Your Best Year Ever: Michael Hyatt - Summary & Analysis (2/6)
Step 2. Complete the Past.
"After limiting beliefs, the next most common barrier we encounter is the past. We tow it around like a trailer full of broken furniture" - Your Best Year Ever: Michael Hyatt
Thinking backward is a must.
Backward Thinking.
Completing the past is an essential part of designing a better future.
We can’t complete the past until we acknowledge what we’ve already experienced. As a friend told me, “An experience is not complete until it is remembered.”
We can’t just ignore it or wish it away. Whatever we have experienced over the last twelve months — or even further back — must be addressed. If we try to ignore it, it’s just going to come back to bite us.
How? Sometimes we live inside unhelpful stories we tell ourselves. Other times we nurse grievances to justify our current actions or feel unvalued because we were slighted or disregarded in some way. If we don’t get resolution, we’ll drag all our unfinished business into the future, and it will sabotage everything we’re trying to build going forward.
The After-Action Review.
The US Army has a helpful backward-thinking method. It’s called the After-Action Review. An After-Action Review is a living, pervasive process that explicitly connects past experience with future action.
☝️The important thing is to just be aware of your feelings as you work through these four stages.
Stage 1: State What You Wanted to Happen.
This could be your list of goals from the prior year. It could also be something less definite. Maybe it’s a hope, dream, or unstated expectation.
Start by asking yourself how you saw the year going. What were your plans, your dreams, your concrete goals if you had any?
Stage 2: Acknowledge What Actually Happened.
Some of your goals, perhaps many of them, remain unfulfilled. So ask yourself: What disappointments or regrets did I experience this past year?
The point of regret is not to try to change the past, but to shed light on the present. You don’t want to leave these hanging in the air or push them behind you like they don’t matter. Both will prevent you from taking meaningful action in the present.
There’s real emotional power in just admitting what we wished others would have noticed and commended in our actions but maybe didn’t.
Don’t stop there. What did you accomplish this past year that you were most proud of? Completing the past is not just about processing failures and disappointments. It’s also about acknowledging and celebrating your wins.
It’s important to acknowledge what you accomplished this past year. You’re probably doing better than you give yourself credit for.
To finish this stage, it’s useful to tease out some themes. What were two or three specific themes that kept recurring? These could be single words, phrases, or even complete sentences. For me, this past year was about being wildly productive while protecting my margin.
Stage 3: Learn from the Experience.
(The author recounts the time when his client fired him on the verge of their biggest deal.)
In the end it was a humbling but helpful experience. I learned three important lessons. First, clients (and customers) can be fickle. I couldn’t afford to put all my eggs in one basket. If I didn’t spread the risk, I might find myself in serious trouble again. Second, I learned I couldn’t assume today’s victories would be remembered or appreciated. I had to keep raising the bar. Finally, I learned I needed to secure alignment from all the relevant parties up front. It turned out my client and his board had different ideas about what I was delivering. All three lessons have been invaluable over the years.
What about you? What are the major life lessons you learnt in the past year?
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. If you have trouble identifying your key lessons from the year, one way to suss them out is to ask what was missing from your success.
Maybe it was strategic planning “you wish you had done more of that in your business.
Maybe you wish you had saved more money, spent more time with your spouse, or played more with your kids, or taken a sabbatical, or read more books.
Listing these missing ingredients is an effective way to learn what went wrong and what it would take to go right in the future.
Santayana also said, “Progress . . . depends on retentiveness.” To retain these lessons, you’ll want to distill your discoveries into short, pithy statements. That transforms your learning into wisdom to guide your path into the future. Just for example, here’s one I wrote down a couple of years ago:
“There comes a point in every experience when I’m too far in to quit but almost certain I can’t finish. If I keep moving forward, I’ll eventually get to the other side.”
That was an important life lesson for me to learn at that time, and I can pull it up when I face similar experiences today.
Here’s another one:
“Don’t overthink the outcome, just do the next right thing.” Or, “I can do anything I want. I just can’t do everything I want.”
You get the idea. Distill the lessons from your experiences so you don’t lose them and so they serve as tools moving forward.
Stage 4: Adjust Your Behaviour.
If you don’t change your beliefs and how you act on them, you’re actually worse than when you started.
If I hadn’t adjusted my behavior as a result of what I learned from getting fired, all that grief would have been for nothing. I would have found myself in the same situation again and again. Instead, as I’ve progressed in my career I’ve acted on those lessons and have saved myself a lot of trouble as a result.
Regret reveals opportunity.
“My new rule: whenever things go wrong, wait and see what better thing is coming”
(The author explains that his wife and he had five kids in less than ten years 😱)
Given the size of my family, I felt a lot of financial pressure. That, coupled with my natural ambition, was a powerful cocktail.
If you have no regrets, or you intentionally set out to live without regrets, I think you’re missing the very value of regret.
The value?
One challenge most of us face in completing the past is the nagging feeling that we failed somehow. This isn’t tattoos. This is existential. If you’re still breathing, you’re probably aware of at least one way you haven’t measured up. But this is no tragedy.
