Camille Rapacz: Reflection is a recurring theme on this podcast, and for good reason. It's not something that naturally fits into our day, and it often doesn't give us immediate results. But without reflecting on the past, we limit our ability to improve on our future.
And since we are all about continuous improvement on this podcast, today we're going to take you through a process for how to do some self reflection.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille Rapacz: George! Hey Camille! I bet the idea of reflecting on yourself sounds like fun to you. Oh, yeah.
George Drapeau: I mean, first of all, I love being the center of attention.
That's great. But I'm the center of my own attention in this case.
In all seriousness, though, I like picking apart something that's happened. to understand why or just kind of replay it. When things go well, replaying a good scenario or something that happened is very satisfying. When things have gone badly, it's a way that I can self soothe in a way.
And so I've always, always had an attraction to reflection, just, just
Camille Rapacz: naturally. You know what? I'm reflecting now on your comments.
George Drapeau: You caught me off guard with
Camille Rapacz: that. Did not see that coming. I caught myself off guard too. Because I'm thinking about how often you have called me and told me a story and the story is you also reflecting on something and you'll ask me like, why do you think that happened?
Or why do you think so and so reacted this way? Or why do you think I, and, and it's, you are in the process of reflecting, but you're doing it with me. on something that happened. And those are like some of our funnest conversations, which I think is also what led us to want to do this podcast. But yes, I think this idea of being curious about why things went a way that they did is a gift that if you have that gift, then you're just blessed with this curious, you know, brain.
And I think that's fabulous. And some of us have to work a little harder at it.
George Drapeau: I have a question for you about this, you know I'm sure you've heard somebody say the phrase, I, you know, the past is the past for me, I leave it behind and I move on.
Do you have a thought about that phrase or the attitude behind people who say that? Do you know people like this?
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, and you know, there's this quote that's you can't start the next chapter of your life if you keep rereading the last. Just like anything, it's not black and white.
I get that there can be a trap of ruminating on the past, right, where you just keep replaying something in your brain that you can't do anything about. That is not healthy. That is not what reflection is. Reflection is not just ruminating about something that you really can't change.
Reflection is really thinking about very, very thoughtfully what happened and being curious about the why.
And then what might I do with that information? So it's not about changing what happened in the past, but maybe about informing a way forward for the future.
I get the idea that you, you know, might think about the past and not want to, I don't have time for that. I just have to move on to the next thing.
But I think when we do that too quickly, we are absolutely putting ourselves at risk of making the same mistakes over and over. At worst, that's, that's, what's going to happen. You're just going to keep making the same mistakes and it's slowing down your progress. Yeah. If you just think about this, even in the not that extreme, the thing I'm trying to help people do is, we're all here because we want to improve.
We want to be on that continuous improvements cycle. That's what we're doing. Yes, we do. We're all continuously improving. And part of that continuous improvement requires us to really look at what is happening and has happened so that we can improve on our path forward. If we don't do that, our chances of being able to improve are very limited.
You only have so much information because improvement is based on data. And if I don't look at the data of my past, that's data, what has happened in the past. And so you're trying to get out of that what information you can, and it's imperfect, but you're going to get that information and then that's going to help you move forward.
So I really think about this as just this critical function and continuous improvement. And people who say that they're doing improvement and are not looking at the past are not fully embracing the idea of improvement. Is the way I think of it. Like if you're not willing to assess, evaluate, reflect, look at what happened thoughtfully, then I don't know what you have to improve on.
George Drapeau: We have both have strong feelings about the power of reflection. Let's not obsess about the past. And I like how you put it, you can't just let the past invade you and ruminate on it passively, but you have experiences. The only way you're going to learn from your experience is just look at them.
You've got to look at them. So yeah, somebody completely ignore their past, you're missing some valuable information that you can use to improve.
Camille Rapacz: So if you're thinking, why should I look at the past? I can't do anything about it. Well, that's not the point of looking at the past.
The point of looking at the past is not to do something about what did happen. The point of looking at the past is to think about how you might improve what you do differently going forward, whether it's in that given scenario or in another. It's informing in lots of ways, because you could also argue, well, I'm never going to do that again, or that's never going to happen again.
And so I don't really need to learn from it. Well, it's not just a one to one relationship of learning. Like the learning can apply in multiple different ways going forward. And also, we don't really know what our futures have in store for us. So who knows, maybe that thing is going to repeat for you. So I think there's just so many reasons to do it.
