The Habit Most Dreamers Skip (and Why It Matters)

When it comes to creativity and taking action on our dreams, there’s a lot of talk about moving forward, but we don’t spend nearly enough time looking back.

That’s why I’m adding this brand-new habit to the Devoted Dreamers Habit Series: Scheduled Reflection. It’s a practice I didn’t include when I first launched the series, but it’s one I’ve come to see as essential for long-term faithfulness to a God-shaped dream.

Here’s why: 

Without a consistent reflection practice, we miss key opportunities for growth and learning. 

When was the last time you took a pause to reflect on something you tried? It could even be a new habit you attempted during this series. Did you keep it up all week? Was it a total flop? Did you find yourself making adjustments with each new attempt? 

When you skip the reflection, you also miss out on the potential mindset shift that comes as you consider what you might do differently next time. 

But when you build a new reflection practice, it helps you recognize what God is already doing in and through you.

Want to make it easy? I share a simple three-question reflection framework you can use weekly, monthly, or anytime you feel stuck. 

If you want to pursue your dream with steadiness instead of burnout, this habit matters right now.

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Transcript

Merritt Onsa:
What is something you could do today that would impact your God-shaped dream and your ability to persevere in it for the long haul?

Hi, I'm Merritt Onsa, your Devoted Dreamer's host, and I'm an authority on what it looks like to go after a God-shaped dream.

And throughout this habit series, which you are getting to the tail end of, there are 10 total episodes, throughout this series, I've been talking about building simple, small habits that will increase your confidence and the consistency that you're going to need to run after a God shaped dream.

Today, I'm inserting a new habit. So this series originally ran in 2023. I re-shared it in 2024 and skipped last year, 2025, but here, in 2026, at the beginning of the year, as I'm getting ready to kick off season 14, I decided to run the series again.

And as I went back and listened to all the previous episodes and thought through like what has changed in my life since I recorded these in 2023, I still very much believe in the importance of persistence to practice daily, weekly or monthly habits, whatever the natural cadence is for the particular habit.

I really believe in this as a practice for growing your confidence and growing your consistency in being able to do something over and over and over again. And eventually that thing becoming automatic for you.

I believe that it builds our brains. It strengthens some things for us neurologically, which don't we all need good brain health and, again, grows our confidence and our consistency.

All these things are very necessary and important tools for going after a God-shaped dream.

Now before we wrap up the series on Monday, I decided that I wanted to add this new habit because I looked at my life and found something that I had started doing since 2023, that I think is crucial for starting something new.

Actually, it's crucial for being a human and we don't often take very much time to do this in our lives.

So, I'm calling this habit Scheduled Reflection.

Reflection is something that I think we know we should be doing, but it never rises to the top of that importance and urgent aspect of your to-do list.

It's like, oh, well, I can do that tomorrow because I have X, Y, Z things that have deadlines today.

And I want to shake that up for you and suggest that it is impossible to move forward without wasting a lot of time if we choose to neglect scheduled reflection.

Said another way, we don't want to neglect scheduling reflection time into the things that we're doing on a regular basis, because if we do, we miss out on the opportunity to grow.

Making mistakes, or looking back at the things that you did, things that went well, things that didn't go so well, making mistakes is how our brain learns.

And so we need to be asking the question, what did I learn from this one? What did I learn from this thing that I did? Or maybe that I didn't do, maybe a habit that I tried that didn't go well.

I can toss that out the window and say, it didn't work for me; or I can spend some time in reflection thinking through why didn't it work for me? Is there something that needs to be different for me to grab onto a particular habit that I've decided is really important to me.

So in my Dream Believers community, we have made reflection and gratitude a regular monthly practice. We meet once a month for 45 minutes. There are three to four prompts. I set a timer for three to four minutes for each one. We process through: how did the month go? What are our little and big wins? What is God teaching us?

And that shapes how we think back on where we've been and prepares us for the next steps we're gonna take going forward in our dream.

If we don't do this, we actually miss out on what God is doing in our lives. If we do do this... I've been following @thefaithfilledtherapist on Instagram, and I love her talk about neuroplasticity and what's happening in our brain when we do things like gratitude and reflection.

She talks about how intentionally remembering God's faithfulness, the things that God did in our life, that actually strengthens our neural pathways associated with trust and hope.

So spending time in reflection, remembering things that God did in your life and related to your dream, it strengthens and grows your ability to trust and hope in Him. I love that, don't we all want to trust and hope more deeply, more authentically in our Father.

I do think this pairs nicely with the final episode in the Habit series that's coming on Monday, the Daily Gratitude Practice.

If you were to implement a scheduled reflection practice, I have a really easy way for you to do this. I learned this from a grad school internship supervisor decades ago. It's three simple questions. You might not even need to write them down.

It's WHAT? SO WHAT? NOW WHAT? I'll break those down for you real quick though.

It's pretty obvious, but WHAT? is, What happened? What was the thing that I undertook? In this case, it could be, What was January like? Or if there's something specific that you attempted, so one of the habits, What happened when I started to work on my sleep hygiene? So, WHAT?

Then SO WHAT? Why do I care about this? What is significant about it? What occurred as a result of stepping into this thing? or What can I thank God for? or What did he show me? What did he teach me through this process? So that's SO WHAT?

And then NOW WHAT? is, What are my next steps?

And I highly recommend whether you use the WHAT, SO WHAT, NOW WHAT process, or some other reflection prompts, or just a general opportunity of journaling, looking back over a day, a week, a month, or we can even do this annually. A lot harder to do if you haven't been doing it at a regular cadence before that, but it's still possible to reflect back on your year, right?

I would just recommend doing this with pen and paper. Yes, you could type, but there's something that happens in your brain as you use your hand and put pen to paper and write out your reflections on whatever period of time at whatever pace or schedule that you want to do that.

Are you new to me or new to the Devoted Dreamers podcast? I want you to download my habit tracker, especially if you've been listening to these last several episodes in the habit series. You can find it at merrittonsa.com/habits. 

I'll send you the tracker. I'll send you some follow-up emails every couple of days to check in with you to see how it's going, to ask you some questions about what it's been like for you using that tracker. (Hey, right there's another opportunity to reflect.) 

And after that, I'll add you to my newsletter list where you'll get some biblical encouragement for navigating uncertainty in pursuing a big God-shaped dream. 

You'll find ways to go deeper with me and the Devoted Dreamers community, as well as a weekly reminder every Friday that God is at work in you and your dream.

That's what I want you to hear from me and I would love to get to know you and your dream a little better so reply to any of those emails that you get and you will get a response directly from me. I read every single email I get from listeners and email subscribers.

So be sure to let me know how I can support you in your God-shaped dream.