Coaching practices for The Daily Examen Reviewing the Day After a Setback

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

  • The second I sit down to look back on my day my mind goes straight to everything that went wrong, and the whole review curdles into beating myself up
  • When I look at how I actually behaved today I can only ever do one of two things
  • By the time night comes my whole day has blurred into one undifferentiated "fine" or "rough," and I couldn’t actually tell you what happened in it
  • I’ll do this big thorough reflection once, feel great about it, and then not do it again for three weeks
  • My days just dissolve one into the next with no real reckoning

Practices that may help

  1. 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.
  2. Begin with gratitude
    Start the review by recalling specific gifts and good moments of the day.
    The Daily Examen: Reviewing the Day
  3. Look honestly at your responses
    Face where you fell short and where you acted well, without spiraling into either.
    The Daily Examen: Reviewing the Day
  4. Replay the day with honest attention
    Walk back through the day’s events and notice them without rushing to judge.
    The Daily Examen: Reviewing the Day
  5. Keep it brief and daily
    Do a short Examen most days rather than a long one occasionally.
    The Daily Examen: Reviewing the Day
  6. The evening reckoning (examen)
    Audit the day’s actions against your stated intentions — without self-punishment, just honest seeing.
    The Stoic Daily Review
  7. Close with a resolve for tomorrow
    End by choosing one concrete intention to carry into the next day.
    The Daily Examen: Reviewing the Day
  8. The daily examen (end-of-day review)
    Spend five minutes each evening reviewing where you were most and least true to yourself today.
    Svadhyaya: Self-Study as a Daily Practice
  9. Weekly trend analysis from daily scores
    Review your scores at the end of each week to spot patterns rather than reacting to single-day noise.
    The Morning Questions
  10. The three-question evening review
    Ask three questions before sleep: What did I do wrong? What did I succeed at? What could I have done better?
    The Pythagorean Evening Review

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