Reflecting for self-awareness

• Self-awareness: learning about yourself to improve
• Some traits are stable, others change frequently
• Challenging your answers to remain reflective
• Links to example activities and approaches for self-awareness

Self-awareness: learning about yourself to improve

The purpose of reflection is to improve practice, inform decisions and become more able and effective in what you are doing. A lot of reflection is done to make more sense of particular experiences – critical experiences, disorienting dilemmas – however reflection can also start with the desire to develop a better understanding of yourself.

Some traits remain stable, others change frequently

Aspects like strengths, weaknesses, and values often tend to be fairly consistent over time. That said, they do change naturally and, of course, with awareness you can start consciously targeting these elements, for example by building reflective habits and goals. However, sometimes you might also want to recognise things that vary faster such as your mood, or how you  feel about something particular.

The questions and activities here will help with awareness of both more stable traits such as strengths and weaknesses, and traits that vary more rapidly.  They include simple check-in questions you can ask ourselves in the moment, to think slightly differently about a problem.

Challenge your answers to remain reflective

One very important aspect of these types of activities and questions is that they lend themselves well to reflection, but don’t necessarily require a reflective approach. Therefore, to remain reflective it is important that you challenge your initial instincts and look for evidence – ask yourself ‘How do I know?’ and ‘Why?’ regularly.

Example activities and approaches for self-awareness

There are many ways to build self-awareness. The activities and questions available below are not exhaustive, but give you a good starting place .