Power of Reflection, Part 4 | Self Reflection 101, A Step-By-Step Guide
“It is when you lose sight of yourself, that you lose your way. To keep your truth in sight you must keep yourself in sight and the world to you should be a mirror to reflect to you your image; the world should be a mirror that you reflect upon.”
― C. JoyBell C.
Everything in the world can be a mirror because we interact with it at all times all day long. Even the insular worlds of reclusive people still offers a reflection of who they are and what they value. Despite the fact that our brains naturally monitor our internal and external worlds at all times, we have to choose whether or not we want to use that collected data to affect anything in our conscious experience.
The extent to which we allow our inner data to feed and direct our lives is on a wide spectrum.
Even though our brains are constantly reflecting, bringing new understanding about ourselves is not always comforting or easy. I wrote about all the reasons why people refuse self-awareness and choose predictable comfort in my article a few weeks ago. Click HERE to read that.
But I also provided a detailed list of the ways that self-reflection can positively upgrade your life last week, which you can review HERE, from ways to make more money at work to how to generate self confidence easily at any time.
In summary, self reflection can be really hard but it can also change your life in the most beautiful and profound ways. If you are out there reading this and you are still not convinced by the possible power of reflection in your life, go back and read last week's list.
But if you are ready to begin understanding yourself in ways you've never imagined, read on to learn how.
HOW TO REFLECT
Let's take it to the basics:
What is your physical experience right now as you read this? Are you tired, comfortable, stiff, stressed, relaxed, etc.? [Access to one's physical experience is often the easiest to gain at any time]
Next: what feeling does that physical experience make you sense? If you are tired, for instance, does that make you feel irritable? If relaxed, do you feel content?
What is the root emotion beneath the feeling right now? The six foundational emotions are happy, sad, mad, fear, disgust, and embarrassment. If you are irritable, for instance, do you feel angry? If content, do you feel happy?
NOW PAUSE.
Check it out: even if you cannot easily identify the feelings or emotions, you have successfully reflected just by thinking about your physical experience in this moment.
Reflecting is called reflecting because you are thinking about thinking about yourself. No, that is not a typo. So CONGRATS! YOU ROCK. YOU ARE SELF AWARE!! YOU SUCCESSFULLY REFLECTED!! WOOHOO!!!
Okay, stage one is complete. You are able to reflect.
Now for stage 2: only if you are able to identify the root emotion, tell me why you feel that way in this exact moment. For example, if angry, what is making you angry in this moment? A thought? An interaction? Something you just learned or heard? Something you are doing? If happy, what about this moment makes you feel happy?
If you are able to identify what makes you feel the emotion that you currently feel, you have created an association in your mind between the emotional context and intellectual data of a moment in time. If you sit and notice, understanding the association between an emotion and a trigger may literally feel like wires connecting in your brain or a plug fitting into a socket. For example, learning that the sound of someone's voice is what makes you angry and then irritable focuses your attention on that person's voice as the issue instead of thinking that everything pisses you off or that you are just an "angry person" or that that other person is somehow a terrible person.
Following that example further, you may have always reacted in a cold, prickly, or rude way to that person but not known until now that the only thing that bothered you was the tone of their voice rather than who they are as a person. Unfortunately, since we are social animals, we can easily and sometimes unknowingly adjust both our behavior and perceived self-worth based on interactions with others. In this way, this other person may interpret your cold reaction as arrogance in you and thus will accordingly react to you in that lens.
Now that you know how and why you react to that person, you can adjust how you interact with them or have a conversation with them that clears up the negative association. That is advanced, though. Contact me if you are at that stage and want help orchestrating the convo.
Okay, stage two complete! Well done! If you stop here, you can go ahead and make some powerful changes in your life just with some basic new knowledge about how your emotions are triggered. If you want to take it to Stage three, however, continue on into the following exercises:
Past Reflection
Now that you have tried to reflect on your current personal experience, it's time to gently reflect on your past. To do so, think about a time today that you felt an emotion. Go on. Any time today.
What was the emotion you felt?
What was the time of day?
What was it that inspired the emotion?
What association do you notice you have made with whatever the trigger was?
Future Prediction
If you have gotten this far and you are not only able to reflect on your emotional experience in the present as well as one in the recent past, and if you are able to identify the association between the emotion you feel and the trigger event, the next question is: when do you think it might happen again in the future?
When else might you experience that trigger again in future situations?
We end there for today. The next step is strategy for changing or weakening the trigger associations, but today's lesson is to practice the most basic reflection strategies that can help you understand why you act the way you act, feel the way you feel, and why your life is the way that it is every day.
Try it out, see how it goes and, as always, reach out to me below if you have questions, breakthroughs, or need assistance:
