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.

“Why I Won’t Hire You” by Charlie Balmer

The other day I stumbled upon an interesting/relevant article. In it, an employer discusses the subtle mistakes that job applicants make that ultimately ruin their chances of being hired. I’ve never seen anything on the topic be so blunt and stringent, but his criteria seem like good guidelines to follow.

Check out the article here:

http://lifehacker.com/5874647/why-i-wont-hire-you

“Why I Won’t Hire You” by Charlie Balmer

Hitting Speedbumps and Updating Resumes

How do you act in the face of failure? That, of course, depends on your personality. Some of us become flustered and break down. Others are apathetic and just float on. We humans have also been known to blame other factors for our failures, whether or not it is justifiable. I am of the opinion that under normal circumstances, most individuals take full responsibility for their actions and resolve to do better next time (which makes me an optimist). Unfortunately, job searching really is a whole different ballgame.

When applying for jobs, applicants will focus their resumes on their past successes, ignoring experience that is considered not relevant or not successful. This makes sense—people want to present themselves in the best possible light because, to be a little melodramatic, their futures are actively being shaped by their resumes and the decisions that result from them. Yet, some research suggests that perhaps this is not the best way to go. In his widely read book Influence (2009), social psychologist Robert Cialdini provides a thought-provoking narrative example:

“From a Former CEO of a Fortune 500 Company:

‘In a business school class I developed for aspiring CEOs, I teach the practice of acknowledging failure as a way to advance one’s career. One of my former students has taken the lesson to heart by making his role in a dot-com company failure a prominent part of his resume—detailing on paper what he learned from the experience. Before, he tried to bury the failure, which generated no real career success. Since, he has been selected for multiple prestigious positions (195).’”

While this may seem counterintuitive, Cialdini provides an explanation. According to the author, revealing a small shortcoming that is secondary to, and easily overcome by, significant positive aspects can cause an individual to be viewed more favorably (Cialdini 192-3). In doing so, one does not only present themselves as having positive character traits, but they effectively prove their reliability as a sort of authority on the subject at hand. This phenomenon can be explained in evolutionary terms. Humans have the propensity to obey an authoritative figure, which in the past proved incredibly useful for survival: if confronted with an emergency, a group of people (or what you would classify our ancestors from long ago) could organize more effectively if a single individual was directing them. In order to avoid the possibility of being taken advantage of by a single person, humans are also inherently skeptical about authority (the Jim Jones/People’s Temple incident is a notorious exception). But, if an individual can justify his position of authority, his or her authority status will be reinforced. The above narrative describes an example of this—mentioning your weaknesses portrays you as honest and retracts any doubts another person might have about your authority (or skills, in this case).

So, when you are taking a good look at your resume, you should think about breaking the traditional mold. Talking about your failures and your resulting growth may be the best aspect you can add to your resume.