Everywhere you’ve been has helped you become the person you are today.
Having the ability to look back on your life and see how your life experiences have shaped you is the power of self-reflection.
When it comes to achieving goals and reaching milestones, we tend to think that the most important qualities are things like grit, perseverance, and ingenuity. While these are all incredibly important in their own right, reflection doesn’t always get the credit it deserves.
The Power of Reflection
Many of the happiest, most successful people in the world have cultivated the ability of self-reflection. Not only does reflection help you track your progress and growth in life, but it’s also pretty much a requirement if you want to keep growing and living a life that you’re proud of.
Personal growth is nearly impossible when you don’t reflect on things like performance, goals, values, who you are, and past lessons that you’ve learned.
Reflection gives you a sort of metric with which to measure your life with. Where were you six months ago? One year ago? Five years ago? Taking inventory of where you’ve been in life helps you build confidence and give you a clearer idea of where you’re going, and what you need to do to get there.
Who do you consider some of the most successful people in the world? What tools do you think they’ve used to help them get to where they are? Highly successful people have created habits and maybe even daily routines that give them the chance to reflect on their days, pasts, accomplishments, and what they need to improve on.
Clues From The Past
You are a culmination of everything you’ve been, seen, and done.
Reflection can almost be like a scavenger hunt at times. When you reflect on lessons from the past, they always leave clues on how you can improve. These clues are the blueprints that you can build future goals around, and figure out what tools and techniques you need to achieve them.
Reflection gives you the capacity to move forward and build momentum, as you look back and see where you’ve been.
There’s a power in facing mistakes you’ve made in the past. These aren’t failures at all, but learning opportunities that help guide you further along your path.
Right now think of three “mistakes or failures” you’ve made that have actually been learning opportunities, and what insight you gained from these experiences. There’s no guidebook for life, but as you move forward and learn from where you’ve been, you start to write your own.
It’s just as important to reflect on wins from the past. What goals have you reached in the past and how did you get there? What systems did you have in place so that you could make your visions a reality? What allowed you to experience that win?
Take a second to answer those questions for yourself.
Reflecting on your wins helps you to hone in on what habits helped you get there so that you can focus on those, and let go of what might be holding you back.
Reflection gives you the ability to know what you’re working with, aka what your strengths are, and what you want to work on. Knowing your strengths helps you figure out how to offer your gifts to the world, and how to delegate when needed.
Some people tend to be more reflective by nature than others. But like most things, it’s a skill that can be built and improved upon.
How to Harness Self Reflection
Learning to become more self-reflective can be as simple as taking a few moments every day to dedicate to the practice.
One way to do this is through TAD – Tiny Actions Daily.
My TAD philosophy asks you to focus on a few tiny actions that you can do each day that will help you reach your goals.
Here’s how to start:
- Get clear on what goals you want to achieve for the week, month, year, and even further out.
- Zoom in on smaller goals, and then even smaller tasks that will help you reach those goals.
- Every night write down three to five tiny actions that you will take the next day to help you reach your goals.
Doing this practice each evening is reflective in nature. TAD asks you to reflect on your bigger goals and what you want to take action on the following day. It also gives you the opportunity to reflect on how your day went and what you’d like to change tomorrow.
Self-reflection can be big and ask you to focus on the huge parts of life, but the small details are just as important, if not more so.
You might be surprised how much self-reflection that you already do regularly. Well here’s your opportunity to create a practice around it. You too have been given the superpower of self-reflection.
