The wo/man in the mirror

Congratulations! You´ve tackled another challenging week! 

I´m sure it wasn´t all rainbows and butterflies, but you made it through! I bet you would want to make the next week even more amazing. What if I told you, all it takes is 10 minutes?

I´m a huge fan of quick improvement strategies and one of my favourite ones is looking at myself. No, I don’t mean literally staring at myself in the mirror, breathing deeply & chanting the mantra “age is a privilege denied to many” (although I will admit, that helps too…).🙄😂

What I mean is looking at my thoughts, emotions, words, behaviours, and actions over the past day. Am I happy with myself or given the chance to repeat something, would I do it differently?

More often than not, I instantly come up with a bunch of things. It´s not always pleasant (to be honest, sometimes it sucks), but it allows me to do a very important thing – give myself praise and feedback!

There isn´t always an eager, well-meaning & skilled feedback giver around me. Even if there was, it’s still possible to completely block out something coming at the wrong time or from the wrong person, at that time.

I’m fairly present with my own actions (at least most of the time), eager to grow and well-meaning to myself (when I silence my inner dictator – more on that at the end of the post). So, who better give feedback to me than me?   🤔 

Feedback and reflection are crucial parts of the learning process, they give us a chance to consciously integrate and learn from our experiences. (BTW: In case you are curious about the “whys and how’s” a good place to start is Kolb’s Cycle. ) https://www.simplypsychology.org/learning-kolb.html

Interestingly, despite what we know about the learning process, in many cultures, it´s still considered “vain” or ”bad” to think too much about oneself, even more so for women, who are often taught to “think about everyone else but themselves“. So due to cultural or parental conditioning and other reasons, self-reflection skills are not always intuitive. The good news is, they can be fairly easily taught and cultivated.

Yes, sometimes it will be painful (because most of us aren’t enlightened just yet); but the discomfort is the prize for learning from our best (and also cheapest 😋) teacher – ourselves.

So if you want more awesomeness in your life you´d like to see some change, stop repeating the same things, expecting different results and start with self-reflection.

 Grab some blanket, pen and paper (if it was a really difficult week maybe a box of tissues and a chocolate bar) send everyone else out of the room and get uncomfortably real with yourself by answering these questions:

• What did I do well today? What was good?
• What could I have done better or differently?
• What are my goals for tomorrow? 
• How can I help myself achieve these goals?
• How did I in the past prevent or sabotaged myself from achieving similar goals?

Now, a very important part of this challenge is to not allow your “inner dictator” to be overly critical and let self-reflection turn into self flogging ☝. You worked hard and did your best with what was available to you at the time. You did a lot of amazing things and deserve your own praise, love and appreciation. 🙌Part of the self-reflection process is also admitting this to yourself. So, whatever you do, don´t skip the first question and aim to write down 3-6 good things for each “bad”.

What do you think? Will you give it a chance? It takes 10 minutes and it´s best applied on regular basis 😊