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End of Year Reflection Questions

One time a friend asked on social media “how do you know if therapy is helping?”

I think of that every time I prepare for a Reflection Session at the end of my coaching package, Painless Productivity. I never want one of my clients to wonder whether coaching was helpful for them—much less to not even know how to tell if it was helpful for them!

So in the final session of the package, my client and I look back at how far they came, and then look forward at how they want to carry their progress into their everyday life.

I find this kind of reflection important in my own life, too. I don’t want to just float through the year without taking stock of what happened and consciously planning what I want to do next. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about self-improvement and New Year’s Resolutions. The important thing is just that my eyes are open, that I’m watching the passage of time, and my own personal evolution.

Even when you’re not in coaching, therapy, or other dedicated personal development work, you’re still growing and developing. Each year contains many moments of challenge, insight, and breakthrough. So I think my reflection questions can apply to the end of our year, as well.

So, join me in an End of Year Reflection!

Productivity Tips

How to get a New Year’s Resolution to stick

Imagine a family where every year, Mom tells the kids that this year, they really need to do their homework before they play video games. Mom is 100% sincere in her desire for the kids to do their homework first thing. She’s resolved. She’s committed. But the kids don’t do it. Why not?

Well it’s not much of a mystery, is it? The kids were the ones who needed to be resolved in order for this to happen. But they weren’t. Mom wanting it real bad doesn’t guarantee anything on their end.

The problem with New Year’s resolutions

That’s what goes on inside of us when we set a New Year’s Resolution in the usual way. A conscious—and conscientious—part of our personality sets the resolution. But in order to follow through with it, the subconscious, emotional parts of us—the parts that try to keep us rested and happy—have to be on board. Because those subconscious parts of us have a lot of say over what we do.

Internal Family Systems

The Marital Spat That Wasn’t

Some people are happily married. As of two years ago today, I’m ecstatically married. Ninety-nine of the time, spending my life with my partner is hilarious and delightful and fulfilling.

As I type this, he started singing a sea chanty at me out of nowhere. See what I mean? [Husband note: I Saw Three Ships is a Christmas song, not a sea chanty] Yes, I let him read over this and leave notes. Checks and balances.

As wonderful as that 99% of the time is, that last 1% can be just about as painful. There’s something about being “all in” with someone that makes fighting with them hit your deepest insecurities, right?

Early on in our relationship, we had a conflict that took us months to fully resolve. It activated the “fixer” part of me, so I tried everything: individual therapy, couples therapy, and reading everything I could find about healthy conflict resolution, including a 400 page book by famed couples therapist John Gottman. One of the things I read somewhere haunted me: the idea that couples therapy works by helping couples talk more constructively, but they almost never keep it up outside the therapist’s office.

Case Studies

A Public Interest Lawyer’s Road Out of Burnout

Taylor came to work with me because she had fallen out of some of her routines during the pandemic, and now that the housework had piled up, it was overwhelming to tackle it. She knew she would feel better if she started to socialize more again, and she thought handling this housework would make her more likely to do so. So she decided to participate in my pilot of Painless Productivity for 10 sessions.

As you’ll see below, we discovered that her craving for socializing was coming from an empathetic part of her that was burned out by her job in eviction defense law, and wanted to empathize with people’s joy instead of just their pain. We were able to release some of the pain the empathetic part was holding on to, and set Taylor up to be less vulnerable to that kind of burnout in the future. This graphic summarizes her journey through layers of parts on the way to a less burned-out lifestyle.

Productivity Tips

How to Get Self-Care Right

It seems like every time I see a post about self-care, it’s telling me that I’ve misunderstood it or I’m doing it wrong. My favorite is when they say “self-care isn’t about bubble baths!” What do people have against bubble baths? (Misogyny, probably.)

But if you look closely, people are mainly alternating between saying that self-care is about self-indulgence, and saying that self-care is about being healthy and responsible.

So, which is it?

Case Studies

Case Study: Chris Releases Chronic Shoulder Tension

My friend Chris is also a coach, so we decided we would each give each other a session. With her permission, I’d like to share with you the heartwarming and remarkable story of the session where I coached her.

She told me that she was going through a transition period and feeling confused, like she used to have all the answers and now she “doesn’t know shit.” So I suggested we talk to the part of her who thinks she doesn’t know shit.

After some guidance to access the part, she found it as a feeling of heaviness in her chest.