I also think that there's something to the building up your mental capacity to be able to evaluate what's And and I don't want to say, like, don't be emotional about it, because there's no such thing as not being emotional, but just looking at it from more of a curious perspective can help you really deal with things that have happened.
So if you've made mistakes in the past, to just observe them as, well, what did I get from that? What can I learn from that as you move forward? I think that's a much healthier way to move through things that didn't go the way you wanted them to go.
The contrast to that is I also find that we don't do enough reflection on why things went well.
So you know how in work we're always like, Oh, we got to do a whole like lessons learned on this horrible project. You always want to do it on the stuff that went wrong. Why don't we do them about the stuff that went right? Absolutely. We should be doing both basically. So we should just reflection, reflection, reflection.
For today, I wanted to focus on reflection for ourselves.
We talked about leadership from these three levels, right? Leading yourself leading others and leading an organization. So there's kind of these three tiers of, you can think of these different aspects of leadership.
So today I want to just focus on one of them and then we'll take those other two types of leadership and talk about reflection for those in later episodes. So this will end up being like a three part series on how you can do some reflection for yourself. And some of these might apply more for you than others, listener, because depending on what level of leader that you're trying to aspiring to be right now.
But I really think all three levels will be informative for anybody, regardless of whether you lead people or lead a business or whatever. You're going to get something out of all of these questions that we're going to put forward. So each one of these, I'm going to lay out a set of questions and just walk you through a process that you can do.
I think the key here is that you're going to grab onto some questions that you might be able to use in your own self reflection process. Because sometimes we get stuck with, what do I reflect on exactly? Yeah. I do hear people say, I love that idea, but what do I do? You just kind of stare at a blank page or something and you're not really sure what to do.
So we're going to help you fill the blank page with some good questions to ask. That is our mission today. Sounds great. Let's do this.
Let's do this. I just want to remind people what we were talking about when we talk about self leadership.
So this is something we covered in episode 52. We talked about this idea of what does it mean to know how to lead yourself, because leading yourself is important before you lead others.
So this was things around developing self awareness, which is What we're talking about today setting clear goals, decision making, adaptability, continuous learning. So there were all these lists. If you didn't listen to that episode, I definitely recommend you go back and listen, because it really focused on what does it mean if we think about being good leaders of ourselves?
Today we're talking about, if I'm trying to be better at that, how could I use a process of self reflection to improve on that? So whether you're a business owner or not, or maybe you're just a leader in your own business, or maybe you're just an individual contributor, this applies to everybody.
It doesn't matter what your role is in the world. We all need a level of leading ourselves and being able to be good at it. That's our focus today.
I can't wait.
So there's going to be three parts to this. And the first part is I'm going to have you do a scale ranking.
So you're going to rank yourself. Going to basically read a statement, and you're going to say how accurate you think the statement is for you. How true is it to you? It's a scale of 1 to 5, and you'd give yourself a 1 if the statement is not accurate at all.
You'll give yourself a 3 if it's a little accurate, and you'll give yourself a 5 if it's completely accurate. And of course, if you're kind of mushy in between any of those, you're a two or a four, try to just pick a whole number.
So you're going to rank yourselves on this scale of one to five for each of these of how accurate you think the statements are. So George, as I go through these you'll probably be thinking of other questions , but maybe some of these will spark some interest for you as well.
Okay. All right So I have eight questions and yes, I will put these questions in the show notes So if this is a process that you want to do after you've listened to this episode you really want to sit down and actually walk through this or if you're listening now to the episode, you can actually just pause and do these as I go through them.
Establish Goals
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Camille Rapacz: So number one I establish specific goals for my own performance. And by goals, I mean personal and professional goals. So if that's completely accurate and you do that really well, you're going to give yourself a five. If you don't do any goal setting for yourself personally, then you get a one.
Yeah, I would say I'm a four on that. Ooh, nice. Okay. I want to come back to that.
Prioritize & Focus
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Camille Rapacz: So number two, I know my priorities and I stay focused on them consistently.
George Drapeau: Can we split that into two different questions, please?
Camille Rapacz: No. I know. I mean, the key, it really is knowing your priorities doesn't really help if you weren't focusing on them.
