A collection of reflection techniques (more than 70 techniques)

Each of us has the ability to direct attention inside our being, to be aware of our thoughts, states, moods and sensations. With this ability we can see ourselves from the outside. In addition, this ability has important practical significance, because it serves as a means of complete and effective self-analysis, allowing you to evaluate your own thoughts, actions and actions, analyze them and change them. This ability is called reflection.

What is reflection

The definition of reflection states that it is a quality inherent only to man, and serves as one of his differences from any other living organism. Over the centuries-old history, representatives of psychology, philosophy and even pedagogy have been interested in the phenomenon of reflection (also called self-reflection). All of them attributed a huge role to reflection in the functioning of a person’s personality, and also looked for a variety of ways for its independent development in themselves.

The term "reflection" comes from the Latin word "reflectio", meaning "to reflect" or "to look back." In fact, this concept has many interpretations, each of them unique in its own way.

If we turn to Wikipedia, we will see that reflection is understood as drawing a person’s attention to himself, his consciousness, the products of personal behavioral activity, skills, abilities and knowledge, as well as rethinking all of this. This also includes analysis of actions already committed or planned. Simply put, reflection is the ability to look inside your consciousness (and even subconscious), evaluate your behavioral patterns and emotional reactions.

When we say that a person is reflective, we mean that he focuses on his own “I” and comprehends (or rethinks) it. The ability to reflect allows you to go beyond the boundaries of “I-space”, indulge in active reflection, engage in introspection, draw conclusions from all this and use them in the future. It gives you the opportunity to compare yourself and your personality with others, evaluate yourself critically, adequately perceive and see yourself as other people see.

But it will also not be superfluous if we point out the difference in the understanding of self-reflection in psychology and philosophy. In philosophy, it is understood as the highest phenomenon, which includes reflections on the foundations of human culture and the original design of the existence of all things.

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates considered reflection one of the means available to a person for knowing and improving himself, because the ability to look critically at one's thoughts and actions distinguishes a person from other creatures and makes him a higher being in the evolutionary chain. It is this ability that allows us all to move along the path of progress and become free from stereotypes, templates and prejudices, to avoid misconceptions and mistakes.

The French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin held approximately the same views. Plus, he pointed out that reflection gives people the opportunity to know and be aware of this knowledge itself. And the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer said that people need reflection in order to isolate the most important points among the huge amount of “garbage” contained in the depths of the subconscious and the vicissitudes of feelings.

But the interpretation of reflection in psychology is of greater interest to us, because This is where its practical significance is revealed. Psychological science considers this phenomenon as a special form of introspection, as a result of which it occupies an important place in the science of the human ability to access the subconscious, analyze thoughts, actions and goals.

The famous Soviet and Russian psychologist Lev Rubinstein called the ability to reflect the ability to realize the boundaries of one’s own “I”, and also pointed out that in the absence of this ability a person cannot develop and become a full-fledged personality. Thus, reflection turns into the ability to stop the endless flow of chaotic thoughts and switch from mechanistic thinking to awareness of the individual spiritual and mental inner world. The result of this is the opportunity not just to think, but to truly reflect, analyze and live fully.

All of the above shows us the importance of reflection in a person’s life, and also once again suggests that it is necessary and important to develop it in oneself. Living in the crazy rhythm of modernity, a person does not have enough time to stop, think about his actions and get to know his own inner world.

At the same time, the ability to conduct high-quality self-analysis, look critically at your mistakes and change your actions based on the conclusions received is extremely important, because helps to fully develop and become a self-sufficient person. By developing it in ourselves, we can come to the realization of our uniqueness, learn to understand our difference from any other person, form our own thoughts, define goals and even find our purpose in life.

However, we should talk in more detail about the role of reflection in a person’s life, but first let me offer you a short video that tells you in an interesting, simple and understandable form what reflection is.

Developing Awareness

The development cycle of any person is hierarchical and it, like reflection, proceeds in the reverse order, against the flow of action.

