I hope you are enjoying life, living in the moment and embracing each day as a new day.
And as I think about each day as a new beginning, it makes me think about how important reflective practice is and how you can use it in your everyday activities and decision making.
If you have not heard of reflective practice, I hope this article will help you understand it more and entice you to put it into practice.
In my research and educational adventures, I have seen that reflective practice is something that is so underrated and not often utilized in daily activities.
I started utilizing this practice many years ago when I figured out that it is so important to be proactive instead of reactive in all of my actions, comments, and responses.
Reflective practice involves truly actively analyzing your experiences and actions that take place each day — in order to help yourself improve and develop. It can be so very beneficial in various situations, so it is worthwhile to understand the concept.
Reflective practice helps you take a deeper dive into “self-reflection’ and involves being present with yourself and intentionally focusing your attention inward to examine your thoughts, feelings, actions, and motivations. It truly has some enormous POWER when you harness it correctly. Specifically, when you use it to look inwardly, it can be so beneficial with both our physical and mental well-being. Looking retrospectively back purposefully at our experiences gives us the opportunities to absorb a wide range of knowledge about ourselves and the world around us.
The POWER in harnessing reflective practice is the ability to reflect on your own actions and those of others. It can help you think about or reflect on a experience that has occurred, your actions, and behavior. Utilizing reflective practice will allow you to gain a better sense of self-awareness and a better understanding of people and groups.
For example, when someone treats you unfairly, unjustly, or not of good character — know that it is not a reflection of you, but a reflection of that person. So its important to reflect on that situation, and open up the possibilities to give yourself insight on who that person is, aiding in not making assumptions, and allow you to challenge some of your thoughts and see things from a new and different perspective.
You can practice reflection in multiple ways in your personal life, relationships, career and in your business — and as a part of your general wellbeing. It has many benefits and helps you focus on planning for future experiences.
Here are some key benefits that I have learned from utilizing reflective practice:
- See The Bigger Picture: With the pressures of life, career, entrepreneurial ship you can become too focused on everything that you have to do and are a part of, but when you incorporate reflective practice it allows you to look at the bigger picture. When you do regular reflections, for example once a day, it can help you think about your goals, and the objectives it will take to accomplish them.
- Using Self-Talk: Reflective practice can help you develop a more deeper connection with yourself through self-talk. Each of us has that inner voice within us no matter what you call it, but for me its the Holy Spirit, my Helper. This inner voice is in our heads and hearts to remind us of all the things we could have done differently in various situations that we face. Reflecting on these situations and experiences can help you learn and put this voice to use as you learn from what you have done and move forward more effectively.
- Construct Rich Understanding and Beliefs: Critical reflective practice allows you to construct rich understandings and beliefs about learning who you are, what you need to do, how you can change, and decide what you can do differently in the future. For example, when you combine reflection with outside activity (i.e. walking, running, yoga, etc.), it is easier to break patterns and connect with nature while you think about lessons from your past experiences you want to make sense of.
- Answer Those Crucial Questions: Reflective practice can help you to answer those hard and important questions. With the culture and environments that we live in now, is very unprecedented and can be extremely ugly. There are so many competing forces such as social media, our smartphones and the internet that get in the way. It leads us down that path of having “monkey mind” — which is where your mind is unsettled, restless, indecisive and uncontrollable. When this occurs, it is a good practice to just write down your thoughts and reflect on them. Getting them out of your head and getting them down on paper is a very powerful way to make dramatic breakthroughs.
These are just a few things that reflective practice can help with. So, I want to challenge you to give it a try and add it as a part of your daily routine.
Being reflective helps you challenge your own practice as you will justify decisions and rationalize choices you have made.
It encourages you to develop an understanding of different perspectives and viewpoints.
The key is to internalize it and not personalize so that you can reflect intentionally and objectively.
And so, by taking sometime out of your day to reflect, will help you have a better sense of self.
This sense of self will open the door for you to have better relationships, improve upon your career. make better decisions, grow and expand your business, and engage in that critical thinking that will aid in successful outcomes.
I hope this has helped you understand how important it is to incorporate reflective practice in your life. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Remember to come back for more amazing blog posts and share this one with others, so they can use it to become the better version of themselves.
You have a POWERFUL PURPOSE to live in this world. Go out and live it each day with your PURPOSE and write your own story.
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