Become More Successful Through Conscious Reflection
Because life can get pretty hectic, it’s easy to overlook the importance of reflecting on your day. By taking the time to think about what happened, you can discover more about yourself, your goals, and the dreams that you have.
Doing this will allow you to create a foundation of self-growth that will help you to be more successful. Most people don’t even recognize that conscious reflection is needed to reach their goals.
Journaling using conscious reflection allows you to grow and stretch yourself every day. And with each of the realizations you experience, you see more progress. Look back on your day and allow yourself to examine it critically, to look for ways that you did improve and ways that you still have more growing to do.
This acts as a kind of performance review that helps to push you to do better things each day going forward. The best way to reflect is simply to question yourself as if you were giving yourself a performance review.
Start by asking what you could have done differently to improve your success that day. You’re not going to have a success streak without ever having any failures. Because you’re human, you’re going to make a mistake.
You’ll waste time, miss an opportunity, or mess up something that’s vital to your success. These failures will hamper your productivity. They’ll make your progress take twice as long and might even impede the completion of your project to the point you feel that you just didn’t have time to give it your best effort.
When you’re using conscious reflection, think over what happened and the steps that led to the failure. By understanding what happened, it helps you to be more aware of how to avoid having the same situation happen again.
Decide in advance what your reaction is going to be if there’s a similar situation in the future. Maybe during the day, you reacted badly when dealing with a loved one, a colleague or an employee.
If your goal is to be a more effective leader, then you need to make sure that your emotions don’t lead you regardless of what happens. By determining your behavior beforehand, you’ll not only be in control, but can improve relationships as well as connections that can be important to your success.
Look back over your day to see if there was a time when you should have spoken up, when you should have taken the lead but didn’t and you shirked the responsibility. Even if you didn’t mean to, not stepping up can affect your success.
As you’re reflecting on your day, think over all the tasks that you had to do and see if there were any areas where improving your skill level would have led to better performance - which in turn produces success. Though at times painful, true reflection can help you to be more successful.