First it is self-discipline, then self-education, then self-motivation, and then awareness of choices. And these qualities are hierarchical. It is impossible to learn to set goals for yourself if there is no self-discipline, because then these are no longer goals, but fantasies.

First comes a good worker who is self-disciplined.

Only after a person is self-disciplined can he be a qualified self-learning employee . At this level, the employee does not need to be trained and told how to do it. He will learn on his own.

Only after a person is self-educated can he be self-motivated - set goals for himself and start working with them. Only at this level does the ability to lead .

Anyone who cannot motivate himself cannot motivate other people.

This is a question both for self-reflection and for the appointment of new managers to management positions.
The next level of development includes all 4 qualities - this is a responsible employee who shares the company’s values . This category of employees and this level of awareness are extremely necessary to form flat structures: cross-functional teams, teams without a rigid hierarchy, when everyone is involved in one action and works as a well-coordinated team. This high level of awareness in the team needs to be developed.

The role of reflection in human life

If we consider the issue of the meaning of reflection in a person’s life in detail, we can draw several telling conclusions. Thanks to reflective activity, a person can:

control and analyze your own thinking;
evaluate your thoughts, looking at them from the outside, and analyze their correctness, validity and logic;
clear your mind of unnecessary and useless thoughts and reflections;
transform latent capabilities into active and effective ones;
know yourself more deeply;
evaluate your behavioral patterns and adjust your actions;
determine a clearer life position;
get rid of doubts, hesitations and indecision.

Having the ability to reflect, a person grows many times in understanding himself and his personality, masters more powerful self-control and follows the path of useful changes in life. But if a person has this ability poorly developed, he will know himself worse, and will also continue to make repeated erroneous actions.

It is obvious that a person who always acts in the same way, but at the same time expects new results, behaves at the very least stupidly and ineffectively. Therefore, it is easy to conclude that reflection helps to correct such behavior, eliminate disruptions in thoughts and actions, begin to accumulate important experience and grow personally.

It is for this reason that reflection has become a method actively used by psychologists around the world. Psychologists use it to help people look inward and explore their essence. Provided they carry out methodical and professional work, psychologists help clients find the right solutions to difficult situations, resolve problems and look for answers to all questions within themselves.

Let's point out the specific results that can be achieved by a person who turns to reflection as a method of psychological and psychotherapeutic assistance. Such a person can understand:

your experiences and sensations at this stage of life;
your weaknesses, hidden deep in the subconscious and subject to outside influence;
ways to use problems, difficulties and obstacles on the path of life for your own benefit and to improve your life.

In most cases, in the process of using the reflection method, a person, with the help of a specialist, also begins to realize several parts of his personality:

I am a separate individual;
I am a person among other persons;
I am an ideal being;
I am a separate individual as perceived from the outside;
I am a personality among other personalities as perceived from the outside;
I am an ideal being as perceived from the outside.

To achieve an understanding of the above things, psychologists can use one of three methods of reflexive therapy:

Situational reflection. Helps a person to understand the essence of the current situation, approach it critically and determine all the subtleties of what is happening.
Sanogenic reflection. Helps a person manage his emotional manifestations and consciously block negative, meaningless and difficult thoughts, reflections and experiences.
Retrospective reflection. Helps a person look at past experience, conduct a thorough analysis of his mistakes and learn from them important and useful experience.

According to many practicing psychologists, reflection is one of the best, most useful and effective ways for a person to achieve inner harmony and begin to improve themselves, collect a mosaic of their thoughts into a single whole and transform them into holistic ideas that contribute to the achievement of success and well-being.

Reflection, intentionally used by a person (it doesn’t matter: independently or through a psychologist), becomes a path to understanding one’s inner world, an opportunity to look at oneself through the eyes of other people, and also to gain the image of an ideal self - the person a person dreams of becoming.

We noted above that psychologists, when working with their clients, use one of three methods of reflexive therapy, but reflection itself can be of several types. We will also talk a little about them before we tell you how to develop reflection in yourself.

