Learn from each success AND failure: Know thyself

We do not learn from experience

We learn from reflecting on experience

John Dewey

Reflection is a way to look at your past encounters and behaviours from a new perspective to improve your future actions. Employers now want a more resilient workforce to promote organisational well-being. They recruit employees who don’t become demotivated in the face of adversity and uncertainty, and have the openness to learn from their mistakes. Self-reflection is an amazing way to create a better self-awareness and resilience as it helps you to recognise and understand your strengths and areas for improvement. 

Benefits of self-reflection 

1. It will assist you in identifying your professional and personal strengths and weaknesses
2. Keeping a self-reflection log will aid you in writing a superior resume and cover letter
3. It will improve your interview skills (Particularly Behavioural Interview. See my previous post for how to answer behavioural questions)
4. It will help you write better reflective essays, reports and presentations for your degrees
5. Self-reflection promotes self-empowerment as it helps you understand and control your emotions, and help you act on incidents rather than react on them.
6. Taking the time to pause and think will help you create innovative ideas
7. You will become more collected and articulate

How to be self-reflective

Reflective Journal:

One of the most common and useful way to create self-awareness is to keep a reflective journal. It is different than keeping diary in the sense that it is less descriptive and more analytic. You use less description and more evaluation and action plan in writing a reflective journal. Using a framework can be especially useful to write your reflection log more coherently and constructively. Below is an example of a simple reflection framework:

• Description (Describe the event): During a conversation with my supervisor in my industry placement program (IPP), she asked me if I knew about the Australian employment law, and unfortunately, I had to say no because I had no Industrial Relation course in my degree.
• Feelings (What were you thinking or feeling?): I felt a bit embarrassed and unprepared because my degree was Master of HRM and IR, and it’s only normal for people to expect me to know about industrial relations. Consequently, I decided to learn about the employment laws.
• Action (What did you do in response?): First, I talked to my supervisor about what laws they needed to use most frequently because learning all the laws was impractical in the short timeframe of my internship. Secondly, since the information on the website was extremely descriptive, I created simple tables for every section which was easier to understand and more effective. Third, while I was learning the laws, I checked different completed contracts and forms from my organization’s database to understand the basic application of the laws.
• Result (What outcomes did you have because of your actions? Was it positive or negative?): I completed 15 employee contracts and 10 statements of contract, and a tier-3 HR query (Back Payment issue) that I didn’t think I would get to do as Tier-3 involves legal issues.
• Future action plan (What would you do differently next time for improvement): I will learn more about the laws and focus on HIG awards as I am interested in hospitality industry which will prepare me for my potential interviews and jobs.

Ask for feedback:

Soliciting feedback can be another way of creating self-awareness.

• Ask your team members, peers, friends, managers and mentors for constructive feedback. Be open and make them feel safe to give you an honest feedback by actively listening to them and asking clarifying questions.
• Read all the feedback given by the faculty on your assessments to improve your future assessments. My journey from D to HD is my analysis of the written and oral feedback from my lecturers and tutors.

Meditate:

Simple regular meditation can be an effective way to pause and reflect to gain greater awareness of yourself. Many people find it beneficial to use a few seconds to focus on their breathing. Being mindful can also foster collected thoughts by lessening your anxiety and stress, and can make you focused and hence, productive. There are several techniques of meditation that you can find on our University Website that I found useful to clear my head and to understand myself and my intentions/needs better.

Increase your emotional vocabulary:

Reflection can backfire and add to your stress if you struggle to express your feelings using the right words. Moreover, it will not reveal any significant information about yourself if you cannot go beyond using the words “good” or “bad” or “happy” or “sad”. You can expand your emotional vocabulary using 100 Ways to Describe How You Feel.

What to reflect on

 

You can reflect on your work, classes, teamwork, presentation and even behaviour! Ask yourself questions like:

1. Are you actively participating in class? Is there anything that is hindering your participation in class? How can you change it in the future?
2. Are you contributing in your team? Do you find it difficult to deal with a team member? How do you think you should approach him/her next time to be more collaborative? What will you do if you encounter similar situation in the future?
3. What is the most challenging thing at your work? Why? How can you overcome this challenge? What is the easiest thing at your work? What strategies make this work easy for you?

 

Reflection can be challenging sometimes, especially when we reflect on negative experience. However, once you learn by reflecting on these experiences, you will have better control over yourself and your future.

Written by

Anindita Roy Bannya, first year Master of HRM and IR student at the University of Sydney Business School and Careers Leader with the Careers and Employability Office.