Self-reflection is as it suggests: taking a look at yourself, your actions and behaviour and being honest about what you see. ‘Reflection’ is the practice of thinking about things and assessing where improvements could be made. We’ve defined three key areas where self-reflection should be focussed.
Strengths
What are you good at? Where do you excel? Which tasks do you complete easily and without hesitation? You may find you have to look at your perceived weaknesses in order to establish where your strengths really lie.
Skills
What specific skills do you have? How do these compare with the tasks you are often asked to perform? Self-reflection is about recognising what we can do readily and the areas where we need to improve.
Successes
Our successes are a great way of establishing the areas in which we shine. Self-reflection and self-improvement are as much about what we have achieved already as they are about how we can improve. It's only by examining the two areas hand in hand, that we will get a true reflection of who we are.
The main benefit of self-reflection is that it helps us to notice – and put an end to – negative patterns and behaviours that are holding us back in life. The hardest part is identifying these patterns. Once we have done this all we need is perspective to put solutions in place.
Self-refection requires us to have an idea of where we want to go in life and what we want to achieve – without this, we are unable to consider alternative solutions to our actions. Without an overall goal in mind, our daily tasks do not hold the same purpose and the need for self-reflection diminishes.
We must remind ourselves of where we are going, in order to get there. Having a destination helps us keep a positive mindset and helps prevent us focusing on matters that lie outside our control. It is only by looking at what we have done before, that we can really establish what we need to do differently in order to succeed in future.