Self-Reflection as The Way to Change Your Life
The difference between us and other living creatures on our planet is ability to self-reflect. We can look within ourselves. Self-reflection helps us to realize who we are, our essence, to evaluate our physical and emotional states. How does it work?
It’s a picture of Dutch artist M. C. Escher named Hand with Reflecting Sphere and also known as Self-Portrait in Spherical Mirror. It was printed in January 1935. The picture shows reflection of the artist and the room in the sphere. The appearance of M. C. Escher is misinterpreted.
Self-reflecting process is the same. You think back on previous events and interpret them through your experience. It helps you learn lessons that will help you learn from your mistakes.
Self-reflection has a lot of benefits:
- Help you to focus on your goals
- Help you to grow and develop
- Help you to understand yourself, so you become a better problem-solver
- Help you to learn from your mistakes
- Help you to respond calmly to challenges
- Hep you to make better choices in the future
As you see, self-reflection provides you an opportunity to stop living on autopilot. The self-reflecting process should become your habit. It’s not like meditation. You should not clean your mind, but think about personal development. That’s why be eager for self-improvement and step out of your comfort zone.
Self-reflection isn’t about sitting and thinking. Examine your life choices, mistakes, failures and also positive moments, your strengths. Of course it’s not pleasant to recall some awful events, but it’ll help you to understand situations better, your behaviour and not to repeat the mistakes. Many people like to self-reflect before sleep, don’t do it! You just spoil your rest. Find time during the day.
During self-reflection don’t be convinced that you were right most of the time. You’ll never gain value from this process because of this approach. Be objective, you couldn’t be right in every situation.
In order to understand yourself better, you should ask yourself questions. Questions are divided into many categories. For example, about your day, choices, behavior, emotions and so on. It depends on what you want to develop or change. Here are examples of questions that you may ask.
About you day
- What happened today?
- What were great and bad about my day?
- Am I satisfied with my day?
About your choices
- What was my decision?
- Why did I choose it?
- What were the consequences?
About your emotions
- What emotions did I experience?
- What was the outcome?
So there is a variety of questions and the limit is only your imagination. You should often ask yourself those questions in order to learn something from your day. Use this experience and become a better version of yourself.
Do you practice self-reflection? What questions do you ask? Did it help you to progress?
