30 Self-Reflection Examples

Self-reflection is the internal process of analyzing oneself with the intent of making more informed decisions, improving oneself, and setting realistic goals.

Christian (2020) defines it as below:

“Self-reflection is when you seriously take time to think about your character and behavior, analyzing where it comes from, what it means to you, is ‘working’ for you, and what you can do about it.”

Self-reflection can help us to increase our awareness of weaknesses and strengths, clarify our values and priorities (Lim et al., 2019), and improve cognitive function (Goupil & Kouider, 2019; Lyons & Zelazo, 2011).

It offers us the opportunity to pause, consider, and critically examine our thoughts, emotions, and motivations.

The key components of self-reflection are introspection, analysis, and willingness to accept self-criticism – aspects that contribute significantly to personal growth (Travers, Morisano & Locke, 2015). Prolonged practice of self-reflection can, therefore, enhance personal development and improve overall quality of life (Ardelt & Grunwald, 2018).

Self-Reflection Examples

Method 1: Journaling
Journaling is a method of self-reflection that involves writing down thoughts, feelings, and experiences consistently. It serves as a personal space for you to express emotions and ideas, providing you with a record to reference and evaluate later on (Christian, 2020; Giguere, 2012). Over time, this reflection can highlight patterns, progress, and areas for development.

Method 2: Meditation
Meditation is a practice that involves spending a period of time focusing your mind. Two main approaches involve completely emptying your mind (Ardelt & Grunwald, 2018). When thoughts enter the mind, the practitioner notices it then stops the thought, returning to a state of thoughtlessness. Over time, this approach leads to enhanced calmness. Another approach is to focus on one thing that you’re concerned about, focusing on it and reflecting on it for a sustained period of time.

Method 3: Mindfulness
Mindfulness is similar to meditation but practiced throughout the day. The idea is to focus on your own body and mind throughout the day, being aware of how your thoughts are driving your behaviors and how your body is reacting to things like tiredness or strain (Ardelt & Grunwald, 2018). This method helps you remain present in the moment and develop deeper understanding of how you’re feeling at all times. By doing this regularly, you may become more aware of your mental and emotional states, and better equipped to understand and control them.

Method 4: Professional Therapy
Engaging with a trained professional provides a safe space to navigate personal issues. Therapists can offer constructive tools and techniques to encourage productive self-reflection (Prasco et al., 2012). By bringing into the open internal dialogues that you may struggle to interpret alone, therapy can enhance your capacity to understand and address personal challenges.

Method 5: Artistic Expression
Creating art can be therapeutic and reflective. It’s a non-structured process that helps to explore suppressed emotions, issues, and experiences (Christian, 2020; Diamond, 2023). Whether it’s painting, writing poetry, or playing a musical instrument, the act of creating can help you express different emotions, leading to insights into your own motivations and feelings.Benefits of Self-Reflection

Method 6: Goal Setting and Reflection
Goal-setting involves putting in place intentional goals or milestones that you need to meet. This helps you to be more self-reflective because you’re able to reflect on your progress toward an objective goal and think about whether you’re on track. If you’re not on track, you can pivot and adjust to get back on the path to success. I recommend the SMART Goals Method for setting both short-term goals and long-term goals.

Method 7: Feedback Analysis
Feedback analysis involves contemplating the feedback received from others. I find that, too often, students get feedback from me (and other teachers) and they don’t even read it. They just care about the top-line grade! This is not self-reflection. Self-reflection would involve actually looking at the feedback and thinking about how to take it on board in order to improve your work next time.

Method 8: Self-Assessment Quizzes
Taking self-assessment quizzes can be another useful self-reflection method. These quizzes can shed light on strengths, weaknesses, preferences, and behavioral tendencies. These often depend upon the tasks, but one good method is to lay out a set of desired outcomes before doing a task, then self-assessing once the task has completed, giving yourself a grade for each outcome. Once this is done, you can think about how to improve on each aspect.

Method 9: Solitude and Silence
Embracing solitude and silence is another powerful tool for self-reflection. It allows for introspection without the distraction of external noise or influences. For example, you could take yourself for a walk each afternoon to clear your head and think about the day. Other people prefer to go fishing, or even pair this up with journalling, by taking your journal out to the forest to write and think.