George Drapeau: Yeah. I mean, I'm a black lab, black labs know what they're supposed to not to do, but whether they adhere to that as a whole separate story,
Camille Rapacz: I don't know. Sometimes I think my black lab really didn't know what he was supposed to do.
He was just running around being happy, but I know he was just a big love. So yes, chasing after the shiny objects. It's hard when you're trying to maintain your focus, but that's what this question is about. So if you stay focused on those priorities consistently, then you get a five. If you're a little black lab-ish and you're just chasing after shiny objects, you might be a little lower on the scale.
If you don't know your priorities and you're not staying focused on them at all, then you're definitely a one. I mean, I
George Drapeau: have to say, I don't think I can go lower than a three considering where I am in my career. I don't think I get where I am as a one or a two, but I am, I know I'm not a four or five.
Absolutely. No, I mean, I'm clear about my priorities. Like I implied here, but staying focused on them consistently is a struggle. And I spend time thinking about why, what is going on there? Yeah.
Work on Goals
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Camille Rapacz: All right, number three. I work towards specific goals I have set for myself. So having goals is one part of this process, but working on those goals consistently is another. So you'll notice I've got priorities and I've got goals. Yeah. So there's like daily priorities happening all the time, which can be different from the actual, I might have a very specific goal, like maybe a personal goal is I wanted to run a marathon. Or I have a very specific goal around wanting to get a promotion at work . The big goals that you're really pursuing versus just the daily priorities that I have. I want to differentiate between those two. Yeah, that makes sense.
Accomplishments
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Camille Rapacz: All right. Question number four. I regularly review and acknowledge my own accomplishments.
George Drapeau: That's a great question, Camille.
I'm going to answer a different question than I'll try to answer this one. So one thing I think is important, I tell people all the time is you got to celebrate little wins. If something good happens, you acknowledge it. Celebrate it even a little way, just buying yourself a cup of coffee or if it's bigger than that, buying a dinner or getting a book, some little gift, something to celebrate it.
And that's a form of reviewing and acknowledging accomplishments, but it's a subset of it. So I would say since I don't know exactly off the top of my head, I'm going to give myself a three because I know I do it. I don't know if I'm systematic about it.
Camille Rapacz: Hmm. Oh, yeah, that's a good thing to think about.
Have I really designed a little system for myself of doing it? I do find that most people when I'm coaching them, this is one of the things they struggle with the most. You and I have the very much the same mindset around it's really important to celebrate the little wins. And I know so many people who really struggle with just acknowledging that they're making progress.
So it's a I think it's a great one to reflect on. I think we all just struggle with this. Yeah. Giving ourselves kudos for what we're doing.
Adaptable & Curious
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Camille Rapacz: All right. Number five, I easily become curious and adapt in the face of adversity. This one's about resilience. How do you respond to unexpected things happening?
Six or seven. You are off the charts on that one. You're doing it all the time.
George Drapeau: Yeah, all the time. And I think adversity, I don't know if we've, you and I have talked about this ever. How are, how do you feel like you are in an emergency or a crisis? Have we ever had that conversation, Camille?
I know my wife and I have had it.
Camille Rapacz: But I don't think you and I have had that conversation. I sometimes wonder how I would be in a like real crisis, like my house is on fire or something like that. Cause I don't know, but I know that I've been fortunate to not have to deal with something quite that extreme. I know like in a work situation, if something, starts to go sideways, I'm the one that jumps in and takes charge of the situation. I will just jump in, get curious, adaptation just becomes part of the name of the game.
But I know some people who they're really thrown off when anything just doesn't go the way it's supposed to go. And this is one of those key self leadership things is to really know how to build your own resilience to because we're always getting thrown curve balls, all the time.
George Drapeau: Yeah. I would cut people a lot of slack on this one because you know, our amygdalas, the back of their lizard brain are built to sense fear and overreact to it. And it's really hard to learn about that and overcome it. And you can teach it, but Hey, it's there for me. I think I have emotional freon in my veins.
And when something happens, it just chills
me out.
Camille Rapacz: Wow. I want that freon system. How do I get one of those put into my body?
George Drapeau: I don't know. It was probably some sort of trauma in my young past that taught me to overly calm down in mostly fraught situations. And that's one of the good things probably.
Yeah. As my son would say, emotional
damage.
I don't know where he's picked that up. Listeners. What's what the emotional damage mean that's out there today. Is this some song from a musical or is it something because he and his friends kind of sing that phrase?
