“Much of the time we are transfixed by all the ways we can reflect ourselves and into the world and barely find the time to reflect back deeply in our own selves” — Ariel Garten
The interest in writing blog posts came from my curiosity around Emotional Intelligence and how we must embrace EQ in equivalence to IQ. I started blogging before COVID -19 and so far it has been consistent.
I am sure this year is unlike any year in the past decade or can I say the past century? ( fact check is needed). COVID -19 has changed our lives and this is something we weren’t expecting and unprepared for.
As I delve more into the subject of Emotional Intelligence, self-awareness is the base we all need. And we can be self-aware when we self reflect.
Self-reflection is to understand who you are and why you act in a certain way. When you analyze these aspects, you can gain insights into what you can do better in the future.
Self-reflection can be as simple as writing a diary or Journal to know how your day went by. In the era of social media, it’s a tough job to do this.
As you practice it more diligently and for more time — you see where your thoughts come from, your strengths and improvement areas and how do you choose to feel about it. It is said that self-reflection builds self-awareness by EI experts. This thought process and my interest in this subject lead me to come across Stoicism which needs another post to talk about.
Identifying what is important to you may not happen today as you sit down to think about yourself. It’s a gradual process that requires time from you for you. The basic assumption here is that you are not lying about yourself.
There is also a tendency to not see what is missing or what are our improvement areas because you are writing an exam and evaluating yourself against no defined parameters.
As a simple example, your thoughts are spread out as a puzzle you are trying to solve. Only when you first untangle all the pieces, you can put them together to see the complete picture.
Self-reflection can be overwhelming, because when you reflect — you see your flaws and your strengths. If you are a critic, you can beat yourself only for your flaws. Most importantly, the danger of doing it the wrong way. Sometimes, we tend to spend so much amount of time without any useful insight. We might just become more stressed that we are not doing enough and worrying about what went wrong. The way to navigate is to ask ourselves what can we do with what we know.
For example, in my case somewhere I doubted myself that I wasn’t putting my thoughts out there in my blog posts. This self-doubt stopped me from writing a new post for some time. However, when I paused and tried to challenge this thought, I realized that I was making an effort to write a post consistently. This line of thought motivated me to try more and keep practicing.
This week marks 6 months milestone writing blog posts. So, I wanted to pause and reflect on how have things have changed so far from the start of the year.
- * The past: At the start of the year I wanted to write about traveling and Emotional Intelligence in my blog posts. As an add on, I did comment on a few general subjects as well. Due to COVID, I wasn’t able to travel anywhere but I researched different places across the world which made me write my wishlist series.
- * So far so good: I did not expect myself to be consistent to write every month. On that parameter, I fared well.
“Self- reflection is the school of wisdom — Baltasar Gracian”
