"Today we're going to be talking about purposeful projections and giving you the power to tap into that positivity so you can reflect the right way. So, tune into this episode of 'Learn How to See Better' because we're about to get started.

Hey, what's up everybody? This is Drew, and I want to welcome you back to 'Learn How to See Better.' It's the only podcast out there that'll improve your vision the longer you listen. As we are moving into the fourth quarter of 2024, it's all about taking that pause moment. We need to be able to take a time out and kind of reflect, but reflect the right way and reflect in a radiant way. That's what I'm going to be talking about today to make sure we are having purposeful projections. 

Some of you that have been rocking with me for a little while may be familiar with the fact that a long, long time ago I did an episode called 'Reflect and Project.' I've touched on this in the past. We do have to take these little pause points along the way to really glance back, take stock, see what's going on, and look to the future. But today I want to be really focused on how we dive deeper into this practice of reflecting the right way, because we want to do this exercise in a way that's going to really empower us.

We need to think about that strategically and say, 'Hey, if we want to be complete, if we want to be thorough, that's all well and good.' But as we look at not just any old kind of reflecting, but reflecting radiantly and looking at the idea of how can we take the best of our past and really harness that to drive us and empower us moving ahead. Does that make sense?

That's how we're going to be diving in. I'm not wasting any time to touch on this. I'm feeling charged up as the end of the year is here. So again, purposeful projections is the idea here. We're tapping into the positivity. We're getting a little woo-woo with it. Again, I'm sharing my experience, what I learned from my journey.

I'll take you on a quick exercise. Once upon a time, I used to live far away. I live in the desert now, and I had an opportunity, which included relocating to somewhere I'd never been before—relocating from a hot climate to a cold climate, relocating from a place where I knew everyone in my life to a place where I knew no one.

At this time in my life, there were thoughts around this opportunity and how excited I was about it. If I'm being frank and honest, I wasn't really looking forward to it because all I could see was the totality of the situation—a lot of which was foreign, unknown, and potentially unpleasant. But I knew that if I was going to be actually moving to this new environment, if I was going to make the best of it, if I didn't want to be miserable the whole time—which was, at this point, an unforeseen amount of time—I knew that I needed to kind of have this positive outlook. I remember even coining this phrase: 'Positive outlook, positive outcome. Positive outlook, positive outcome.' Sometimes bio hacks are little tricks you tell yourself.

As I look back on that, it's kind of funny because at times when it was extra cold and snowing outside and there's no one to call to hang out with, I knew that, hey, one of my mentors, long time ago, Jim Rohn, once told me, 'There's never a double night, there's never a double winter.' So, you know, this too shall pass. Eventually, the snow will thaw out and there'll be better days and the ability to travel and make friends and all the other positive things.

So that's just one little simple story of my past using this brain hack to look at the future in a certain way. But as we talk about the idea of reflecting and how important it is, it's a key component of how we grow because it's our ability and our time and our opportunity to say, 'What have I learned recently? What is life teaching me?' Because a lot of the lessons that we get, the lessons we're taught, the lessons we receive, it's a part of our experience. And so we have to use these experiences and understand what we're supposed to be taking from them as a way to make us grow.

No different than if you want to take it as far back to the kid touching the hot stove. Okay, we can keep touching that hot stove until we realize fire burns. There's a point at which we have to kind of piece all this together. And so as we culminate and aggregate all of our experiences, it's helping us tie it all together. As we look at that, we don't want to underestimate it and just keep going through life just going, going, going, going, going.

There are these points where it makes a lot of sense to say, 'Hey, I need to take this all in. I need to be able to process it.' I've got an analytical mind, so I found that this can be very powerful because you are allowing yourself to just kind of run the tapes. No different than if you've played sports; the day after the game, you'd go back and watch the tapes and see what went right, what are some areas of improvement.