Why is reflection useful?

Because this is how you can understand G. Di Stefano, GP Pisano, F. Gino, BR Staats. Making Experience Count: The Role of Reflection in Individual Learning / Harvard Business School Working Paper past mistakes and not making them again in the future. Reflection also gives you a chance to deal with real feelings and desires. By reflecting on the past, we are able to S. Ayan. 10 Things You Don't Know about Yourself / Scientific American understand the unconscious motives of your behavior and correct them. For example, find something you really like, instead of an activity imposed by someone.

Working on mistakes helps you become more effective. A Harvard Business School study found G. Di Stefano, G. P. Pisano, F. Gino, B. R. Staats. Making Experience Count: The Role of Reflection in Individual Learning / Harvard Business School Working Paper that reflective call center employees perform 23% better than those who do not reflect on themselves. The former quickly understood what was required of them and made decisions more confidently.

Finally, by listening to ourselves, we learn to listen to others, which helps us better understand our interlocutors and determine their feelings.

Types of reflection

The classification of reflection presented below is considered one of the most common in psychology. Each species has its own specific characteristics and characteristics. Let's look briefly at these types:

Personal reflection. In this case, the object of knowledge is the personality of the reflecting person. He evaluates himself, his actions and actions, thoughts and behavior, attitude towards himself, other people and the world around him.
Intellectual reflection. It is activated when a person solves some intellectual problem. Thanks to such self-reflection, he can return many times to the initial conditions of this task (or situation) and find the most effective and rational ways to resolve it.
Communicative reflection. Here a person tries to get to know other people. This is done by assessing and analyzing their actions, behavior, reactions, emotional manifestations, etc. At the same time, a person seeks to understand the reasons why people behave in one way or another in order to get a more objective idea of the inner world of others.

However, the above types of reflection do not exhaust all their diversity. Those types of it, which we have already mentioned, relate to either a philosophical or psychological understanding of this phenomenon. But reflection can also be considered from the point of view of science and society:

Scientific reflection. Designed for research and analysis of scientific knowledge and tools, methods for obtaining scientific results, scientific justifications, theories, points of view and laws.
Social reflection. A unique type of reflection, the essence of which is to understand the emotions and actions of other people by thinking for them, on their behalf. Interestingly, social reflection has another name - “internal betrayal.” The inner world of others is known through one’s own reflections, i.e. a person “enters the character” of the person he is interested in and tries to understand what both this person and those with whom he interacts think about themselves.

Any type of reflection (philosophical, psychological, social or scientific) occupies a special place in a person’s life. Depending on the goal being pursued, you can turn to a specific “direction” and act based on it. It’s very easy to choose examples of reflection:

if you need to better understand yourself, you need to turn to personal reflection;
if you need to better understand the process of solving a problem, you need to turn to intellectual reflection;
if you need to better understand another person, you need to turn to communicative or social reflection;
If you need to better understand some scientific direction or scientific method, you need to turn to scientific reflection.

It may seem that all this requires enormous effort, specific knowledge and unique skills, but in reality everything is much simpler. Reflection, whatever it may be, is almost always subject to a single algorithm (it may differ only in form (depending on the type of reflection), but not in essence). And now we want to tell you how to develop reflection in yourself, i.e. how to learn it.

Development

Have you ever wondered what development is?
What does the concept of “development” mean to you? Frequent answers, development is:

improved results;
gaining new knowledge;
improvement;
evolution.

So how is development different from improvement?
When in doubt about the meaning of a word, it is best to first turn to etymology. The word “development” in Russian has two parts: “raz” and “vitie”.

The Wiki dictionary gives the same meaning for this word in at least four languages (German, Latin, French and Russian). Development means that something was once “curled” and now needs to be developed. The concept itself refers us to the principles of spiral dynamics, to the sequential unraveling of something.

If something needs to be developed, it was obviously first "curled" in some way. What is “curling”?