Fred the Soothing Elephant

She shared that she had done similar work before and discovered another part that felt heavy in her chest. That other part appeared to her as a friendly cartoon elephant named Fred.

Fred would sit on her chest to soothe her. If we were only paying attention to physical sensations, we might have thought this part was Fred again, but Chris was able to tell that this part was different.

Coaching

How Long Does Life Coaching Take? Speed vs Efficiency

When I first started learning about parts work, I read that it worked very quickly. And the demos seemed to back this up: IFS founder Dick Schwartz can go from meeting a person, to working with their protectors (defense mechanisms) to unburdening an exile (healing and transformation) in the middle of a podcast, and still have time to chitchat before the episode is over.

But as I read more first-person accounts and started doing my own work, I realized it’s not always like that. People with highly traumatizing childhoods still spend years in IFS therapy. It might be more like three years instead of the ten or twenty years they’d spent in talk therapy, but it’s years.

What about people who aren’t focused on healing intense trauma, but soothing the bumps and bruises of life so they can accomplish their goals—people in coaching rather than therapy? Sometimes people have a breakthrough in one session, but often it takes months to get to know a person’s protectors, gain their trust enough to go deeper, and reconsolidate a key memory, ushering in tangible change in the person’s life. And they may want to keep doing the work for longer than that, because we humans tend to have more than just one bruise!

At first, I was a little bit disappointed. It’s common in the helping professions for people to tout their best-case outcomes instead of their average outcomes, which can be misleading. At the same time, I’ve realized that speed is not the goal. Instead of trying to maximize speed, I focus on efficiency—going no faster than your system wants to go, but also not wasting time.

Productivity Insights

How to Have a Breakthrough: Memory Reconsolidation

Emotional learnings keep us safe

Imagine your great-great-etc grandparent, a hunter-gatherer, stumbling across a new type of berry. Is it a good source of energy? Or poison? They take a risk and taste a tiny bit—AGH! It tastes terrible. They’re probably tasting the bitterness of toxic alkaloids and would get sick if they ate more. Fortunately, the human brain adapted to protect them from making that mistake more than once. They’ve just acquired the emotional learning “this kind of berry is bad for me.” It’s an emotional learning because they learned it in the presence of the strong emotion of revulsion.

Unlike the facts you crammed for your history test, emotional learnings die hard. Imagine that years later, your ancestor came across the same type of berry, and, like you in your history test, they’ve forgotten their mental diary entry of the day they first found this berry. (They would remember it if prompted, but it’s not “active” right now.) Consciously, they don’t see anything wrong with this berry. But subconsciously, their emotional learning is guiding them. Their stomach gets a little queasy. Something feels off. They lose their appetite and decide not to try the berry. Their emotional learning is keeping them safe from illness even without their conscious awareness of it.

Coaching

When to fire me

A lot of service providers have an onboarding process. Not many of them use that process to tell you when to fire them. But after watching The Shrink Next Door and reading about the true story behind it, I decided that it’s essential to my ethical practice.

The Shrink Next Door is the story of Isaac Herschkopf’s thirty-year career of exploiting his clients to such a degree that he even ended up taking over client Marty Markowitz’s house. Finally, Markowitz had a wake-up call, freed himself from Herschkopf’s spell, and reported him to the health department in 2012. Seven years passed without an investigation. In 2019, two things happened, and I don’t know which happened first, but I have my suspicions: a journalist found the story and made a podcast about it, and the department finally started investigating. Two more years passed before Herschkopf’s license was finally revoked in 2021.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness as flexibility

As I start piloting a program called Finding Mindfulness, I’m reflecting on what I think mindfulness is really about. Once again, I’m drawing on my experience getting physical therapy and massage to find a helpful analogy.

One time, my friend and gifted massage therapist Ron Aur Hod told me that my problem wasn’t so much knots in my muscles as adhesions – places where my muscles were sticking to my fascia. Fascia is connective tissue that creates a casing around muscles and other structures in the body. It’s supposed to slide past your muscles as they move. When it adheres or sticks to your muscles, you lose some of that freedom of movement, and develop pain.

Just as massage can un-stick fascia from muscles, I think mindfulness can un-stick layers of thought that are supposed to be able to move independently. It’s not that one kind of thought is good and the other is bad, just like it’s not that muscles are good and fascia is bad. It’s just that we need flexibility.

The problem with New Year’s resolutions

Fred the Soothing Elephant

Emotional learnings keep us safe

What's Your Procrastination Type?