What is the benefit of review? Many programs, professionals, or sites will suggest keeping a journal. I’ve done it here multiple times. While there is inherent benefit in writing things down, a journal offers much more when you take time to review it. Without review, you may miss a problematic food response, a pattern that is prolonged over so much time that it isn’t obvious, or you may fail to see the progress you’ve made.
The correct review schedule is the one that works for you. It will be best if you can find a time that you are rested and have few distractions. If you can only carve out small chunks of time, that’s okay. You don’t have to review a whole year at a time.
You may want to take a tiered approach. Perhaps do a monthly review, make note of anything that surprises you, that you’ve learned, and the progress you see. Save these notes and review them at the end of the year.
There’s no magic to monthly review. You know yourself best. If you need longer to settle into feeling comfortable recording things, you may want to wait 6 months or a year before reading what you’ve written. This will give you time to get in the groove of choosing the information you need to write down, determining what information you want to access later, and what it feels best to get off your chest and onto paper or a screen.
Years of schooling can make it seem like we should set out on a path with very specific goals and a narrow view of how we plan to achieve them. Without review that may not lead to success because we won’t see where we’re wasting time or spinning our wheels. Looking back can help us make the most efficient and effective adjustments.
Sometimes we resist looking back because we’re afraid we’ll focus on what hasn’t worked well or want to punish ourselves for not doing enough or being good enough. But what we’re really resisting is a chance to learn and improve.
More people than ever before are able to get our attention delivering expertise. They edit themselves to look perfect and perfectly confident. That doesn’t mean they haven’t worked hard, failed, reinvented, and revised before you even knew who they were. That’s how they became experts.
The most knowledgeable mechanic has learned the way to remove X before doing Y. The most knowledgeable plumber has learned from messy mistakes. The best lawyers review both their mistakes and those of others to determine the most effective tack to take in a given case.
Effective journaling and review will assure that you are an expert on your physical responses, feelings, and perceptions. This knowledge will help you ask better questions of your doctor, therapist, and even friends when you’re trying to plan. It will help you feel more grounded and stronger. And it can surprise you in the best ways!
We don’t always recognize the incremental steps we are making toward improvement. Seeing the results of those small steps become a big change over time can bring a sense of accomplishment and excitement to keep going.
I’ve written 727 blog posts that represent close to a million words. I’ve chosen over 1200 images to post along with those words. A words to pages calculator tells me that’s 83 hours and 20 minutes of content or the equivalent of 2062 single-spaced pages.
Even if I haven’t caught all the typos or chosen the most perfect words, I can’t look at those stats and say I haven’t accomplished something. And that’s the benefit of review.