Camille Rapacz: They heard that somewhere. So that was number five.
Number six. I regularly seek input and feedback from others.
George Drapeau: I'm going to say three. I do. I love feedback. I love input from others. I'm not sure how active I am about like bugging people to give me feedback. That's different from when somebody pays me a compliment.
I say, yeah, thanks. Why? I do want the answer, but I'm not sure how often I say, so look. Let's review. How did I do on this? Or how, what do you think about, I said about this? So I'm not a one, but I'm not a five.
Camille Rapacz: I feel like you're a four. If I think about it in comparison to most people, most people don't ask the why after they get a compliment.
You're good about that. Yeah. You have this curiosity of like, what makes you say that? How about you?
I think I'm more of a three. I don't have that automatic response if somebody makes a compliment, I'm too busy trying to graciously accept and not deflect it. You know, I try, I practice not being that person that says, you know, when somebody pays a compliment and then you sort of undo their compliment by saying like, Oh, it was, it wasn't me, or it was no big deal.
You end up undermining it cause you're just too embarrassed to take the compliment. I'm too busy working hard to not do that.
George Drapeau: That's cool. That's important.
Saying NO
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Camille Rapacz: That's important. Yeah. All right. So number seven, I say no to tasks that aren't serving me and my goals.
George Drapeau: Man. I'm going to have to give myself a two on this one, but I have a reason.
Camille Rapacz: I mean, we all have reasons for it, George.
Yeah,
George Drapeau: you're right.
Okay. I'm going to make a comment here though. I'm a two because I'm not as laser focused about rationally doing things that benefit me and serve my goals versus other. I believe strongly in putting energy, positive energy back into the community and the universe and whatever into other people and stuff.
And so part of that is I have energy reserved toward helping. Responding to people and doing that, even at the expense of my own personal goals advancement, but I'm a two,
Camille Rapacz: what I thought of as you were saying that was, well, maybe that's because you haven't defined to yourself that one of your goals is about the giving back. Yeah for sure.
Now If you made that part of your set of personal goals, like one of my goals is to contribute to the community And this is why everybody needs a good coach because I can turn your twos into sixes just like that
George Drapeau: Yeah, yeah, I think this is a good point I love this question I just love just asking that question images immediately.
Oh, man. Am I saying Yeah. Am I saying no to stuff? This is a great question.
Decisions
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Camille Rapacz: I'm going to come back to this one because just the ranking, isn't going to be enough. So we'll come back to that one. Okay. Okay.
So number eight, this is the last question that you're going to rank.
My decision making processes are clear and effective.
George Drapeau: It's such a self serving one. I say five. I think about it a lot. I usually have a system for many things. Even with self leadership. Yeah.
I would say I have a five. I have a lot of tools and things that I use to help me make decisions. I'm clear about how I arrived at a decision. Most of the time I can explain it. I'm just kind of running through the list of what are attributes of this stuff. I think I'm a five.
How about you?
Camille Rapacz: I think I've gotten pretty good at this. I think it's something you have to get good at if you're going to run a team.
Well, so when I was running teams managing teams, you really did have to be clear and effective in that decision making and the processes or your team would just stagnate and they would lose trust in you. So I imagine you're good at it as well because it is a key trust building trait for when you're leading a team.
Doing it for yourself, if you're not leading a team, I think it can get much trickier and mushier. And so I find that a lot of people who run their own businesses, for example, some of my clients who are running their own businesses And their decisions are only really affecting them as a person. Of course, also affecting their business.
Some of the frustration that's happening is they're trying to make a decision and they're kind of swirling and nothing is forcing them to choose and make a decision, except for their performance of their business that is slowly tapering down because of this lack of making a decision.
So a lot of times this is where people do call coaches in because they're like, I'm stuck and they're stuck because they don't have a good decision making process for how they're going to move forward.
Other people. will go to a coach or a consultant because they know that they need help making the decision. They're like, part of my process is to ask this other person to help guide me in the process. That's a completely viable client who asked me to help them from that perspective, like that's fantastic.
That's my favorite thing to do because they know what they're in for. They're like, I need somebody to tussle with as I go through the process and who will also help me really ask myself questions I wouldn't otherwise ask. So I try to use that in my own decision making process. So yeah, I think I'm Kind of forced to be good at this.