Method 10: Coaching or Counselling
Engaging in professional coaching or counseling can facilitate self-reflection. Trained professionals can ask probing questions and provide non-biased insights that initiate deeper self-reflection. For example, many CEOs and high-performing athletes have mentors and coaches who help them think through their bottlenecks and difficulties, which can help them to squeeze out those extra few percent of higher performance each week.

Method 11: Reflective Conversations
Reflective conversations involve discussing personal experiences and thoughts with trusted friends, peers, family, and mentors. These conversations foster deeper self-understanding and provide opportunities to view issues from different perspectives. Some of my best lightbulb moments of self-reflection have come through conversations with my very insightful sister, who is really good at asking the right probing questions and summarizing my muddled thoughts!

Method 12: Philosophical Inquiry
Philosophical inquiry involves in-depth questioning about the nature of human existence and purpose. Through exploratory questions and discussions of philosophical tenets, deeper self-reflection is induced. This process assists in shaping your core beliefs and core values. Some people might do this by reflecting on secular philosophy, while others might turn to the philosophical and spiritual writings of their religious traditions.

Method 13: Role-Play Scenarios
Role-play scenarios can allow you to experiment with different perspectives or behaviors in a controlled setting. This can enable a greater understanding of your own reactions and actions within different contexts. This serves to highlight patterns of behavior and areas of growth or change. We do this often in education, but therapists and counsellors also do it, which allows the student or patient to think about things from other people’s perspectives, displacing their own ego momentarily to achieve breakthroughs.

Method 14: Mind Mapping
Mind mapping is a graphical technique for visualizing connections between various ideas and concepts. By creating a mind map about a topic related to yourself and your struggles, you can gain valuable insights into how you perceive different aspects of your life and how each of those aspects interconnect. This is a beneficial tool to visually organize and structure thoughts, allowing for deeper self-reflection.

Method 15: Visualization Techniques
Visualization techniques allow you to create a mental image or scenario to explore thoughts, feelings, and desires. Through this, you can envision your future goals or replay past experiences to gain a different perspective. This method is often used with children, whose visualizations (often in the form of drawings) can display what the child is thinking and feeling about a topic.

Method 16: Personal SWOT Analysis
A personal SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities Threats) analysis encourages you to look deeply at personal characteristics and environments. It allows an assessment of personal attributes and the external factors that can influence them. This type of analysis helps you to strategically plan for personal and professional development, and is a good starting tool for goal-setting and planning, so you can both avoid threats on the horizon and position yourself best to embrace any upcoming opportunities.

Method 17: Daily Milestones
Documenting and assessing your daily achievements and steps toward your milestones – no matter how small – can help to promote personal self-reflection and self-growth. This guides you in celebrating successes every single day, while also acknowledging failures and thinking about how you could use new strategies to reach your milestones. This daily habit can instill a sense that you are, in fact, making progress every day.

Method 18: Guided Reflective Activities
Guided reflection exercises, such as prompted journaling or organized workshops, can facilitate in-depth insights. Often, these activities encourage participants to confront difficult thoughts and experiences. Through these guided activities, you can explore your struggles and challenges in more structured ways.

Method 19: Digital Detox
Digital detox involves refraining from using digital devices for a sustained period of time. While this isn’t an overt form of reflection, you may find that by no longer having your phone as a distraction, you can then open up space and time to think more deeply. By reducing reliance on digital technology, an individual can refocus their attention back on their thoughts and experiences in real-life contexts. Digital detox periods are often cited for allowing the space for much-needed introspection and self-reflection.

Method 20: Being Among Nature
Becoming an observer of nature and embracing the natural environment can support self-reflection. Nature inherently promotes calm and mindfulness, which can provide an ideal setting for introspective thoughts. Observing the rhythm and patterns in nature can, in many cases, be reflective of one’s life patterns, stimulating profound self-reflection.

Did you Know?
British Columbia, a province in Canada, allows doctors to prescribe national parks passes to people with depression. This is in recognition of the restorative power of nature.

Method 21: TED Talks and Podcasts
Delving into thought-provoking TED Talks or podcasts can stimulate self-reflection. They often provide unique perspectives and compelling stories which can challenge our existing beliefs. By reflecting on these insights, individuals can foster a deeper understanding of themselves and the world around them.

