How to Exercise Self-Reflection on a Regular Basis? -

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.
Peter Drucker

It is easy to get caught up in the chaos of life and get busy chasing your goals and accomplishing your to-do lists. You might find yourself questioning life and if what you are doing translates into real meaning and happiness. Maybe you feel like you are trading your time for money while in fact, you want to spend more time with your loved ones or create more value for others or make a positive change in your community. Through regular self-reflection, you can stay on top of your thoughts, emotions, and actions and lead your life in a way that is fulfilling to you. We are all different and we want different things in life. But one thing that unites us all is our desire to lead fulfilling lives, whatever that might mean to you.

Self-reflection is a deliberate process of getting to know yourself and your core values. There are many benefits to regular self-reflection. It can help you evaluate your thoughts, feelings, and behavior and determine if they are helping you or hurting you. By regular introspection, you are able to project the life that you truly aspire to.

What ground rules to follow?

Before you start reflecting on yourself and your life, set some ground rules to make sure this process is useful to you.

First of all, reflection is not a process for self-criticism and self-pity. You should not judge yourself, or the thoughts you have if you feel unhappy or ungrateful for things you have. You should be open, understanding, and accepting of yourself.

Self-reflection is a process to open up with yourself and reveal all those thoughts and feelings you have about yourself and your life. Resist any temptation to jump to conclusions about yourself. Imagine if your best friend, your partner, or your child decided to open up with you and share all of their negative thoughts and insecurities about themselves. Would you use this opportunity to criticize or manipulate them or point out all their wrongdoings? Or would you comfort them instead and encourage self-love and compassion? Treat yourself as you would treat someone you love.

Take as much time as necessary to cover all important aspects of your life and address any pressing issues and feelings you have. However, know when to stop. Don’t get sucked into your past and self-sabotage yourself with all the things you did wrong or why certain things happened to you. You can also give yourself a specific time frame and stop immediately after your time is up.

Once you are done, try to shift your attention to completely different things by changing your physical location or focusing on a different activity to make sure your thoughts do not follow you. And, avoid self-reflecting right before bed as you might spend the rest of your night dwelling on your past instead of recharging your energy and getting the rest your body needs.

How to exercise self-reflection?

The process of self-reflection is very personal and it reveals areas of your life where you might have not paid enough attention. This is the time to ask all questions – those that feel right as well as those which are tough to face. If this is the first time you are practicing self-reflection, it might be a good idea to make a holistic reflection on your life. Go as far back as necessary to understand yourself, to identify the underlying experiences, thoughts, and beliefs which shaped you into the person you are today. Below are some questions that can help you start your self-reflection process.

Who am I, really?
Am I living true to myself?
How do I feel on a daily basis – physically, emotionally, and mentally?
What matters most in my life?
What am I doing about the things that matter most in my life?
What have I given up on?
When was the last time I pushed myself out of my comfort zone?
What are the things and people that give me energy?
What are the things and people that take my energy?
What tough questions do I need to ask myself?
What are the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that I have been suppressing?
What are the thoughts that no longer serve me?
Am I using my potential to the fullest?
Am I letting matters that are out of my control stress me out?
Am I achieving the goals that I’ve set for myself?
Am I taking good care of myself – my body, mind, and soul?
Am I taking anyone I love for granted?

To take it a step further, list down areas of your life that are most important to you. Then, rate each area on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is very dissatisfied/unhappy and 10 is very satisfied/happy. Below is a list of different areas you might want to consider. You can pick as many or as few areas as you want, and add new ones that I’ve not mentioned.

Physical Health
Mental wellbeing
Spirituality
Career
Finances
Family
Relationships
Social life
Personal growth
Attitude
Fun and recreation

Then, ask yourself – why did you rate a given area the way you did? For example, if you rate your physical health as 4, ask yourself what is missing. Go through all the ratings and write down what you want to improve in each area. What do you need to do to take your physical health from 4 to 8? You can’t do everything at the same time. So, prioritize 1-3 top areas that are most important to you right now and choose 1-3 actions you can take under each area. Once you have improved these priority areas, you can always go back to your list and pick up more things to focus on. Ideally, you should do this exercise on a regular basis.

Area	Rating: 1 -unhappy 10 – happy	What is the problem?	What can I do to move closer to 10?
Physical Health	4	– Extra weight – Lack of exercise – Poor nutrition	– Lose the extra weight – Do physical activity – Eat healthy

How to self-reflect on a regular basis?

You can practice self-reflection on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. You can do it casually while you are walking, jogging, or talking to your partner. For better results, I recommend setting aside a specific time in the day when you can focus all your attention on reflecting. To start with, schedule 5-10 minutes daily on specific days of the week, and increase as you go. For this, journaling might be a great tool. I practice daily and weekly reflection and use it to close that day or week on a strong note and draw some useful lessons I can learn from and apply in the future.

While reflecting pay attention to any kind of strong thoughts or emotions you have. Scan your past day or past week to analyze events and your reaction or response to them. Explore your experiences and relationships – both with yourself and others. Did you live up to your values? Did you focus on things that are important to you? Did you take good care of your physical and mental health? Were you kind and helpful to other people? Were you kind to yourself? Where do you see the biggest potential for growth?

You can also practice self-reflection through visualization. For this, pick a quiet place, close your eyes, and visualize your day or any major activity. Try to observe this event from afar, to be able to objectively assess the situation, analyze your behavior, and what you could do differently next time when a similar scenario unfolds. Remember, the most important point of this exercise is to learn from your past experiences so you can do things differently or better in the future. So, make sure you take the key learnings from this exercise and apply them on a daily basis.

So hopefully, by now you got to know yourself a bit better and identified the most important areas of your life and what you want to change. The next step is to design a vision for your future and decide who is that you want to be.

This post is part of the 5-Step Guide to Personal Development blog series.

Let me know if you find this process useful and if you have your own way of self-reflecting.