All right. you've done all these rankings. We can kind of go revisit these now, because you had more on some of these. Because there are two more parts to this, and I'm going to talk through both parts of it and then come back to some of these questions. So the second thing you're going to do, so it's one thing to just rank yourself.
So now you're looking at this, you're like, great, I'm fours and fives. And look at me. The goal here isn't to just try and get a five all the time. That's the first thing I want to say. Also, it's important to know that when you are doing a ranking like this, value in this is to repeat it.
So seeing how you rank yourself and then maybe doing it again, midway through the year, or even if you just do it on an annual basis and you start to look at how you rank yourself. So this is something I'll do with my clients is I'll ask them maybe one question, I'll have them, you know, rank on a scale of something. And it's a way for us to assess whether they're actually improving on the thing we're working on. And sure, it's an objective, like I'm making my best guess here, but what matters is how they feel about it.
So it's what you're doing for yourself. This is how I feel about it. One of the things that will happen is that the more that you understand something like, so let's say the first one was establishing specific goals for my own performance. The more clarity you have about what doing that actually means and what a clear goal looks like, the harder you will be in grading yourself.
So you might be like, yeah, sure. I have a goal and I'm giving myself a four. And then if throughout the year, you actually get a deeper understanding of what having a specific goal means next year, you might be better at it, but yet rank yourself lower. Because now you know more so this is something to be aware of that you are raising the bar for yourself on what it means to be a five and therefore start rating yourself lower.
That's all still a good sign, but it's something to just be aware of as you're doing a sort of ranking score. Yeah,
George Drapeau: Yeah. Makes sense.
Camille Rapacz: So the two things that you want to do after this to make it really meaningful is that you first want to go back through these and so say you gave yourself a three and now ask yourself, why? Why did I say three?
And so that's some of what you started to do, George. You started to say, I think I have a three because this, this, this, and that. That's what you want to do for each one of those questions to make it meaningful. A meaningful reflection is I went and studied a little bit of the why. Why would I say that?
Why would I give myself that ranking? And then the last part of this is, and what do I want to do with this? What kind of improvement do I want to make? And what would that look like? Something that's actually actionable. Something you could actually do.
One of the ones I wanted to go back to was saying no to tasks that aren't serving me and my goals.
All right, so let's dig into the why, because I know you were like, I have reasons, but I think we all have reasons for why we don't, you know, go after our goals. But one of the things that I think is interesting in here is to actually assess whether those tasks are informing you. So as you're doing the why, and you started to say, some of the things that I'm working on, they're really important to me.
It's really important to me to give back to the community. It's really important that I'm spending time at my kid's school. All of these things matter to me. And I, my first thought there was, well, maybe that's just an undefined goal. And if you defined it, then it would give you really clear, like, I have committed that I want to spend X amount of time doing that type of work, and I'm doing it.
And then it starts to fit. So sometimes I think our goals are not defined outright upfront and then we pursue them, but they sort of come up organically and we realize how important they are to us. Then we can shape them into a goal. Does that make sense? Like it's not just a one directional thing.
It
George Drapeau: does make sense. With this one, there's a lot of stuff going on with me. One thing is I like the philosophy of trying to find reasons to say yes to things. I really like hiring people who have a I want to say yes attitude. That's the default versus I'm done just saying no on autopilot.
Cannot stand people whose autopilot is no by default and you have to move them off that. So that's one thing.
So I don't want to say no to things if I can avoid it. And if somebody's asking me to do something and it's not that much trouble, I'm going to try to find a way to say yes to it. I will overextend myself a little bit if I need to. I'll try to help them out, make a little extra effort. I like being that way. I like the world being that way. Saying no, I'm also not highly
protective of myself as a person. And I could probably be better about that, but in many, many ways I choose not to protect myself that much. You know, I'm fine being teased and joked with and stuff. Cause mostly I realize that that doesn't do much harm.
I don't say no to things to protect a work boundary or a resource boundary. Like mentorship for example, somebody asked you to be a mentor, write a recommendation letter, or look at a resume or something like that. I may not really have the time to do that, but I won't protect that time.
resource so well because I like being able to help some of this stuff. I guess I'm listing things. I think they're clearly both good and bad of either of them. Like people should be protective of the resources.
You shouldn't let yourself get dragged into stuff that's not good for you. That's a lesson I've learned more as an adult. And I guess where I choose to draw that boundary is different than other people.