It turns out that in the same languages, everything that concerns “curling”, twisting into a roll, is associated with words such as cycle of action. That is, our experience - how we act, how we produce something - is all a process of “twisting”.

It’s interesting to play around with these words, for example, the English word “involve” just means to involve in the process.

But we are not discussing linguistics here, let’s look at what is developing in our country, what then needs to be developed in order to achieve this very development.

How to develop reflection in yourself

Almost anyone can develop the ability to reflect. To do this, you need to follow the recommendations below. Each of them does not have to be considered as some kind of stage of self-reflection, but in general they can all form a complete algorithm.

So, what do you need to do to master the skill of reflection:

After making any decision, analyze its effectiveness and your actions. Try to look at yourself from the outside, see yourself in the eyes of others, understand what you did right and what needs improvement. Strive to see if you had the opportunity to act differently - more correctly and more effectively. It is also important to evaluate your experience after any events and decisions.
At the end of each working day, analyze it. Mentally return to what happened during the day and carefully examine what you were dissatisfied with. Try to look at unsuccessful moments and awkward situations from the outside in order to see them more objectively.
From time to time, analyze your own opinions about others. Your task is to understand whether your ideas about them are correct or incorrect. At the same time as you develop your reflection skills, you will also develop your communication skills.
Try to communicate more with those who are different from you, who share different views and beliefs. Every time you try to understand another person, you will activate reflection, train flexible thinking and learn to see the situation more broadly, as well as develop empathy, which will improve your relationships with others.
Use problems and difficulties to analyze your actions, the ability to solve complex problems and get out of difficult situations. Try to look at different situations from different angles, look for unobvious pros and cons in them. It is very useful to find some funny moments in any situation, and also to treat yourself with a certain amount of self-irony. This not only perfectly develops self-reflection, but also allows you to find innovative ways to solve problems.

In principle, these few recommendations will be enough to understand what needs to be done so that the ability for reflective thinking begins to activate and develop. But we still want to give a few more good exercises for its development:

Exercise "Carousel". Aimed at developing skills of reflection, establishing contact and quickly responding to the behavior of another person. The essence of the exercise is that you need to meet at least one new person every day and maintain a small conversation with him. At the end of the meeting, you need to analyze your actions.
Exercise “Without a mask”. Aimed at removing behavioral and emotional rigidity, developing skills of reflection and sincerity in behavior, as well as subsequent analysis of one’s own “I”. Several people take part in the exercise. Everyone is given a card with the beginning of a phrase, but without its ending. In turn, all participants must sincerely finish their sentences.
Exercise “Self-portrait”. Aimed at developing the skills of reflection and self-analysis, as well as the ability to quickly recognize another person and describe him according to various characteristics. The point of the exercise is that you imagine that you need to meet a stranger, but in order for him to recognize you, you need to describe yourself as accurately as possible, and this applies not only to appearance, but also to behavior, manner of conversation, etc. It's best to work with a partner. If you wish, you can change the “polarity” of the exercise: you describe not yourself, but your assistant.
Exercise “Qualities”. Aimed at developing reflection skills and forming correct self-esteem. You need to take a piece of paper and a pen, divide the sheet into two parts. Write 10 of your strengths on the left and 10 weaknesses on the right. Then rate each positive and negative quality on a scale of 1 to 10.

With these tips and exercises, you can develop your ability to reflect very quickly. And if you follow our recommendations for at least three weeks, you will form a useful habit for life, and reflection will become your faithful companion in life.

Having learned to reflect correctly, you will notice a lot of positive changes in your life: you will begin to better understand yourself and understand the people around you, you will make more correct decisions and easily learn from mistakes, you will begin to predict possible scenarios for the development of events and even the behavior of other people, you will be prepared for the unexpected circumstances and unexpected turns in life's path.

All this will bring a huge amount of positive energy, harmony and a sense of self-sufficiency into your life and inner world. You can develop in this direction throughout your life, becoming better and better all the time. But we also cannot forget that there must be moderation in everything, because excessive and hypertrophied self-reflection can lead to self-examination, self-flagellation and other negative mental states. And then you will have to look for ways to get rid of reflection. But this is a topic for another article.

