In the afterthought of an event, planner Shana Davison meets with her clients to go over what worked and what didn’t so that they can prepare to run the next event with greater success. As Shana explained this concept to me in a recent episode of #thedeliciousstory, I suddenly wondered if doing something similar for life events would be beneficial.

The notion of the “life event debrief” struck me funny at first—a kind of nutty vision of people writing reports on their life choices. But as I considered the core approach of a debrief as reviewing an action and articulating its outcome, I thought how impactful the process could be for driving mindful action in life.

I figured this must be a thing already, so I did some research. Right off I found that the debrief is associated with the military, with events, projects and other work-related arenas. And the definition of “debrief” is firstly connected to the military and the act of questioning (as in, interrogating a spy), I didn’t find anything along the lines of “life debriefing.”

AN INTERVIEW OF SELF

To be clear, I think that the personal use of debriefing can run the risk of taking you down a rabbit hole of regret and self-flagellation. Let’s avoid that useless activity. Similarly, a personal debrief wouldn’t be even remotely useful if done as an interrogation. Rather, a debrief for the individual is about looking at an action itself from high, high above, as a detached onlooker rather than from “within” so that no judgement has to be involved.

What I’m thinking is that if we operate as our own project managers and assess an activity from a bird’s eye view based on our goals and values, we can better choose our actions going forward with more certainty, driving them toward what we want.

I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who take this approach already (think of people objectively managing their finances, for example), but what I realized in reviewing my journal—and certainly before I started using this journal—is that I’m far better at creating lists and checking things off than I am at deciphering what’s working and what “checks out” against my vision or values.

KEY QUESTIONS AND THE PURPOSE

As nice as it might be to have my own personal team swoop in and coach me into a better tomorrow, I don’t have the budget for a life coach, so off I went to find great questions to use for a personal debrief in my journaling. The team over at Box of Crayons provides good and to-the-point debrief questions in their post, “The Most Powerful Debrief Questions and Why They’re Important:”

1.       What are you trying to do?

2.       What happened?

3.       What can you learn from this?

4.       What should you do differently next time?

5.       Now what?

The next step is to determine the markers that merit a personal debrief. Originally, I thought perhaps daily or weekly debriefing would work, but my daughter pointed out that this could get messy and lack focus if not directed toward specific goals and values.

For example, if I look at my intention to eat healthier, I can look at what I’m currently doing toward the effort and restructure my behaviors. To stay objective, I’ll ask and answer those key questions:

What am I trying to do? Eat healthier and lose a bit of weight.

What happened? Thus far I’ve been keeping a food journal for about six weeks. A couple weeks ago, I started to tally the number of calories associated with what I’m eating as well.

What have I learned? The food journal alone did make me more aware of what I’m eating but I still ate the package of M&Ms and had the chocolate shake rather than eating more fruit and vegetables. Counting calories helps because I have a number target to focus on, but it doesn’t assist me in making healthier food choices.

What should I do differently? I think I’ll deploy a mini-habit to work over the humps of my inspiration and willpower by incorporating a small, attainable action of eating one piece of fruit or a serving of vegetables before I eat a meal or snack. Perhaps eating fruit and veggies first will stave off hunger and at least meet the “eating something healthy” goal.

Now what? I’ll make the mini-habit super small because success is the point, so just one small piece of fruit or vegetable BEFORE I consume anything else at a meal is the goal.

This is a small example of something I’ve been working on for several weeks. By looking at my behaviors and thinking strategically of what I eat, I hopefully have found a solution to reaching my goal.

Now if I want to address other values and goals the first thing to do is make concrete in my journal what those truly are going forward. Perhaps before creating monthly and yearly goals in bullet journal format, a statement of values and goals generally is important to list. I’ll have to give this some thinking and report back to you.

In the meantime, if you’re looking to make some connections with those you care about who are celebrating a birthday, please check out our new Storied Gifts Greetings card line and our first card!

Sherry is the founder of Storied Gifts a personal publishing service of family and company histories. She and her team help clients curate and craft their stories into books. When not writing or interviewing, Sherry spends loads of time with her grandchildren and lives in Des Moines, Iowa.

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