Reflection is a major way to communicate with yourself. In doing so, you are identifying whatever it is you're involving yourself with. Whether you like your situation or not, it's vital to understand what you're doing and where you're going.
Making a decision leads to making another, which leads to another, and so on. Keeping up with your own decisions makes things a little less chaotic and a lot more meaningful.
It's like writing a paper: every little piece of information is used to make the entire point. Without the upkeep and defensibility of each point, the paper as a whole would have zero validity.
You give your learning new meaning. Everything we do in our daily lives is learning, ever since we were old enough to retain information.
Self-reflection helps to build emotional self-awareness. By taking the time to ask yourself the important questions, you gain a better understanding of your emotions, strengths, weaknesses and motivations.
What gets us from experience to understanding is reflection.
A part of reflection is taking a self-inventory. What's new in your life that you need to accept and understand before you go on?
I love understanding things. I have a drive to understand even the smallest aspect of what I do with my time and my life. I feel like I'm cheating myself and others if I dive head first and never pay attention.
I hate living meaninglessly. I don't stand by the clock and give everything an in-depth meaning, but I certainly give meaning where it's due.
Although the first emotion that arises usually sets the tone from there on out, you get to control how you perceive all situations. Emotions change; your moods change; your circumstances change.
Reflecting is adapting. It's always knowing where you lay in the midst of whatever is happening. It's accepting. It's living without confusion. It's taking a step back and understanding the ins and outs of how you got to where you are now.
It's a humbled, comprehensive task that takes you to different levels of yourself, heightening your state of mind.
We can make small but cumulative steps to doing things better in every given opportunity by asking simple questions such as "What did I do well in that situation?" or "What could I do differently?"
Reflection also helps to provide deeper learning by causing you to look at all situations through a different lens and to ask yourself searching questions that challenge one’s assumptions about the world around you.
Unfortunately, we have a tendency to focus on the negative. An exercise in reflection or self-assessment provides a structured and safe way to think about the positive, too.
Writing down experiences can help to clarify what actually happened, to understand one's own interpretations of those events and then assign meaning to them.
Reflection also links with another critical element of the inner work life; the ability to make small changes and achieve small wins – called the "progress principle." This simple but powerful concept is based on research that shows that the most important factor in boosting motivation is in making progress in meaningful work.
You may work a job only to get a paycheck like we all do, but it's not something all of us enjoy. The goal here is that we want to feel as if we achieve something, every single day.
It's possible to find ways to do so even at a boring job, to feel like we are making these small accomplishments.
Reflecting on yourself is what keeps you going. Constantly striving to understand yourself is the safest route you can take.
After all, any understanding is better than no understanding at all.