Method 22: Mantras and Affirmations
Creating personalized mantras or affirmations serves as a tool for self-reflection. These mantras or affirmations, when repeated regularly, aid in challenging and reshaping assumptions about oneself. They can help in cultivating positive beliefs and focusing on personal growth objectives.

Method 23: Dream Analysis
Analyzing dreams and their symbolism can induce a form of self-reflection. Interpreting the situations, characters, and emotions presented in dreams can reveal subconscious thoughts and feelings. Here, dream analysis can form an important part of an introspective journey. But beware – dream analysis enters into the realm of pseudoscience.

Method 24: Narrative Therapy
Using narrative therapy techniques fosters self-reflection by encouraging you to tell your life story. It provides an opportunity to review your life from a different perspective, recognizing dominant narratives and addressing inherent bias. It enables us to rewrite our narrative, shaping a more constructive view of ourselves and our life.

Method 25: Practice of Empathy
Active empathy towards others promotes self-reflection, as it requires understanding the thoughts, emotions, and experiences of others. By stepping into someone else’s shoes, we can gain insights into our own biases and feelings. Thus, empathy can act as a mirror that reflects our values and beliefs.

Method 26: Retreats and Workshops
Participating in personal growth retreats and workshops offer an immersive experience that often prompts introspection. These platforms facilitate structured exercises, group discussions, and introspective practices that enable individuals to understand themselves deeply. Retreats create a supportive environment conducive to intensive self-reflection and personal insight.

Method 27: Personality Tests
Taking personality tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) contributes to self-reflection by breaking down individual characteristics. These tests assess a range of personality aspects, providing a comprehensive insight into oneself. Based on this, individuals can recognize their inherent traits and consider ways to leverage or improve them.

Method 28: Exploring Cultural Differences
Exploring cultural diversity or visiting new places can trigger self-reflection. It facilitates understanding different worldviews, which in turn, encourages introspection about one’s cultural lens and biases. Interacting with various cultures can highlight where our attitudes and behaviors come from, prompting self-reflection.

Method 29: Gratitude Practice
Keeping a gratitude journal, or simply pondering what you’re grateful for, incites self-reflection. By focusing on the positive aspects of life, gratitude practices foster an understanding of what truly matters to us. Gratitude helps refocus our thoughts and feelings, promoting a deeper sense of self-awareness.

Method 30: Life Milestone Review
Reviewing life milestones can provoke powerful self-reflection. By examining major life events, individuals can evaluate personal growth, changes in values, and turning points. This method provides an opportunity for individuals to appreciate their journeys, achievements, and learn from past experience.

References

Ardelt, M., & Grunwald, S. (2018). The importance of self-reflection and awareness for human development in hard times. Research in Human Development, 15(3-4), 187-199. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/15427609.2018.1489098

Christian, S. (2020). Self-Reflection: The Key to an Amazing Life. Independent.

Diamond, L. K. (2023). Art as Self-reflection in Nurse Practitioner Role Transition. Nurse Educator, 10-1097.

Giguere, M. (2012). Self-reflective journaling: A tool for assessment. Journal of Dance Education, 12(3), 99-103. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/15290824.2012.701168

Goupil, L., & Kouider, S. (2019). Developing a reflective mind: From core metacognition to explicit self-reflection. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 28(4), 403-408.

Lim, C. Y., Berry, A. B., Hartzler, A. L., Hirsch, T., Carrell, D. S., Bermet, Z. A., & Ralston, J. D. (2019, May). Facilitating self-reflection about values and self-care among individuals with chronic conditions. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-12).

Lyons, K. E., & Zelazo, P. D. (2011). Monitoring, metacognition, and executive function: Elucidating the role of self-reflection in the development of self-regulation. Advances in child development and behavior, 40, 379-412. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-386491-8.00010-4

Prasko, J., Mozny, P., Novotny, M., Slepecky, M., & Vyskocilova, J. (2012). Self-reflection in cognitive behavioural therapy and supervision. Biomedical Papers of the Medical Faculty of Palacky University in Olomouc, 156(4).

Travers, C. J., Morisano, D., & Locke, E. A. (2015). Self‐reflection, growth goals, and academic outcomes: A qualitative study. British journal of educational psychology, 85(2), 224-241.