Getting Started with Reflection: A Beginner’s Guide

Hey, Jessika here 👋

In this post, we’ll tackle how to reflect, which can improve your life in many ways. After reading this newsletter post, you’ll know why reflection is important, how to reflect, and you'll be ready to start reflecting with a bank of relevant reflection questions.

Why Reflection is Important

As we go through life, we experience so many valuable lessons about people, ourselves, and the world. While going through these experiences, we learn from them. Or do we?

I’m sure you have been in a situation and after it you’ve thought “Oh, that’s something I’ll not do again,” or “The next time this happens, I will handle it differently than I did this time”. But when that situation appears again, how big of a chance is it that you’ll remember to do things differently, or what exactly you should do differently?

Chances are you actually haven’t learned anything from that experience since you don’t have any learning to apply.

But this can be solved with reflection questions, to make your lessons in life stick to how you behave, and react to situations in your life going forward.

You’re not going to improve yourself by thinking the thought to improve every day. There’s some actual work that needs to go into that change.

How Reflection can Benefit You

When you reflect, there are multiple good things that can come out of it.

First off, you’ll understand:

1. Where you are now

2. Where you want to go

3. Where you are headed

All three of these can be very different from each other, which is causing you to not move towards your end-goal. So, while reflecting, you can spot the differences and see where changes are needed to get back on track to your goal or the path you’re longing for.

The moment of realization

This is when you understand that the path you thought you wanted, wasn’t actually the path you should go for.

Questions to Ask Yourself While Reflecting

I have divided these questions into different categories to make it simpler for you to choose which questions to ask yourself:

Regular questions:

• If I continue living my life as I do today, where will I be in 1 year?

• What is something that happened today that felt great, and why?

• What is something that happened today that didn’t feel good, and why did it feel bad? Is it possible to see this situation as something positive? In that case, how can I do that the next time?

• If you have some reflection notes from before: What situation that happened today can I link to a specific pattern I have in my life? Is that pattern good or bad? Do I need to take action on that pattern, and what kind of action in that case?

When you’re feeling stressed:

• What is the core reason I’m feeling stressed right now? (It can be good to write down all the things you need to do on paper to understand if all of them are stressing you, or if there’s mostly one thing stressing you)

• Why am I feeling stressed about this?

• Is it because I have time pressure, or am I uncertain of my own capability to get this done?

• Could other factors like not enough sleep/rest, or not eating, be a factor to why I’m feeling stressed now?

• What’s one thing I can do immediately to lower the stress feeling for me right now?

• Have I been procrastinating and now being in this situation because of that? In that case, why did I procrastinate?

• Do I feel stressed because I can’t focus? Is there too much clutter in my mind? How can I get rid of the clutter to be able to focus? (A braindump of everything you’re thinking of and need to get done is a good idea here).

• Is there anything on my list that I can get rid of?

• Is there anything on my list that I can put off, or delay the deadline on?

When you’re feeling angry:

• What situation/person/thought got me feeling angry?

• Why?

• Is it motivated for me to be angry in this situation?

• What should I do with my anger?

• Should I confront the person or not? 

• What outcome am I hoping for if I confront them?

When you’re feeling sad:

• What situation/person/thought got me feeling sad?

• Why?

• What can help to make me feel happy again right now?

• If I get sad about this again, how can I handle it differently than I did today?

There are so many more questions you can ask yourself while reflecting, and you’ll notice that you come up with even more questions as you start reflecting on a regular basis.

How to Set Up a Reflection Routine

Having a routine to reflect can be important to make sure you don’t forget to reflect in your daily life. It can be different routines depending on how much you feel that you need it at the current stage in your life.

Here are some tips depending on the interval:

Daily

Have one or two questions to ask yourself about your day. Doing it daily should be fairly quick and not take up too much of your time. Use one day of the week to go through your reflection notes and see if you can make any action points, or see patterns that stand out.

Weekly

You’ll need more time to go through the week’s experiences and situations. You can include some time to analyze patterns in your week/life.

Monthly

A monthly reflection can be very good to sum up the month and see how you progressed. You can go through your social media, pictures, and calendar to see what you’ve been up to during the month, and start reflecting on your experiences, people you’ve met, and decisions you’ve made.

Yearly

I wouldn’t recommend only reflecting yearly, because it becomes such a big and heavy task to do all at once. There’s also a possibility that the points you come up with from the reflection gets lost during the year, since you don’t have a follow up routine. However, pairing a yearly reflection with a daily/weekly/monthly reflection habit is a good idea.

Situation based

Situation based reflection is when you reflect specifically when a situation occurs. For example: You have an argument with a friend. With all the emotions coming from the argument, it can feel good to sit down and write them out to get more clarity on: what happened, what you’re feeling about it, what you should do about it.

Of course you can combine these however you want. Don’t be afraid to test it out and see how it feels. Most important is that it fits into your daily life, and that you feel progress over the reflection sessions.

How to Take Action on Your Reflection Notes

So, you might ask yourself, how do I take actions on my notes from my reflections?

It’s all about making it as easy as possible for you to take actions on your reflections.

Writing down action points at the end of your session is a good habit. You can add the action points to your calendar or to do list. Even if your action point is: “When I feel angry, I should count to 10, and ask for time to think before continuing the conversation,” it’s good to write it down as an action point. Later on, you can reflect on whether this action point helped you.

An example: I reflected that I haven’t seen my family in a month → Action point: Adding a task in my calendar to send a dinner invite to my family.

Another example: I have a problem with being a perfectionist. Since I have reflected a lot on that, and why that might be, when I’m designing, I’m unconsciously thinking in my brain: “It doesn’t need to be perfect, Jessika. Let it go”.

That thought helps me to work on my perfectionism every day, and if I hadn’t reflected on myself, I would probably not even know that I am a perfectionist.

Summary

I hope this reading inspires you to get started with reflecting. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding this post, reach out to me on Instagram or X.

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Best,
Jessika