The problem is how quickly we distance ourselves from it. We’d rather not live with the feeling long enough to gain the benefit. That’s a big mistake. When it comes to experiencing your best year ever, we can leverage our regrets to reveal opportunities we would otherwise miss.
The Uses of Regret.
Before we look at the benefits, let’s examine one common but unhelpful use of regret: self-condemnation. “The delta between I am a screwup and I screwed up may look small,” says Brown, “but in fact it’s huge.” When we focus on ourselves instead of our performance, we make it harder to address improving next time around for the simple reason that improvement isn’t the focus.
Worse, self-directed regrets sit on the evidence table in the criminal court of our minds as an ever-expanding mound of exhibits, proving all our worst limiting beliefs about ourselves. Never mind the built-in confirmation bias. We’re all fallible, so if you believe you are a failure, you’ll never run out of proof.
First, there’s instruction, which relates back to Stage 3 of the After-Action Review process. Regret is a form of information, and reflecting on our missteps is critical to avoiding those missteps in the future.
Next there’s the motivation to change. As Landman says, “Regret may not only tell us that something is wrong, but it can also move us to do something about it.” Finally, there’s integrity. Regret can work in us like a moral compass, signaling us when we’ve veered off the path.
The Opportunity Principle.
Several years ago a pair of researchers from the University of Illinois ranked people’s biggest regrets in life. They combined the results of multiple studies and subjected them to fresh analysis, along with conducting additional studies of their own. Family, finances, and health all made the list, but the six biggest regrets people expressed were:
- Education
- Career
- Romance
- Parenting
- Self-improvement,
- and leisure.
Notice how these high-regret areas correlate closely to the ten life domains I outlined at the start of the book. If your LifeScore was low in any particular domain, welcome to the human drama. You’re not alone.
The researchers mapped a three-stage process of action, outcome, and recall.
- In the first, we take steps toward a goal.
- In the second, we experience the result of our effort. If unsuccessful, we often trigger regret.
- Where it gets interesting is stage 3, recall. The researchers found that “feelings of dissatisfaction and disappointment are strongest where the chances for corrective reaction are clearest.
They called their finding The Opportunity Principle which in essence states that regret is a powerful indicator of future opportunity.
The fact we feel regret at all is evidence we have what it takes to make positive change in our situations, no matter how dire they might seem. The only people with no hope are those with no regrets.
What if your greatest frustrations from the previous year were actually pointing you to some of your biggest wins in the next? What if regret isn’t reminding us of what’s impossible, but rather pointing us toward what is possible?
Gratitude makes the difference.
Gratitude enhances effortful striving. The first way gratitude makes us resilient is that it keeps us hopeful. Gratitude is a game of contrasts. Our circumstances look a certain way; then something happens to improve them. Gratitude happens when we take notice of the distance between the two. Suddenly, we have something to be thankful for.
That process teaches us something critical about life. While our circumstances might be bad, they can also be better. And our stories prove it to us again and again. Gratitude keeps us positive, optimistic, and able to keep coming back for more when life throws obstacles in our way.
Next, gratitude reminds us we have agency. Because gratitude involves giving thanks for what others have done for us, this might seem counterintuitive. But that’s an illusion. You know what they say about unopened gifts 🎁. If we didn’t use our agency to receive and act on what others have done for us, we wouldn’t have benefited.
Finally, gratitude expands our possible responses. Gratitude moves us into a place of abundance — a place where we’re more resourceful, creative, generous, optimistic, and kind. When we’re operating from a place of scarcity, we are more likely to be reactionary, closed-minded, tightfisted, gloomy, and even mean.
Disciplines of Gratitude.
Gratitude has the potential to amplify everything good in our lives. It’s the best remedy I know for the affliction of scarcity thinking and the best way to cultivate a mindset of abundance.
To leverage the gratitude advantage in my own life, I’ve benefited from adopting these three disciplines:
- I start and end the day with prayer. Instead of bookending the day with what I failed to get — sleep or accomplishments or whatever — I try focusing on the blessings I do have and expressing them in prayer.
- I practice thankfulness. Before I get caught in endless comparisons, I express gratitude for the gifts I do have.
- I journal my gratitude. Journaling is useful for many things, but expressing and capturing our gratitude is certainly one. Not only do I have the in-the-moment benefit of focusing on the good, I’ve recorded it for later reflection, for those times when things don’t feel like they’re going as well as I had hoped.
What once delighted and surprised us can later feel rote and predictable. Psychologist Timothy D. Wilson calls this the pleasure paradox: We experience something wonderful and try to understand it so we can experience it more often, but once we understand it, we take the edge off the wonder. The way around the pleasure paradox is something he calls the “George Bailey technique.” This is essentially mentally erasing your blessings for greater joy, appreciation and optimism.
The Future is Bright.
The truth is that you will never have more of what you want until you become thankful for what you have. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Changing the rhyme scheme starts with upgrading our beliefs, getting resolution on the past, and looking toward the future with a sense of expectation and the hope that comes from deep gratitude.
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