As this year comes to an end (and what a year it's been!) and a new year is coming into focus, it's a great time to take a few moments to refresh, and reflect.
One journal exercise I come back to every year is a 4-question series that my husband and I have been using for the past several years.
We use it for a variety of areas in our life: marriage, parenting, work, finances, exercise, community involvement, friendships, home responsibilities, etc.
We take an area (i.e. marriage) and thoughtfully and thoroughly answer the 4 questions. And then go to the next area and answer the 4 questions again.
We go through the series of questions for each area on our own and then bring our answers on a date night to talk about them.
Being the end of the year, I thought it would be fun to share these questions with you so you can answer them for yourself. I’m always amazed at what emerges for me from these four questions, so I am excited to share them.
This is a wonderful exercise to do as you approach the end of 2020 and head into a new year. And really, it's an awesome exercise to do any time you feel stuck, need to reassess, or want to feel inspired and connected to your life and those in it.
It’s simply an awareness tool that can help you gauge the direction you’re going (question 1 & 2) and course-correct if you need to (question 3) and create a lens to see a larger deeper picture (question 4).
Here are the 4 Questions:
What’s Working?
What’s Not Working?
What’s Missing?
What’s Emerging?
You can ask these four questions for any of the areas I mention above (marriage, finances, parenting, etc.) or create categories like physical health; mental health; spiritual health; emotional health etc. You could do this alone or with a child or as a family or with a business partner etc.
Make it work for you.
The key is to write down your answers. There’s power in taking the time to write down your answers (versus just answering them in your head).
Have fun with them and let me know what resonates with you!