Camille Rapacz: The point is it's different for everybody, So when we talk and when you, as you were talking about this, I was thinking, Oh, George is just defining what serves him. Like what serves you is your ability to serve others in these way. And that's, that's just part of who you are and what Is satisfying to you. And so I get that we could read the, you know, serving me part of this question as selfish, but it's not intended to be that.
It's intended to be, what makes me feel fulfilled? What's satisfying to me and, and also to make sure you are clear, like you said, it is important that we be clear about our boundaries because we cannot be there for all the people we want to be there for if we then also give of ourselves so much that we are tapped out. We run out of energy, and we all have different ways of doing that. And then I was thinking about we were talking about how I think it was you and your wife had decided that you were just going to stay home for the weekend instead of having plans to go out of town.
And that then your next thing was, Hey, what do you think about? And it was doing something with some friends or some family. And I laughed because so you're an extrovert and she's an introvert and I'm an introvert. And I'm laughing as you say it. Cause I'm thinking, Oh boy, you got in big trouble didn't you, George? Cause that was the exact opposite of what she was trying to accomplish by staying home.
But your brain goes to, Oh, now we are free to go do this other thing. Where her brain went to, Oh, now I'm free to do what I actually want, which is hunker down at home and whatever her plan was.
Right. So I think what's important here is what, what's going to best serve you and her acknowledging what her boundaries were and needing some time alone at home were different from what you needed. And my husband and I have the same challenge he's done the exact same thing to me.
And I told him the story and we laughed by the way, because the exact same thing has happened to us where I'll say, Oh, great, blah, blah, blah. And then since we have time, he's like, Hey, I was thinking, I told so and so that they could come over and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, why did you do that? That's not what I want.
So just understanding that we have different things, different needs, and there are different things that serve us and our goals. And sometimes what serves me and me achieving my goals is very different from what it will be for you. And that's what matters is that you know what that is and that you're willing to say no to the things that don't serve you.
So for me, if I were to say yes to a very extroverted activity, knowing that I was already tapped out, I already didn't have energy. That would be me going beyond my boundaries and making myself miserable for no good reason. I would end up just resenting the fact that I had to go do the thing.
So I just have to know that, but you are very different. You would be the opposite. You would be more on the, I'm going to go do all the things.
One of the things you said that was interesting though, because I am 100 percent on the same page with you about the yes people.
I want yes people. We all want yes people, but what I don't want is somebody to say yes, if they really are tapped out. Yeah. Or if they're extremely uncomfortable, like, Mm-Hmm, , I want to, but I really don't think I'm qualified or I need help with it. I want people to be honest about saying yes, not just yes.
And then, oh my gosh, what have I done? That's a really good point. And I know you're the same. Like you want them to say yes, but also if it means yes, but I need help in this way, that's the better yes. Absolutely. And I think sometimes people are saying yes, and then they're like, Oh my gosh, I guess we'll just figure this out, which if you have a good support system, like if you're part of a really good team, you can do that.
You could go off and be like, yes, I got it, George. And just me and the team, we're going to go figure it out. Don't worry about us. If you've got a strong team, that's awesome. Like that's the best team to have. They're going to go figure it out and they'll just come to you for the big stuff. But sometimes you're just working individually with somebody and you're it, you're the person who has to help them.
And that's your job.
All right. Any of these other ones? What else did you say?
Resilience
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George Drapeau: The one that I really liked for myself was number five, becoming curious and adapt the face of adversity. Emotional Freon.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, this one is interesting because I think about this idea of resilience a lot. And what does it mean for us to be resilient?
Does it make you feel exhausted? Not you, George, but listener. Does it make you feel exhausted to feel like, oh my gosh, I'm happy to be resilient all the time about all the things. I think of resilience as, I can move through adversity without much effort.
Getting so tapped out without it depleting my energy reserves. To me, resilience is I've got the energy to manage and handle what's coming at me. I can do this because I have curiosity. That's what it means to be able to adapt is I have the energy to handle that. I know how to put myself in that space because I, also feel strongly that these are choices we make.
I choose whether I want to have the energy to handle what's coming at me. Yeah, we can all do that. We can all make that, if this thing that's happening right now is that important, I could shift my energy in a second to be up for it, Yeah, absolutely. So when it comes to this, you know idea of building resilience, this is about doing this self reflection exercise to really think about what do I do in that situation and how would I do it better?
