Reflection From the 15 Laws of Growth by John Maxwell
| “Experience leads to wisdom. So take your time to stop, reflect and connect with that wisdom.”
The Law of Reflection from the 15 Laws of Growth by John Maxwell helps us understand why we should pause and reflect on our experiences. This self-reflection helps you connect with your wisdom and become more self-aware in life.
Discover:
- How the Law of Reflection can help you become more self-aware
- Why you should take time to “sharpen your saw” in life
- Time-proven practices to mastering the skill of self-reflection
- What you should do as the last thing in the evening & the first thing in the morning
- How to gain better clarity into your objectives for a day
- Why you should celebrate your successes (as well as failures)
And so much more.

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Welcome to the Ivy League Prep Academy podcast, where we help you make a meaningful impact in your communities and get accepted to your dream university. Becoming the person that Ivy League schools recruit is more enjoyable and meaningful than you ever imagined. Come find out why.
Hello and welcome again. Today we'll be discussing law four of the 15 invaluable Laws of Growth by John Maxwell. The law number four is called the Law of Reflection.
Learning to pause allows growth to catch up with you, and it's mostly about taking time for yourself and making sure that you are sharp, that you're clear that your focus is in the right spot so that you're not just grinding away and tiring yourself out without taking breaks and learning to make yourself more efficient through rest. Steve, tell us a little bit about law number four. Yeah, I love it.
Experience is the best teacher, but that's only if you are able to pause and reflect on your experiences, right? There are a lot of people who live life and are constantly in go mode, constantly moving, aggressively pursuing their objectives and trying to improve their life in some tangible way. And yet if you don't stop every now and again to think about your path and to think about where you've come from and how you've gotten to where you are today and where that path is leading you, then you're just going to continue on this go mode. And it really feels like the hamster wheel, right? Where it's more mindless, less meaningful.
And what the fourth law? The Law of Reflection encourages us to do is to recognize that if we can stop periodically, it doesn't mean you lose ambition and you lose momentum, but periodically, strategically stop and reflect, stop and identify what got you to where you are and where you're going. And if this is consistent, if it's congruent with your values and the life you want to be living, that's an excellent chapter. Yeah.
This reminds me, we talk a lot about the seven habits of highly effective people. And this reminds me of the Sharpen the Saw Habit, where he describes an analogy. Stephen Covey describes an analogy of two lumberjacks, one of which just keeps going and going and going and cuts down tree after tree after tree, and then his saw starts to dull.
But he continues and continues and continues and just is nonstop cutting down these trees, but he's unable to cut them down very quickly because his his saw is so dull. And then he compares that to another lumberjack who cuts and cuts and cuts these trees down. And then when his saw gets dull, he takes some time away, sharpens the saw, and then goes back to work.
And he can cut down the trees much, much more efficiently and much more successfully because he took the time to sharpen his saw. And so this law reminds me of that. Would you say that it's similar.
Yeah, absolutely right. The second lumberjack is going to win every single time. If you take time to sharpen your saw, you're going to have better tools to live life.
And your mind, your vision, your own personal energy, those are your most valuable assets. And those should combine to give you some sort of wisdom, some sort of roadmap about what life should mean to you. And it requires that you stop and spend the time necessary to allow that vision to kind of rise up from your subconscious into your awareness.
So, Steve, what are some of the ways that John Maxwell or that you have discovered and share about how to make sure you do take time to sharpen the saw? Well, I think that practices like meditation or breathing exercises, gratitude exercises, journaling, self reflection, I mean, these practices are rising in popularity as more and more leaders start to realize the benefits of giving the mind some quiet time. What works for one person may not work well for another. But I think that stopping to breathe, stopping to meditate, reading great books, stopping to just be with your thoughts or be with your gratitude are all excellent exercises.
One thing that I've told my students in the Ivy League Challenge is that when my feet hit the floor in the morning, I don't reach for my phone first thing in the morning. In fact, my phone is in a drawer closed or it's in a different room because I don't want to be looking at my screen and have that screen keep me awake until I fall asleep from exhaustion, until my mind collapses, right? So at night, before I go to bed, I'm not looking at my phone and it's put away somewhere so I don't reach for it first thing in the morning. And what that allows me to do is it gives me a few moments of quiet and peace in the morning.
And when my feet hit the floor, rather than stand up quickly and race to begin my day, my feet hitting the floor is a signal. It's a trigger to me to breathe and take a few deep breaths in and be grateful for the morning. And so that's my very first gratitude and breathing of the day is when my feet hit the floor from my bed.
And at that time I like to stretch. And it's a great opportunity even though it's just a few minutes, right. When you wake up, rather than stressing about running to get your day started, start your day with some deep breaths and some gratitude and maybe a reminder of what you're excited about for the day and then move into go mode.
It's just an excellent way to start the day. Okay, so you wake up, feet hit the floor, and it's go time. What are some other ways that you take some time to reflect or some time to gain clarity about your objectives for the day? Yeah, great question.
