Reflection Eternal

The ability to consistently reflect upon your own experiences is paramount in the process of developing your career. After all, career development is as much about knowing yourself as it is about knowing your trade. How can you decide on your ultimate profession without knowing what you want, what your strengths and weaknesses are, or who you are at your core? Furthermore, outside of career development, reflection is vital to your psychological health. Being your own enigma, while poetically captivating, leads to nihilism.

So how do you reflect? There are many ways to go about it and no single method is superior to others. All people are different and therefore each person may be partial to a certain method. I personally advocate more open forms of reflection, such as keeping a journal. First of all, writing down your feelings helps you to better express them. It allows you to deeply consider your thoughts for an extended period of time and attempt to vocalize them. Secondly, it helps you remember your thoughts. In writing down your experiences you are not only forever preserving them in a record, but you are better encoding them into your memory. Thirdly, regularly writing about one’s feelings has been shown to effectively relieve stress. If you are not partial to keeping a journal, then you can try going on walks by yourself. While you will not be recording your thoughts, the time alone may lead to new insights about yourself.

There are alternative methods if you would prefer a more structured way of reflecting. Zimmerman (2011) provides guidelines for introspection, albeit for more professional purposes. She outlines specific criteria to cover, including identifying unproductive behaviors, attitudes towards change, beliefs about self-efficacy, and strengths and weaknesses. The idea here is that in uncovering these characteristics about yourself, you can plan how to make changes and achieve specific goals in your professional life. Here is another guideline for reflection. This article emphasizes that there are four lenses of reflection: thinking back, forward, inward, and outward. These filters are most helpful if you are thinking about a specific topic or event.

In our busy lives it is difficult to make time to slow down and think. Yet, making that time is vitally important if we are to know ourselves and how to best approach the future. Even if you only have fifteen minutes to spare, on a consistent basis those fifteen minutes can go very far. It’s a small lifestyle change, but it can have large effects in the long run.





Zimmerman, J.A. 2011. “Principals preparing for change: the importance of reflection and professional learning.” American Secondary Education, 39(2), 107-114.