Introduction

In this modern-day living, most of us tend to live life without properly reflecting and this is usually because we’ve got our eyes fixed on our big goals and we’re just rushing through life. Funnily, many people are beginning to understand the importance of knowing themselves better than anybody else does but creating the time to sit down and think is usually the problem as they’ll always say that they have no time for that. Self-reflection is a way to find yourself, it can help you start a major change in your life, propel you to take vital actions that are necessary for your growth and development, and assist in organization and planning.

It can as well help to calm you down, make you feel confident, identify your goal, and aid you to attain greater motivation.

Understanding how significant self-reflection is, this article serves to give you a fine insight into the tangible boons of self-reflection and the intricacies.
It connects you with ways to reflect properly and guides you on how to let go of the past to focus on the present.

Understanding Self-reflection and its Significance

Our everyday living and encounters do give us tons of opportunities to bask in self-love. From window shopping to looking at the mirrors, we’re truly faced with countless occasions to adore ourselves and see how beautiful and amazing we are, and while it’s indeed beautiful for us to see the beauty in appreciating ourselves for who we are, we should also take time to think of how splendid it would be if we can afford to invest a little time to shine an unveiling light on our consciousness and glance beyond our skin-deep presentations and outer legging-clad exteriors.

Delving into the act of self-reflection is very vital when we’re looking at our goals and actions but the question is, how often do we consider self-reflection? What of our emotional wellbeing and gut feeling? How often do we check back in with them?

What is Self-reflection?

Self-reflection can be simply explained to be the conscious act of taking an inward look at your emotions, performance, behaviors, and thoughts with the aim of improving and growing. Most times, we put both our personal and professional lives at a detriment when we brush aside this act to the very bottom of our to-do list.

Little do we know that our aspirations for the future, gut feelings, and current goals can be aligned with our path when we take time to practice self-reflection.

With self-reflection, you’ll get to understand the complex relationship that exists between your goals and emotions, and aside from the intriguing additional insight into the complex manner it provides, it can as well help you become more satisfied in your relationships, increase your productivity at your daily tasks, be better orientated, and become more focused with work when you practice it regularly. As highlighted by Robert L. Rosen, self-reflection has to do with imagining yourself in the future, reflecting on your interactions with others, thinking about your perceptions, assessing your strengths and failures, and questioning yourself about your values.

Why You Need Self-reflection

One can never exhaust the importance of practicing self-reflection. Whether you thirst to gain a new perspective on a situation or you’re in need of guidance, self-reflection is always there to help you.

It can help you realign yourself with your core values and beliefs, help you refocus, and it can as well make you take some breaths to relax and then continue later. At times, looking at what makes us feel purposeful and motivated is what we need to do, rather than looking for practical solutions.

This could be pretty much applicable if you’re attempting something a little different; maybe planning a career switch or thinking of opting in for a change of job. This is because we can feel uplifted and enjoy a more satisfactory life when we’re reminded of our talents and aspirations.

Self-reflection gives you the opportunity to make changes that are valuable and positive as it permits you to comprehend more beyond the surface and dig deeper. Many times, our heads are often rumpled up with several different emotions, feelings, and thoughts that need to be sorted and the beautiful thing about self-reflection is that it lets you take back control of what you’ve let go of mistakenly.

It helps you to be honest with yourself, it helps you to get rid of negative influences as you become more equipped to take corrective actions, and all of this depicts that self-reflection does a lot more beyond making you cognizant and conscious of your feelings, emotions, and thoughts.

Another beautiful benefit of self-reflection is that it helps you become honest with yourself about what you can control and it makes you feel at peace with what you can’t control. If you’ve constantly felt helpless or you’ve always felt that there’s a massive weight on your shoulders, you may want to consider practicing self-reflection for it can help you understand that there are some things you don’t have control over and it can as well be handy in managing anxiety, depression, and stress.

What You Should Try to Avoid

•     Don’t get overwhelmed. Patience is the key when you’re self-reflecting. Though it’s easy to feel “consumed” by the need to cover everything from identity to ideals, relationships, desires, goals, and lots more, just try to focus solely on a subject. Always remember that a single session doesn’t have to cover everything you need to reflect on. Create time for other sessions to reflect on other subjects too.