So I've kind of learned through my athletic experiences in life that there's a process by which we go through and evaluate. It's kind of looking at the report card, so to speak. But one thing I will share is that you can, through this process, actually become very accustomed to your own experience. And what do I mean by that? Well, what I mean is sometimes your experience can be—let's take athletics into perspective—your experience can be that the morning after the game or the next practice when the team gets together, maybe the team did well. Usually, if the team did well, it was all praise.

But what if the team lost? What if the team lost really bad? What if the team got blown out? Well, depending on your experience, there may have been a scenario where coach was chewing people out. He was letting them have it. The coach was not pulling any punches on letting everyone know where the errors were, where the screw-ups were, where they kind of blew it.

Sometimes we can use reflection as an instructional tool, but it's a little bit of a whipping tool too. And so I can safely share and admit that there's been times I've kind of evaluated my own performance in life kind of like, in a similar way that I learned from my coaches, right? If I did right, it's praise. But if I didn't do as well as I anticipated, it's like, 'Oh, really gotta bear down, gotta get that fixed.'

Part of the reflective process you can still grow from, but there is an important element that's easier said than done—I'll tell you that right now—but it's the idea that we need to see ourselves through kind eyes. We are growing, we are doing the best we can with what we have in this moment. And that pretty much applies to everybody. We're doing the best we can with what we've got in this moment.

So if we develop a keen ability to highlight the mistakes or shortcomings in our process of reflection, then we can get really good at basically just criticizing ourselves. And even if you get a 98% on that test—you know, that A-minus, you're almost there, almost a perfect performance—you may find yourself falling victim to the focus on the word 'almost.' You see what I'm saying right there?

Take a minute, regardless of your age, if you're listening to this, as you look back and reflect on things, how do you typically do that? Do you do it from a more instructive standpoint and find an ability to pick things apart? Or do you spend your energy and your effort and your time pulling out only the best nuggets that make the best sense to preserve and use to your advantage as fuel and reasoning to get excited and optimistic about your future and moving forward and building momentum and just grabbing the bull by the horns and really doing everything you're trying to do—to do things the way you're trying to do, to hit those goals, to take those actions, to change your life in the way that you want to do?

Can you kind of feel an energetic difference in those two examples of reflecting? And I wanted to start with one of them because I'm thinking about reflection in the total sense of the word. Looking at a reflection is, you look in the mirror, everything reflecting back at you is everything that's there. So the totality of reflection can still be valuable because you're looking at truth. But where do we want to put our focus?

If we want to be able to reflect and look at the radiant components of that reflection and tap into that in a purposeful way to project really a brighter vision, a brighter vision of the future, a brighter tomorrow, that's going to be not only more efficient because you're throwing away the hiccups—we already know what the lessons are because we've typically changed the behavior, and if not, we might be experiencing pain from it—but more importantly is the what went right, what went well, what went great, what were the highlights, what were the momentum builders, the needle movers. And that's where we want to be able to capture that and be able to study it.

As we start to create and anchor in these lessons, these memories, what we want to take from the game tape is all the highlights, the points scored, the stats—not a missed tackle or a missed block. Thinking about that, how the mind tends to let whatever story it tells itself the most get really sticky and etched in stone or written in ink, I thought I'd share just a couple different techniques to reflect in a more radiant way.

Now, one of these I've been doing as long as I can think back to, but sometimes we can get away from it. It's very easy to get right back to it. It's the act of journaling and physically writing down the things that have taken place in our lives, and specifically the things that have taken place that really lift us, and the things that make us feel good, and the things that we're thankful for.

So you could kind of look at the idea of journaling as a practice of gratitude to be a way to capture the past, that when you look back, there's no moaning, groaning—there's thankfulness, there's reminders that can help to shift our mindset back to where it needs to be. Looking at ways that we can make that a part of our reflection, how do we capture it? Do we just take a few minutes and think it through? Yes, that's the first step. Let's capture it, because feeling good, feeling bad—it's like they say that there's no news like bad news because it travels the fastest.

