What is self-reflection? It’s essentially just carefully considering your beliefs, experiences, changes, events, and your own behavior. Normally we save this type of self-reflection for the end of the year as we set our resolutions for the New Year. You don’t need to wait for that, though. You can self-reflect at any point, and it’s important. There are a number of benefits of self-reflection. Let’s take a look:
The Benefits of Self-Reflection
1 – Emotional Intelligence
Self-reflection forces you to look inside yourself. That helps you create two sets of building blocks – self-regulation, as well as self-awareness. These are key components of emotional intelligence. Self-awareness allows you to understand your values, to know what drives you, to realize your goals, to get a deeper understanding into your emotions, weaknesses, and strengths.
Whereas, self-regulation is all about redirecting negative emotions and adapting to your circumstances as they change. Both of these skills will improve your life, both professionally and personally.
2 – Integrity
Having a clear view of your core values will better serve your integrity, which will help you make better decisions. During trying and stressful times, we often experience our integrity being put to the test. So, taking time to self-reflect and consider your actions and decisions will help you ensure that you are always acting with integrity. Consistently self-reflecting will help you solidify your core values and will make decision making much easier.
3 – Confidence
Confidence makes you better at making decisions, it makes you a better communicator, and it makes you more influential. It’s crucial to managing a complex life. The more time you take to reflect on your decisions, strengths, and weaknesses, the more you can build on that to increase your confidence. You grow more confident in your strengths, and you learn how to adapt your weaknesses to close the gaps.
4 – Productivity
It’s easy to fall into patterns; we get caught in cycles. We try our best to maximize our productivity. You reach a point where you’re always moving, and there’s never any time to slow down, stop, and think. Self-reflection offers you an opportunity to process new ideas and adapt to change, which will make you a more productive person.
Questions to Self-Reflect On
Just to Get Started:
- Who are you and what achievements are you proudest of?
- What are you grateful for?
- What’s the most important thing in your life?
- Do you spend the appropriate amount of time with the most important things in your life?
- Who do you spend the most time with? (you can list five people here)
- Are these people building you up or tearing you down?
- Do they hold you back or do they enable you?
- What are your greatest goals?
- What is holding you back from going for them?
- What support do you have?
- Who can you turn to for support?
- What have you learned in the last six months?
- How can that help you moving forward?
- Where does your energy go when you feel stressed?
- Is that how you’d like to expend your resources?
In-Depth Self-Reflection:
- Choose a specific area of your life to focus on, whether it’s your career, health or otherwise.
- Find space and time to be alone and somewhere quiet.
- Write a list of the questions that you want to answer.
- Answer each of those questions in turn.
- Be honest. This is all about growth, and you don’t need to share it with others. So, be as honest and open with yourself as possible.
Take Action
Now it’s time to identify the steps that you need to take. In business, there are stops, starts, and continues. So, use that to create your action plan. What do you plan to stop doing? What will you start doing, and what will you continue to do? It could be that you need to stop procrastinating and start being more grateful.
