This is the 4th Law of 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth. As read and understood by me.

LAW 4 – The Law of Reflection – Learning to Pause Allows Growth to Catch up with you

Learning to pause allows growth to catch up with you.

The Power of Pausing

1. Reflection Turns Experience into Insight – Experience is not the best teacher. Evaluated Experience is! People have innumerable experiences every day, and many learn nothing from them because they never take the time to pause and reflect.
2. Everyone Needs a Time and Place to Pause – Stopping to reflect is one of the most valuable activities people can do to grow. Pausing allows them to make sure they are on the right track. If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need motivation to speed up. He needs to stop, reflect and change course. Create a thinking place. If we pause to allow growth to catch up with us, it makes our lives better.
3. Pausing with Intention Expands and Enriches Thinking – Great people spend a considerable amount of time alone thinking. Practice discipline of solitude. Time alone allows people to sort through their experience, put it into perspective, and plan for the future. A minute of thought is worth more than an hour of talk.
4. When you Take time to pause, Use Your I’s
   1. Investigation – Continual growth from experiences is only possible when we discover insights and truths within them. That comes from investigation
   2. Incubation – Very similar to meditation, let the experience of life simmer into to your mind for a while
   3. Illumination – At the end of each day, you should play back your days performance. These are the “aha” moments.
   4. Illustration – most ideas are skeletons. They provide a good structure, but they need meat on their bones. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing.

Good Questions are the Heart of Reflection

Anthony Robbins says “Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.”

If your questions are focused, they will stimulate creative thinking.

Personal Awareness Questions

1. What is my biggest Asset?
2. What is my biggest Liability?
3. What is my Highest High?
4. What is my Lowest Low?
5. What is my most Worthwhile Emotion?
6. What is My Least Worthwhile Emotion?
7. What is my Best Habit?
8. What is my Worst Habit?
9. What is Most Fulfilling to Me?
10. What do I Prize most highly?

Most important thing is to write out the questions and answers. You will discover that what you think after you write the answer is different from what you thought before you wrote it.

The farther you go in life the more critical it is that you take time to pause and think.

Ideally spend a short time pausing to reflect at the end of every day (between ten and thirty minutes), a significant time every week (at least an hour or two), part of a day several times a year (half a day), and an extended time annually (as little as a day and as much as a week). Put these times to pause on your calendar and guard them as you would your most important appointments.