Well, if you put any stock in that, then the idea is if you're reflecting on an experience or memory, it's the drama that people tend to think back to and talk about. At the old reunions, people laugh about the time when whatever went down that one time with that group of people or whatever the issue was that took place, right? If there was some drama, people are going to talk about it and reminisce. 'Hey, do you remember that one time that crazy thing happened in high school between those two people? Wasn't that wild? Oh my goodness.'

No one's necessarily talking about who won valedictorian and all the things they did in the student council, as an example. But being able to just capture these things as we reflect and reflect with radiance, but to be able to put that together with the effort and the effectiveness that we're seeking from the exercise, you want to tie it together with not only capturing some of the past, but if you're going to take the effort to write down a few things about the experience and the nuggets we've gained, let's also, with the effort to look back—that same memory muscle—let's use that same mental muscle to look forward and project with a little bit more purpose.

One way to do that is to be able to just take a moment before we even sketch it out by hand or write it out by hand is just close your eyes and think about it. Close your eyes and visualize it. Close your eyes and feel it out—what it's going to be, what it could be, what it's going to look like, how it's going to feel based on this goodness that you just experienced. Because they're both so rich: one has just happened, but guess what? The moment's gone. Another one you're looking to happen, but guess what? It hasn't happened yet. So both of them are kind of fleeting, but using one to fuel the other can be a great way to reflect radiantly and develop a more purposeful, powerful projection. Is that making sense?

This is good stuff. So I wanted to talk about that because I think that's one thing that whether you are capturing your moments as a physical written element or even in some ways being able to capture it on audio—your private audio recorder—or capturing a little video clip from a certain experience, being able to see the own look in your eye from capturing a moment where you have brought forward to the present a great life-shaping experience that you can use to help you build momentum in the future looking forward.

It's a great exercise, and encouraging that to be something that you can do right now to make a big difference as you wrap up the first nine full months of the current year and look at those last three. How would you sum that up? Now, take a moment, think it through, write it down, capture it, look back, enjoy, look ahead, also enjoy. And then it's time for action.

All right, so check this out. I want to give you a quick example of how I am actively right now purposefully projecting positivity into my own future. This is going to give you an example of, outside of just the conceptual, what I just shared with you—what I'm going through, how I'm experiencing this, how I'm living it, learning it real time.

So I had an experience recently where I was able to have one of these reflective moments. In this opportunity, I was even able to get together with a few trusted individuals that I enjoy being able to connect and mastermind with. Essentially, the secret sauce of a mastermind of any type is being able to connect with other minds and be able to kind of create almost like a third or a group mind to be able to think at your highest level.

Without getting into the specifics of the group, what I wanted to share from my own experience was that it kind of reminds me of this idea of a wheel of life. You've all probably seen one of these. Look at a pizza slice. You look at a large pepperoni pizza, one of my favorites. Carve it up into eight slices, and you can see there's eight slices in there. Each can kind of reflect in the wheel of life an area—it could be your career, it could be your health, it could be your relationships.

Typically, you'll carve it up more detailed. It could be your family, it could be your friends, it could be the fun that you're having by yourself. So there's a lot of different areas of life, and as we go through life, we're consistently trying to kind of manage our way through having, ideally in my mind, a level 10 experience. And, you know, each of these areas of life, perfect pizzas, round and symmetrical all the way around.

But life isn't quite like that. We might be in a period of time where we might be dealing with a health challenge but got millions in the bank. Or you might have a scenario where the roles are reversed. There's any sort of combinations you can look at with this wheel of life. As we find ourselves going through changes, either individually or as a group, it may be interesting to see how we can evaluate one wheel of our life and evaluate another wheel of our life. And depending on which way the mood or the sensation in our life is dragging us—more to the positive side or more to the negative side—this can influence how we kind of look at that wheel of life.

