Dose of Dignity: The Weekly Meeting You Can't Miss

In this dose of dignity, Jennifer describes the purpose and important of having a weekly meeting with oneself to enhance self-awareness, personal growth, and effective time management. She discusses the benefits of self-reflection, including improved problem-solving skills and stress management. Jennifer provides practical tips on how to establish this meeting, including choosing a consistent time, creating a distraction-free environment, and asking insightful questions to guide the reflection process. Our website, www.thedignitylab.com, has a downloadable list of questions you can ask yourself each week.

Resources

• PRO Weekly - The Life Planner to Achieve your Goals – Clever Fox®
• Flow Club 2-week pass

Takeaways

• Many meetings are not valuable and lack clear next steps.
• Neglecting personal development can lead to a lack of awareness.
• Investing 30 to 40 minutes weekly can significantly impact growth.
• Self-awareness is key to effective leadership and personal values.
• Regularly assessing priorities aligns time with long-term goals.
• Dedicated time for problem-solving enhances decision-making.
• Reflecting on relationships helps address communication patterns.
• Managing stress can be achieved through self-reflection.
• Creating a distraction-free environment is crucial for focus.
• Asking the right questions leads to valuable insights.

Exploring what it means to live and lead with dignity at work, in our families, in our communities, and in the world. What is dignity? How can we honor the dignity of others? And how can we repair and reclaim our dignity after harm? Tune in to hear stories about violations of dignity and ways in which we heal, forgive, and make choices about how we show up in a chaotic and fractured world. Hosted by physician and coach Jennifer Griggs.

For more information on the podcast, please visit www.thedignitylab.com.
For more information on podcast host Dr. Jennifer Griggs, please visit https://jennifergriggs.com/.
For additional free resources, including the periodic table of dignity elements, please visit https://jennifergriggs.com/resources/.

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Transcript

Intro

Many meetings, as I'm sure you know and have experienced, are not valuable, last longer than they need to, go off track, and often end up without clear next steps. 

In today's Dose of Dignity, I'll talk about one meeting you can't miss, and that's a meeting with yourself. I'll explain the why, what, and how of a weekly meeting and propose some questions for your agenda. I've found that, without checking in with myself, I can fall into a trance, moving forward in time and space without landmarks, without awareness. Weeks and months slip by and then here I am at the end of a month or a year wondering, where did the time go? I'm wondering if you've had that experience. 

It's so easy to neglect our personal development, giving ourselves little time to reflect on the past week and to forecast the upcoming week. It's hard to give ourselves time to think about the wins and the areas in which we can do better, course correct, ask for help, say no to something and say yes to something else. 

Recall that life and leadership is a series of experiments. And that we often learn more from our mistakes than from what we've happened to get right. Giving ourselves 30 to 40 minutes a week is a small investment in our own growth and can make a big difference in how we interact with other people whether we have an official leadership title or are leaders of our own lives, our family, and our community. 

A disciplined habit of scheduling time with yourself offers you several things. The first is increased self-awareness, one of the keys to both life and leadership. You'll gain a better understanding of how you're living your personal values and reaching your goals and give yourself the time and space to identify your strengths as well as areas for improvement. 

A weekly meeting improves your time management. You can regularly assess your priorities and align how you spend your time with your long-term objectives. You can regularly assess your priorities and align how you spend your time with your long-term objectives. 

A weekly meeting will enhance your ability to solve problems. You'll have dedicated time to address personal and professional challenges and to brainstorm solutions without distractions.

A weekly meeting will help you look at your relationships, noticing patterns in your communication, seeing how your words and actions affect others, and allowing you to address problems before they become capital P Problems or worse. issues. 

If used to its fullest, a meeting like this can help you manage stress, serving as an outlet for processing emotions and experience and giving you a chance to identify how you're doing and the yellow flags you might notice as you look both back and ahead, not just at work but in all areas of life. 

So how do you go about actually having a weekly meeting with yourself?

I recommend that you choose a consistent day and time if you can. Make a calendar event and hold that time sacred. If you have to cancel, make sure to reschedule before a week or more has passed you by. 

You may need to experiment with the day and time. I used to have my meeting on Fridays, but found that more often than not, my meeting was canceled, mostly for good things. I moved my meeting to Sunday evening just after I cleared off my desk for Monday morning. 

If you have a hard time creating and keeping that time, you may want to try co-working with a colleague or friend, or consider joining Flow Club, a virtual co-working space. We'll put a link for a free two-week trial in the show notes. 

Whenever possible, create a distraction-free environment. You may want to start a ritual where you go to the library or to a quiet coffee shop. You can print out next week's calendar as a way of avoiding self-distraction from your email or other notifications. Put your phone away or on silent. 

Write down your responses to the questions you ask yourself. For me, I have to put pen or pencil to paper. It slows down my racing thoughts and can lead to some surprises as I write out my responses to the questions I ask myself. I also prefer seeing everything on the page in front of me. We'll put a link to the Clever Fox Pro 12-month planner that I use in the show notes. It's undated, so you can start at any point in the year. 

And finally, and this is really important, commit to telling the truth. Some of the people I know who always tell the truth find it all too easy to pull a fast one on themselves. I actually think we all do that.

Here are some candidate questions for self-reflection. I have a complete downloadable version of possible questions for your weekly meeting on our website, thedignitylab.com, under the Resources tab. You can use the same questions every week or shake things up. At the end of your meeting, you will have some new insights and a set of next steps. 

Okay, here we go. 

Review of the past week. What were my wins this week? A win can be a great conversation, a major task completed… frankly, a minor task completed, a time when you honored your dignity, a time you honored someone else's dignity, an accomplishment or a barrier you overcame. What energized me? What de-energized me? What did I learn about myself by tracking my energy? What progress did I make toward my goals? What challenges did I face and how did I handle them?

Values and purpose. In what ways did I live out my values? Did I make any decisions or act in any way that conflicted with those values? If there's one thing I could do to make next week better, what would it be? What is one step I can take in that direction? 

Personal well-being. How am I feeling physically, emotionally, and spiritually? What can I do to take the absolute best care of myself this upcoming week? What positive habits did I maintain consistently this week? What negative behaviors or patterns did I notice and how can I address these next week? Did I follow through on my commitments? If not, what held me back?

Relationships and communication. How have my interactions with others been this week? How can I better support or connect with important people in my life? s there a conversation I need to have that is, is there a relationship that needs attention or improvement?

Goal setting and planning. What is my top priority for the coming week, the one thing that needs to get done? Are my current goals still aligned with my long-term vision? What steps can I take to move closer to my objectives?

I'm curious what you've written down, what you've learned about yourself and thinking through these questions. How does all of this sound? Appealing? Scary? I get that. It can be easier to avoid taking stock regularly until it isn't. If you're curious about what would happen and maybe also intimidated, start small. Pick just three questions. Play around with the day and time. Sunday afternoon, Monday morning. Wednesday at noon? Yeah, that wouldn't work for me either. 

I would love to hear how it goes. What have you learned? How has meeting regularly with yourself changed how you appraised the past week and planned for the upcoming week? You can email me at jennifer at jennifergriggs.com or through our website, thedignitylab.com. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week for another Dose of Dignity, this one on the dignity of active, deep, and radical listening. We'll see you then.

Outro