•      Shift your focus from moments. Whenever you’re practicing self-reflection, it’s advisable that you focus on your positive traits and not on your success or failure moments because you’re likely to arrive at needless disappointments when you analyze literal mistakes. Since you’re not focusing on rewriting history and you just want to improve yourself, you should focus on traits.

•      Don’t lie to yourself. One of the costly mistakes you can make is to lie to yourself while you’re self-reflecting. Do well not to lie to yourself when you’re self-reflecting so that you can reap the full and proper benefits you deserve.

If you’re in a volatile state, don’t self-reflect. Whenever you want to carry out a deep analysis like self-reflection, make sure you’re conscious of the kind of state you’re in. A state of depression is a good example of a volatile state and if you self-reflect in such a state, you’re likely to arrive at false views and unreasonable decisions.

Seven Core Principles for Reflection

Every transformational leader must develop the habit of reflection. Reflection does help us to forge ahead in life, it helps us take actions, and to gain focus as well in our spirit. Let’s dwelve in these seven core principles for they’re quite vital for your reflections. 

1-Be Positive

You gain energy for the future, learn, grow, and experience growth when you are positive while reflecting on your past and therefore it’s often recommended that you choose to be positive while you’re reflecting since you have the power to choose how you reflect on your past. Never let the mistakes of your past make you reflect negatively.

Learn to see mistakes as part of life and the necessities to grow and do better. Even failures are mere opportunities to do better and they’re experiments that propel us towards success. So, with a positive spirit, look at how your past has been. Even if you’ve had some negative experiences, think of the lessons you’ve learned from them that affected you positively.

2-Be Present

You’ll be able to see more objectively and separate yourself from your past when you stay mindful and present. The past is the past and there’s a reason why it’s called the “past”.

Live in the present but you may look at the past at a distance, even though you wouldn’t want to relive it. You see, our present is a gift, and they do become more meaningful and even more purposeful when we learn from the lessons of our past.

3-Be Perceptive

Whenever you’re reflecting, it’s advised that you’re perceptive. Being perceptive here means that you show more desire for intuition, understanding, or insight.

In this light, it’s recommended that you act like an objective investigator and scrutinize your past. The past years have certainly vested some wisdom in you and if you look inward deeply, you will see that you do have a lot to learn from your experiences.

4-Be Purposeful

Reflection does help us understand and grow and it has more potential when we start from a place of compassion. If you’ve been struggling with pressing on towards achieving your goals, reflection can help you renew your determination and it can as well help to get your purpose refined.

5-Be Perfected

The mention of “perfection” shouldn’t make you feel uncomfortable. Of course, no one is perfect but the reality of life is that we can always keep working on ourselves continually to become better day by day.

Our pasts do serve as an analytical tool and helpful metrics that can guide us in the future. And, irrespective of the fact that we may not be able to attain perfection, we must stay dedicated to serving our friends, families, and others better.

6-Be Proactive

Many people, despite understanding how significant and momentous reflection is, still won’t be proactive to take time to reflect. Reflection helps you to learn and grow but it demands your energy, time, and focus which are your most precious resources.

You should be ready to allocate your time and energy to reflection because it’s proactive work, and if you invest in reflection, you’ll certainly have more to enjoy.

7-Be Passionate

Our passion is a vibrant energy that helps us push beyond our challenges and setbacks and trivialize them to be just little things. We’ll have enough energy to sustain us and carry us through if we cultivate the habit of celebrating the good tidings we experience.

Likewise, we’ll be able to laugh at our mistakes and cherish our successes when we live from our deepest passions. Do you wish to rekindle some passions that you’ve lost connection with? In recent years, what passion has sustained you?

Conclusion

The goal of self-reflection is to help us move forward but sometimes, most of us are still struggling with our past and we’re finding it difficult to let go of some things that we should let go. (We will go into more details on how to let go in future posts.)

We even tend to make matters worse by being untruthful to ourselves.

Self-reflection helps you to be more conscious of your general state of mind, behavior, goals, and a host of other essentials.

In your own way, make sure you develop the daily habit of reflection because it will help you learn from your mistakes, give you great ideas, help you help others, make you happier, and give you a perspective.