It's no different if I step on a scale today and I stepped on a scale 90 days ago. And I would imagine for most people listening to this, whether they intend to or not, those numbers were not exactly the same if we could have taken those snapshots on time. Now, if the number was higher or lower, you may feel a certain way about that. And if you have only evaluated how well things are going based on that number on that one device, that could be very telling about how accurate or misleading the good vibe or the bad vibe that we have is.

So if the number on the scale is unfavorable, and our whole disposition leans to—even though all sorts of other areas are going great in your life—it can be very insightful because what it may require, the power of a group of individuals that got your back and are part of your tribe is to say, 'Hey, watch out now. Don't look at that number on the scale and get so hung up on that because there's an abundance in all these other areas,' right?

Sometimes it may not even be the group saying, 'Hey, bang,' you know, 'let me knock you upside the head and really point it out.' Sometimes you can have some of these a-has where you're really just being able to say, 'Hmm, what am I learning from my reflections? What am I currently projecting based on what I've taken from my reflections?' And so we can almost assess how we've been reflecting if you've never done this before based on how we are currently projecting.

If you're not projecting positivity, you're projecting negativity. You might be neutral, but you see where I'm going with this. Sometimes we want to be able to look at how we're reflecting and recognize if we are—for lack of a better phrase—looking at the stains instead of looking at the shine, then that could have us all messed up. You see what I mean? Looking at the stains instead of looking at the shine. Going back to looking at the game tape, looking at the fumble as opposed to the last-second field goal that won the game.

So really, it's what we're tuned into that can indicate how we're currently projecting. And if you don't feel like you're projecting well, you're probably going to hear it or know about it or learn about it from one of your loved ones. Sometimes there can be some clues just from our experiences. So use this as a hint: whether you're actively reflecting or not, there's things happening in our world that we kind of sum it up and put things together, and it weaves its way into how we project positivity or negativity in our lives looking ahead anyway.

This is about raising your awareness to the importance of this activity so you can get a little bit more intentionally tuned as we look ahead, as opposed to kind of guiding everything based on the past. And you all know the popular phrase that goes along with investing: 'Past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future results.' So we need to think about that and make sure that we're kind of stacking the deck in our favor.

Reflect on the radiance, reflect on the best of what's past, and use that to remind ourselves how great we are. Remind ourselves of our greatness. People need to be reminded more than they need to be instructed. So this is really more of a reminder to say, take that time to take stock of how well you've done, celebrate your wins, whether you do it on a Monday or a Wednesday. Celebrate your wins today, put together a win wire. Share your experiences with me; I'd love to hear about them and help cheer you on.

But that's the idea with the ability of reflecting the right way to project a more purposeful and positive future. It's making sure that as we look at it all, we put the focus on the best—the best lessons learned, the best of the experience, the highlight of the win—because the rest is going to be there. You're going to pick up on that, but where do we want to focus? What do we want to capture? We want to capture those wins, lean into those wins, and build a steady win wire that can develop momentum in our life and all that we do and pursue.

So that's really what I wanted to share with you all. Figure out and take action on what might work best for you. Is it grabbing the microphone and capturing some audio of this experience that you've gone through? Is it grabbing a journal—which is what I recommend—and taking stock of all the best of those highlights and reviewing that from time to time to really put together a plan for the best of the rest of this year and beyond?

Keep that in mind and look at ways you can visualize that and capture that. So it's kind of like pre-play and then replay. Do it in advance, but you're doing it in your mind, and that's how you get a lot more purposeful about your projections and really set yourself up to win. Throw yourself that alley-oop!

So with that, I wanted to thank you all for tuning into this episode of 'Learn How to See Better.' I want to make sure that you're taking the most out of this. Give me your feedback. Let me know how you're able to use this info to reflect more radiantly and project more purposefully in your life so you can have the year end with a significant win.

Thanks again, everybody. Catch you on the next one."