Is the new year a good time for reflection?

With the close of another year, and another decade, we can find ourselves reflecting on the year that’s gone. What were the highs and lows, what have we learned, where do we need to improve moving into a next year?
 
Psychology shows us that fresh start moments, like a new year, are a good time to kick start new habits (Dai, Milkman & Rils, 2014). In this respect looking back and reflecting where we can grow as individuals and then using the new year as a moment to change behaviours makes sense. But why just once a year, should this not be a more regular activity?
 
In our busy lives, self-reflection can often seem like a luxury we don’t have time for. We want to learn from our experiences, maybe not to make the same mistakes as before or to improve on the way we do something. However, being wrapped up in the hubbub of daily life we can fail to understand why things happened to us or jump to the wrong conclusions. 
 
This very much reflected my own behaviour up until a few years ago. I thought I understood myself, but trying to juggle work, study and 3 young children, even if I did stop to think about why I had reacted in a particular way, there was little productive self-reflection going on, more a mulling over things that I thought I’d done wrong. This would then lead to the inevitable worrying and feelings of inadequacy. Very few learnings were taken away from these musing – all round a fairly unhelpful behaviour.
 
That was then but over recent years, through my study of coaching, I’ve developed much more consistent habits of self-reflection. This not only follows coaching sessions with clients but also more generally, in my comings and goings I try to catch myself reacting to everyday things that I notice. From my coaching studies at the Henley Business School I’ve learnt a useful model for self-reflection that I have modified in order to improve understanding of myself more generally rather than just as a coach. Here I’m going to share it with you.
 
The first step is simply noticing how we feel. This sounds simple but actually involves a high level of self-awareness. These are reactions we’ve become fairly used to, and so we can easily dismiss them. Are you starting to feel tense? Is your face reddening up? Are you breathing more heavily? These are all signs we need to become attuned to and are very individual, so start to become more aware of physiological clues as well as psychological ones.
 
Secondly, what caused us to react in a particular way? So often, we can look only at the surface and identify the seemingly obvious cause, for example. I’m feeling tense and angry when I open up my mailbox because I see that so and so hasn’t responded to my email for 2 days! However, if we dig a bit deeper we can reveal the underlying cause of our reactions. Are we actually that bothered about the email, or does it say more about our feeling that they do not respecting our time? Do we have the same reaction when this manifests in a different context?
 
Thirdly, what does this tell us about ourselves - the good and the bad? So, I may get angry when I feel that people are disrespecting my time, but am I also living by these values? Respecting others is clearly a good value but only if it works both ways. Or looking at the same example, are we personifying the issue, maybe the fact that the email hasn’t been returned is nothing about them respecting or not respecting us, but one about a misunderstanding or poor communication, or even a more basic reason, they are away or very busy, etc. etc. It’s not always about us!
 
Finally, what can we learn from this and what will we do differently next time? This is the key to improvement. There’s one thing understanding ourselves, and another taking any learnings from self-reflection and implementing these into our everyday lives. In the example above, do I need to work on my own thinking traps to avoid personifying everything, or simply do I need to communicate better to express more explicitly my expectations?
 
Self-reflection has become a hot topic with many articles out there on its benefits with respect to increased confidence, improved Emotional Intelligence, happier lives and professional success. But from a personal perspective I have found practising self-reflection after events that have caught my attention can help bring perspective to a situation and nip in the bud that, often, unhelpful mulling over that we can get trapped in. Personally, I have found diarising these self-reflections has helped not only move my learnings into real actions but, over time, into habitual actions.
 
References
Dai, H., K.L. Milkman, J. Riis (2014). The Fresh Start Effect: temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behaviour, Management Science. 60(10): 2563–2582.