Habits of Self-Reflection

Background: Reflection is executive functioning. True courageous reflection galvanizes your willpower. It promotes continuous self-awareness, empowers you, ensures you are valued, and gives you the self-awareness you need to quicken achieving your potential. If you, as a professional, want to ascend, then do what those who are successful do. Reflect on surprise, frustration, and failure. Make it part of your life.

Where do you start?

Empathy, communication, adaptability, emotional intelligence, compassion. These may seem like "buzz words" thrown around in the workplace. Time and again, we even hear that these capabilities are the "key to making yourself indispensable — soft skills, after all, are what make us human, and as far as we know, can’t be performed well by technologies like artificial intelligence (AI).

One competency that is often less talked about is self-reflection. Research shows the habit of self-reflection can separate elite professionals from mediocre ones.

Create Self-Reflection Habits:

The practice itself is all about learning, looking back on the day (without bias or regret) to contemplate your behavior and its consequences. It requires sitting with yourself, taking an honest moment to think about what transpired, what worked, what didn’t, what can be done, and what can’t. Reflection requires courage. It’s thoughtful and deliberate. Being at the “top of your game” only comes when you extract from your past how to engage the future.

Like diet, exercise, faith, to get its full benefits, you must make self-reflection a habit. How do you sort which experiences are most?significant?for your development? Simply put, which of the myriad of things that flew across your life are worthy of scrutiny?

Three distinct themes arose through our analysis: surprise, frustration, and failure. Reflections that involved one or more or of these sentiments proved to be the most valuable in helping our leaders learn and grow in their careers.

Surprise

Moments that greatly derail expectations:

When we are mistaken, we are surprised — and mistakes, lapses in judgements, and wrongful assumptions are worth our reflection.

Failure

Making a mistake visible to the masses:

Failure, then, is often behavioral, and it manifests as a mistake. The good news is that we all make mistakes.? Mistakes provide raw evidence of what we should not do in the future. Mistakes allow us to learn by “negative example” otherwise known. Naturally, we can’t learn if we don’t take the time to stop and intentionally reflect.

Frustration

Thoughtful analysis is criticized:

It’s important to understand that, at the root of frustration, lies our goals, or the objects of our ambitions and efforts. Goals reflect our values, and our values make up the compass that keeps us connected to our higher purpose in life and at work. We’re frustrated when our goals are thwarted and we’re not able to get what we want, but pushing through that frustration and finding other ways to cope and move forward results in our growth.

Building a Weekly Practice: 3 Steps

Surprise, frustration, and failure.? Cognitive, emotional, and behavioral: Head, heart and hands.? Three parts of you are constantly in motion and if you don’t give them time to rest, they will break from fatigue. Like a muscle, your mind needs reflection to reenergize and grow stronger.

1) Daily: Keep a journal

Whenever you are surprised, frustrated, or fail, pause and note the feeling. Try to identify the why behind the emotion. What about the event triggered these feelings in you? Were your expectations derailed? Did things not go your way? Did you make a mistake?

2) Weekly: Set an hour aside

Don’t skip it. Block out the time on your calendar in order to avoid other disturbances. It may even be painful to examine your shortcomings, but also know you can’t get better until you know what to get better at.

3) Monthly: Add to it with retrospect

Press yourself. What went wrong? Were your initial observations correct or do they reveal something else that may have been going on, something you couldn’t see in the heat of the moment? Try to think of yourself as neutral observer.

Now the question becomes: How can I make sure this doesn’t happen again? In the case of failure, you may find there is a mistake you can learn from. In the case of surprise, you may discover that you need to recalibrate unrealistic expectations. In the case of frustration, you may figure out that you need to get better at adapting to the unexpected.

Go easy on yourself. Self-reflection — well and truly done — is ego-bruising. Always remember that excellence is achieved by stumbling, standing up, dusting yourself off, then stumbling again. If you study those stumbles, you’re much less likely to fall down in the future.

Pro tip:?If you are looking for more resources, here are a few popular and proven reflections toolkits that may help guide your reflection practice.

• Gibbs Reflective Cycle explores six stages of an experience: description, feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusions, and action plan.
• What? So what? Now what? are three reflective stages of thinking about an experience, its implications, and what it means for the future.
• Integrated Reflection Cycle has four steps: the experience, your actions, relevant theory, and preparation for the future.
• The 5R Framework of Reflection, Reporting, Responding, Relating, Reasoning, and Reconstructing is yet another toolkit.

It will pay off - good luck!