Coaching practices for Short Ignatian Review

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Short Ignatian Review, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• When I sit down at night to look back on my day with God, I tend to jump straight to everything I did wrong
• Whenever I review my own day I quietly spin everything to make myself look better, and I know it
• I keep starting this nightly prayer practice and then dropping it the second life gets busy, because I’ve made it this long involved thing
• When I look back on my day it’s just a checklist of what I did, and it tells me nothing
• I do these honest reviews of my day and then nothing actually changes tomorrow

Practices that may help

1. The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review
   The Ignatian Examen is a five-step daily prayer and reflection practice developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola: give thanks, ask for clarity, review the day, face what fell short, and resolve what comes next. As a structured reflection method it is centuries-old and widely practiced; its benefits are supported by the broader research on gratitude, emotional review, and implementation intentions, not by trials of the Examen itself.
2. Become aware of God’s presence and give thanks
   Open the review by pausing, settling, and naming specific gifts from the day.
   The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review
3. Ask for clarity and honest perception
   Before reviewing, pause to ask for the capacity to see honestly rather than defensively.
   The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review
4. The Daily Examen: Reviewing the Day
   The Examen is a short, structured evening review from the Ignatian tradition: you replay the day with gratitude and honest attention to where you felt drawn toward or away from your values, then carry one resolve into tomorrow. It is a centuries-old contemplative practice; its benefits are best described as mechanistically plausible and widely reported rather than established by controlled trials.
5. Practice the Examen daily and briefly
   Do a short Examen most days rather than a long one occasionally.
   The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review
6. Review the day following your feelings
   Walk back through the day in sequence, tracking the emotional quality of each moment.
   The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review
7. The Pythagorean Evening Review
   The Pythagorean evening review is an ancient practice of structured nightly self-examination, reconstructed by Pierre Hadot and others from Pythagorean and Stoic sources. It involves reviewing the day in three questions — where you went wrong, what you succeeded at, what remains — and has been a foundational practice for self-development from antiquity through the Stoics and Montaigne to modern structured journaling.
8. Close with a forward-looking resolve
   Choose one concrete intention to carry into tomorrow before closing the review.
   The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review
9. Face shortfalls with honest sorrow, not shame
   Name where you fell short today without either minimizing it or spiraling into self-punishment.
   The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review
10. The Stoic Daily Review
    The Stoic daily review is a structured morning-and-evening self-examination practice — rooted in Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus — that trains attention on what is within your control, builds honest self-knowledge, and interrupts reactive patterns before they compound. Evidence is largely mechanistic and clinical; no randomized trials exist, but the underlying cognitive mechanisms align with modern research on self-monitoring and reflection.

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