And McKeown left them to go to a client meeting. Not because it was an emergency. Because he felt he had to say yes. Because he was afraid of disappointing someone. Because he’d built a life around doing it all. He calls it a “fool’s bargain.” He saw the trade-off. He was choosing a meeting over his newborn daughter. He now sees it as a micro “Essentialist Judgment Day”—a moment where his life flashed before him.
It forced him to reflect. And reflection turned raw experience into insight. Someone had told him, “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.” He was living that out. But reflection rewired him. He stopped being a non-essentialist, trying to do everything and say yes to everyone out of fear or obligation. He became someone who deliberately chooses what matters most and says no to the rest.
We have looked at John Maxwell’s list of the 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth this week. The 4th is Maxwell’s Law of Reflection. Learning to pause allows growth to catch up with you. Everyone experiences a lot in life, but few learn from the experience, because the importance of the pause was never used. It’s been said when you push the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you push the pause button on a human being, she starts.
McKeown now teaches this practice: the pause is not passive. It’s the bridge from experience to wiser action. He writes about journaling, about scheduling time for thinking, about creating space to discern signal from noise instead of reacting to whatever’s loudest. Without that pause at the hospital, he might still be running on the treadmill, never catching up. Instead, the pause allowed growth to catch up with him.
The better story to tell yourself is, “The pause I take today is where tomorrow’s clarity comes from.” When you’re moving too fast to know what matters, you might be moving too fast. Sometimes it’s momentum that is moving you. You are simply being carried along by the frenetic pace of life. Maybe that is part of the wisdom of the Sabbath. Pausing one day in six doesn’t allow you to pick up too much speed. Monks practice what they call hours, mini reflections throughout the day. I think daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and sabbatical reflection is wise. In the Torah there was to be a sabbath for the land, where it was to lay fallow for a whole year every six years.
One of the best reflection strategies I’ve implemented is What? So What? So What Now? I use it after meeting with a client to review. The first “what” is to define reality. What was that? The second “what” defines the meaning. What was important? The last what defines action. What is the next step?
What? So What? So What Now? might be the reflection you need to turn experience into insight. This is an invaluable part of growth.
Tell me a story of a pause that changed your direction to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “When did you last pause and reflect?” You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, by going to fromchad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are always available at www.fromchad.com.
