Self-reflection is extremely important for personal and professional growth and improvement. It involves considering where you are currently and where you see yourself in the future. Without this essential pondering, you can’t reflect on past performance and establish a solid foundation for your future.
Executives and leaders who don’t self-reflect believe they are perfect and don’t need further development and growth. Unfortunately, this mindset hinders their career and lets their team down in the long run.
Dedicated and active leaders must regularly check their skills and zones of improvement so they can have more clarity about the course they should be headed to. Today, I like to discuss the importance of self-reflection and how executives can practice it to improve their leadership skills in the workplace.
The Importance of Self-Reflection in the Workplace
Reflective leaders constantly learn and evolve. They never make decisions before reflecting on prior experiences and seeking different insights that could enhance future outcomes.
Reflective practice is highly effective in keeping your thoughts and actions in check. It involves assessing your feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and reactions in a particular situation.
Self-reflection helps develop these important internal components:
1 Self-awareness: Recognizing your strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and goals and how they influence your leadership skills.
2 Self-regulation: Restraining and redirecting disruptive impulses/emotions and adapting in stressful situations.
3 Decision-making: Consistently reviewing your decisions and actions and evaluating them against your core values significantly improves your decision-making process. This increases team expectations and encourages them to perform better.
4 Self-confidence: Self-awareness, self-regulation, and decision-making ultimately give self-confidence, which helps you become a more productive and respected leader.
How To Practice Self-reflection In The Workplace
Reflective leaders don’t pretend to be someone else to gain respect. Instead, they allow themselves to be vulnerable and open to new ideas and feedback.
Here are some ways to practice self-reflection and improve your leadership skills:
- Make A Schedule
Suppose you want to reap the benefits of self-reflection; schedule 10 minutes daily. Ensure your commitment to the task and block out interferences during this period.
Start by focusing on a single event of the day. In doing so, break down the day into smaller chunks and assess how they influenced the bigger picture.
After you develop a habit of regular reflection, you can increase the duration of these sessions.
- Write Things Down
Start writing your ideas, emotions, thoughts, and experiences daily. You can start a journal, make entries in a digital note-taking app, or any other convenient way.
For instance: “I felt extremely discouraged after our team meeting today since my new idea wasn’t accepted.”
Being as honest and elaborate as possible will help increase your understanding of your emotions and how they influence your thinking and actions. It will also highlight the areas you need to improve.
- Keep Adapting
As I share with you the steps on how to practice self-reflection, remember that there’s no single best way of doing this. Everyone is different, and everyone’s self-reflective practices are different as well.
So, to keep things interesting and productive, test what works for you. For instance, you can change the time of the day, stop writing in a journal and start taking voice notes, Etc.
Whatever you do, ensure it strengthens you and your reflective regimen. Self-care will help you become a stronger leader and person.
- Don’t Become Complacent
Now that you know the tools and skills needed for self-reflection don’t assume you’ve achieved everything. Resist the temptation to stop; reflection is a never-ending experience, and every day will teach you something new about yourself and your team.
Think about it like this: continuous self-reflection will help develop a growth mindset in the workplace and help those around you grow personally and professionally.
Final Thoughts
Self-reflection in the workplace involves evaluating personal experiences to help you grow and excel as a leader. To enhance self-awareness, improve learning, and boost leadership skills, you must devote some time to examining yourself, your thoughts, and your actions. Self-reflection is a vital part of leadership development; practicing it regularly will benefit you and your entire team.
Afterall, as Socrates the ancient Greek philosopher once said, “an unexamined life is not worth living”. To make your leadership count, you must embrace periodic self-reflection.