Like have you had a scenario in the past where you thought, man, I really didn't respond well to that moment. I wish I'd responded better. I think we all have those, right? We're like, Oh yeah, this thing happened, whether it's in a relationship, whether it's at work where we just felt like we didn't have the best response.
I could have showed up better. I wish I had. And that's something to reflect on and ask yourself why? And how would I do that better next time? Like maybe I just needed a minute. So sometimes for me, I need to step away for a minute and then I can come back and engage in this thing, but I just need to gather myself for a minute, depending on what it is. So those are the kinds of things I think that help us build resilience is what do I need to do that helps me bring the right energy to whatever the scenario is?
George Drapeau: Yeah, helpful coaching technique, by the way, when you can do that with others, when you can help them find a way to step out of themselves, and look back, and there's different ways to do that, depending on who you're dealing with.
And I think a lot of people can reflect if you can help them step out of their current situation.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. There's an interesting aspect to this of managing your emotions through it all.
Which requires you first to recognize them, which I think is usually what is the problem is we're not recognizing the emotion we're having. We're just too busy having it. If we're, you know, getting into a point of, stress, we're not thinking about the emotion we're having, we're just reacting to the emotion instead of stopping and think like what's happening and what's this emotion and just letting yourself have it.
It's okay to have the emotion. And sometimes we're so busy trying to resist the emotion that it's taking us over. And you know, we're all human and that means that we're, make mistakes all the time. Nobody can be perfect at this, but you can definitely get better at it.
It took me a while, especially as I was leading a team to really understand how to control how I was showing up and my emotions and how I was going to manage that. And it wasn't by pretending I didn't have emotions about things or by, stuffing them and just ignoring them.
It was by processing them by acknowledging like, Oh yeah, I'm feeling kind of stressed out about this thing. Okay. Well, what does that mean? Having somebody to process that with also was helpful.
All right. So any of these other questions you want to dig into George? We did enough?
Did enough George self reflection.
George Drapeau: Yeah. No more. Today's seven hour podcast, George reflects on everything personal is like...
Camille Rapacz: ...therapy with George. Well, thank you for answering the questions. I thought that was kind of fun to hear where you ranked yourself. Very interesting.
Yeah. Yeah. So as you go through this, everybody go through your eight questions, give yourself that ranking. Then ask yourself why? Do bit of reflection of, why did I give myself that score? What's going on with me?
And then once you've done that, get into the improvement part. Don't forget that part because without the improvement part, the reflection, I mean, it's nice. I'm not going to say it's not worth doing, but the whole point to me of doing this reflection is so that you can then improve. And it doesn't have to be about very specific things. It can just be in general.
What do you want to improve on? Maybe it's the topic I just talked about. You want to think a little bit more about emotions that you're having as you're going through certain situations. Or maybe you want to get better at establishing your priorities and being really committed to them or whatever it is that you want to do.
Maybe in Georgia's case, you're going to reevaluate the goals that you're setting for yourself and better align those to what really are your priorities.
So whatever it is, these are all things that you can think about improving as you're moving into the next year, which is really why I started this at this time of year. December just feels like the month of reflection to me.
All right. that's all I have. Anything else, George?
George Drapeau: No, I love these questions. I love the scale ranking and reflection of it. This is really useful. I'm interested to see where we go with this in the next episode.
Camille Rapacz: So in the next episode, everybody will do a similar exercise, but we'll bring questions for leading others. And this is great, even if you don't have a team of people that you lead, by the way, so you'll still want to tune in.
And then in the last episode of the year, we will go over leading a department, an organization, a business, those types of questions. So three part series of reflection. Cool. Just in case you weren't getting enough reflection out of this podcast, we will bring you more. More reflection.
thank you everybody for listening. And if you do do this exercise, we would love to hear from you. So go leave us a voicemail, go to the belief shift. com. There's a little widget where you can leave a voicemail. We'd love to hear how it went. What did you reflect on? What happened?
What are you going to do next?
And if you want help with your reflection and your goals for next year, and it's making you realize that maybe you need a little bit of guidance. That's what I'm here for. So you can book a free consultation at CamilleRapaz. com slash book a call. All of this stuff will be in the show notes for you.
Really fun today. Thanks for joining me, George. And thank you for joining us listeners and we will be back in your ears next week.