As far as objectives for the day. In the morning when I'm breathing and taking deep breaths with my feet on the floor and and just feeling gratitude for the for the morning and and looking forward to the day, I do often think about the night before where I have taken five minutes to plan out the day and to prioritize. I also like to think ahead the night before.
What might trip me up and how might I prevent that potential pitfall from becoming a challenge for me, how might I overcome that? So in the morning, I might reflect back on the daily planner activities that I did the night before. And as far as just the daily strategy, that's probably it. Right.
I'm not going to take more time other than the night before and then those first moments when I wake up and breathe and stretch to really think through the day. But I do think it's important to take time periodically over the course of weeks or months or years to really evaluate some key elements of life, to stop and slow down and evaluate what you've accomplished. For example, I know that you and I have both talked to a lot of people who work very hard and potentially even become very successful and never feel that success.
Right. They never stop in the middle of pursuing their dreams to hit the pause button and evaluate the things that they've accomplished. Are they proud of their efforts? Have they grown and have they become a better version of themselves over time? I like to stop periodically and ask those questions of myself and I think that's a really valuable exercise.
Yeah. Take some time to celebrate success and reward yourself for all the sacrifice and work that you've put into things. That sounds awesome.
Absolutely. Yeah. Even sometimes the small victories to recognize that you were afraid of taking this step, you were afraid of doing something, of starting this journey of some kind, and you did it anyway.
And that first step, that's a celebration moment. And so periodically to stop and look back and realize that you are putting in the work, you're being consistent, you're growing as a human. I think that's a fantastic practice and John Maxwell certainly agrees.
Okay, so what are some takeaways that you would recommend from this principle? I think it's important also that we realize stopping and reflecting helps us to avoid mistakes or at least to identify mistakes that we have made and learn from them. Right. We started out this discussion kind of talking about how experience leads to wisdom.
As long as you take time to allow that wisdom to percolate, allow the wisdom to become front of mind. And certain mistakes that we may have made during our journey oftentimes don't even appear. We don't even realize what mistake we might have made until we look backwards and we are reflective about it.
When we're sincere and reflective and try to be as honest as possible. And learning from those mistakes is really what separates wisdom from experience. You gain the experience either way, but do you become more wise? Do you become a better decision maker, a better leader, a better human as a result? And I think it's critical to stop and reflect, to learn from those mistakes.
And then of course, the continuation of that is to check your future direction, right? Are you on the path that's taking you where you want to be? Are your actions now considering the mistakes and the victories that you have had over the past time period, considering everything together? Are your actions, are your decisions congruent with your values? Are you living the version of your life that you want to be living? Are you being your best self? And all of that requires stopping and reflecting and allowing pause in your life so that growth can occur. So what are some ways that we can keep this top of mind or make this into a habit? Because for me, this is one of those principles that I learn and then I seem to forget over time. And what are some ways that we can keep it as a practice that we continue to do well, sometimes the obvious answers are the right answers, right? Like we've talked about, a phrase we stole from our friend Brendan bashard is that common sense is not common practice.
But if you find yourself forgetting to slow down and forgetting to be reflective, then you need to schedule that time into your day, into your calendar. So schedule it as periodically as you need it. If you just need the daily refocusing, I love the morning routine that I just described.
It only takes a minute and can take longer if you'd like, but certainly can be very quick and very efficient. Get you started off on the right foot, so to speak. Started from a position of gratitude and very positive mindset.
But other thinking time and other reflection time would probably need to be scheduled into your calendar. If you find yourself forgetting about it, then once a week it's a good idea to reflect back on the week. Once a month, I find it's a good idea to reflect on the month and certainly a lot of people generally around New Year's often have at least inclinations to be reflective.
I just think it's important to schedule it in and whether that's just scheduling in a swim or a walk, whatever it is that you do that helps you take your mind off of the daily grind and allows you to be more reflective, schedule that time into your calendar. Okay, so it sounds like there's a few takeaways here. One is that we need to be scheduling this time to sit and reflect.
We need to be making it an active part of our day or our plan to, in the evening, take some time and plan out the next day and take some inventory on how the previous day went. And it seems like every so often we need to ask ourselves sort of some tough questions that help us introspect and develop a clear picture of what's happening in our lives. And this can either happen if we schedule it or in my case, in my life, a few times it's been like a train hitting me in the face and saying, hey, you need to rethink this, or the body breaking down because you're too sick.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. It seems like every few years in my life where I just think, oh, I'm not taking care of myself. So some of the tough questions for me that help me rethink the direction my life is taking is stuff like how do I want to develop this skill? Or especially self development skills like we talk about here on the podcast, how do I want my career to shape up? Or those five year, ten year questions, where do I want to be physically? Where do I want to be in my relationships? Where do I want to be in my career or in school? And then asking those questions in such a way that I can then put a plan together.
And then the times that we pause and reflect daily are really times that we pause and reflect about those answers to those tough questions that we've asked periodically. Yeah, wonderful. It just leads to a far, far more productive, more wise life.
Just a better way to live.