Alysa Liu captivated audiences everywhere when she won gold for the United States in the 2026 Winter Olympics women’s skating final. Full of smiles, the 20-year-old delighted judges and viewers by exuding joy throughout her performance – all the more surprising because Liu had ‘retired’ from the sport at the age of 16 after a lifetime of competition. For two years she stayed away from the rink, instead choosing a normal life: getting her licence, attending college and even going on holiday for the first time. When she laced up her skates again at 18, she wasn’t driven by a desire for the gold medal. Instead, Liu said simply: ‘My framework, my perspective, changed’. Instead of viewing it as competitive sport, she now sees figure skating as an opportunity to bring together her love for the arts, dance, music and sports. While she’s engaged in the same activity – competitive figure skating – she’s doing it from a completely different place of freedom and joy. ‘Skating is a sport, but first and foremost it’s an art form. And in order to produce the best art and have it connect with fans, you have to know yourself,’ she said.
Liu’s unusual path serves as an example of why personal reflection is one key leg of the three-legged stool of discernment, alongside prayer and taking action. While most of us will never be Olympic athletes, the intensity of certain seasons of life can make any of us lose perspective. It’s hard to discern well and make decisions confidently if we can’t see clearly the place from which we’re making decisions.
Where have we been so far in life? Where are we going? What challenges, strengths, weaknesses, experience, personality traits, skills, education, desires, duties, priorities, resources, spirituality and habits do we bring to the discernment process? Are we living on autopilot, just moving from one task to the next? Have we paused to consider what we’ve learned along the way – about ourselves, about God, about the invitations He might be offering and the manner in which they seem to arrive for us uniquely?
‘The unexamined life is not worth living,’ said Socrates – and yet I’ve met many Christians who seem wary of the practice of self-reflection. After all, they ask me, isn’t it a bit narcissistic to be thinking about yourself all the time? Isn’t self-reflection just a form of navel-gazing?
I suppose it could become so if a person allowed self-reflection to turn into rumination – ‘chewing’ on the same things over and over with no exit strategy. In a healthy practice of discernment, though, self-reflection is designed to serve a greater purpose: to draw us out of ourselves towards God and neighbour.
That’s the general principle that guides our lives: love God and neighbour. The difficulty arises in knowing how to apply that general principle to the practical situations of our own lives. Thankfully, the virtue of prudence is designed to help with precisely that. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines prudence as ‘the virtue that disposes practical reason to discern our true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of achieving it’.
And how do we obtain this virtue, so essential to good discernment? It turns out that prudence is primarily gained through, well, practising prudence. Think of it like playing the piano: there are only so many books one can read, so many experts one can observe, before the only path to gaining the skill involves practising it. But practice is not merely repetition: it involves reflection on where we have gone wrong, where we have excelled and what strategies, methods and exercises have served us well along the way. If we want to get better at discernment, we need to practise prudence – and in order to practise prudence, we need to reflect well on our lives.
Many years ago I spoke with a priest about the possibility of pursuing a religious vocation.
‘Have you tried living in community?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I replied, and then added honestly, ‘and I hated it.’
‘Well,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘you might want to consider that.’
While certainly not the only factor in my discernment of religious life, the priest was right to help me consider my own experience – not as a means of navel-gazing, but in order to help me discern realistically rather than aspirationally. If I hadn’t taken time to reflect on my experience of living in community, I might have blithely assumed that it was irrelevant to the daily life of being a sister – or rather that it would be irrelevant to my daily life of being a sister.
The word reflection means to ‘give back’, or ‘show an image of’. We see a reflection of ourselves in the mirror when it gives back our own image. When we enter into a space of self-reflection, we have to hold something up in our minds to help us see ourselves more clearly.
The first thing to hold up is the image of God. How are we living the imago Dei we were given at creation? We might hold up the words of the scriptures, the wisdom of the tradition or the lives of the saints as inspiration. We might hold up our own experiences and ask ourselves how they relate to what is good, true and beautiful. We might hold up our past decisions to consider which were made with peace and which were made with fear, and whether there’s anything to learn from them. And we might consider how the unique elements of our lives point us in a particular direction when it comes to state in life, career or even volunteering.
We can’t discern well if we aren’t self-aware, and we can’t discern well without the virtue of prudence. We need both to know what is generally good and to know how to apply it to the particulars of our own lives. Certainly God wants to help us in this endeavour, but as the tradition teaches us, ‘grace builds on nature’. Do we know ourselves, not only as human beings, but as individuals?
In a wise move for one so young, Alysa Liu stepped away from the spotlight in order to get to know herself. By all accounts, it seems to have borne fruit in her: not because it enabled her to win an Olympic gold medal, but because it made room for her to move through life with freedom and joy, untied from the pressures of external expectation that plagued her youth.
‘That’s the whole reason why I perform – so that I can share my art and, hopefully, it can reach other people,’ she said. Her disposition of ease and enjoyment makes her performances even more of a gift to those who see them: one example of how self-reflection can serve others.