With this, we summarize the material, and as a good afterword, we invite you to watch a short video in which psychologist Yuri Nikolaevich Levchenko gives an interesting point of view on soul-searching and tells why it does not lead to anything good.

Did you like the article? Join our communities on social networks or our Telegram channel and don’t miss the release of new useful materials: TelegramVKontakteFacebook

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Key words:_D1034, _D1043, 1LLL, 4Psychoregulation, 4Self-knowledge

Activity

Let's consider the scheme of human thinking through the cycle of action. There are 4 main processes corresponding to the 4 types of communications that we discussed in detail last time.

The cycle of action in this diagram goes clockwise. The “I” with its values receives a call to action that determines the meaning of the activity. Ideas and emotions arise, the next step is prioritization - goals and objectives, motivation arise. At the stage when tasks are defined and need to be performed, knowledge and competencies are needed. GitHub, Google, communication with colleagues helps to upgrade them and begin the execution stage - GTD. Getting Things Done is the performance zone where the actual creation of value that meets the initial call to action occurs. Sooner or later we get a result that creates a new experience. New experiences give growth and new opportunities (new meanings).

If we repeat the cycle many times (and we do this all the time in our work), sooner or later our brain will turn into a pile of unsorted experience. Only one person, and even then with difficulty, can figure it out. He relies in his reasoning on fragmentary, unsystematized cases, operating, let's call it, thinking based on examples .

If everyone in a team thinks based on examples, then a new task is discussed at the level: “I have this experience,” - “And I have another, and what are we going to do?”

When experience is unclear, it is very difficult to decide what to do in a new situation. Conversation at the level of sharing life experience does not work if you need to find a solution to a new problem. Therefore, with the “curl” that occurred on the basis of experience, something needs to be done - “develop” it!

Areas of manager development

The same thing happens to a manager.

The most important and difficult transition is the transition from the performer, that is, responsibility for oneself, to the level of team lead and responsibility for other people .

At the same moment, the type of activity changes. At the performer level, the developer programs, writes code and implements features, but the main performance area of the team lead is different and is located in the area of communication. This is a rather difficult transition to comprehend.

The next level is the transition to management control . This is also a psychologically difficult transition that can be made in the process of reflection. In simple terms, it's beating yourself on the wrist for trying to fix a particular situation and admitting that you're no longer an expert.

When we become managers, we immediately lose our expertise.

There is such a difficult thing as managing expert employees.
Control management is about finding systemic things that can be automated, turned into a standard, into an algorithm. The task in management management is to manage formats, not to analyze specific cases. This is the time to solve problems at the system level and build a system.

The next difficult moment is the transition to the level of entrepreneur , or, as it is fashionable to say, internal entrepreneur (interprenership). This is where the hardest part is moving from “doing things right” to “doing the right things.”

A person at the level of an entrepreneur constantly destroys the existing system, structure, and processes, because it is always necessary to follow what the customer (the market) requires. This is important for us, because digital business requires being extremely customer-oriented. Focus on the client is more important than the system built within the team. This is exactly what an internal entrepreneur does.

Then the following transition occurs: a person in the position of an internal entrepreneur begins to understand that he alone is not enough to serve the market - there are too many options. The involvement and inclusion of a team that shares common meanings becomes necessary.

There are fashionable words “turquoise organization”, holacracy, flat structures, and these also include cross-functional teams - organizations that we designate as organizations of the future .

In order to build a team of the future, you need two things:

Performers whose performance level shares the values and meanings of the team. That is, the level of awareness of each employee in the team is such that the person is self-disciplined, self-learning, self-motivated and shares the company’s mission. Only such a team can become a link in a flat structure.
The leader of such a team can no longer be called a leader. He is focused on the market, knows how to build a market service system, when each team member becomes a self-motivated leader.