Reflecting for self-awareness

A collection of reflective activities and questions for developing self-awareness .

This page covers:

• Self-awareness: learning about yourself to improve
• Some traits are stable, others change frequently
• Challenging your answers to remain reflective
• Links to example activities and approaches for self-awareness

Self-awareness: learning about yourself to improve

The purpose of reflection is to improve practice and become informed in our decisions. Generally, we want to become more able and effective in what we are doing. A lot of reflection is done to make more sense of particular experiences – critical experiences, disorienting dilemmas – however reflection can also start with the want to develop better understanding of ourselves.

This doesn’t necessarily have to start with an experience, but rather a reflective question. To answer this type of question, we will often use experiences as evidence or support.

By learning about ourselves, our motives, and our assumptions, we can develop a toolkit of knowledge and abilities that we can draw on to help ourselves preform to the best of our ability.

Some traits remain stable, others change frequently

Aspects of ourselves like strengths, weaknesses, and values often tend to be fairly consistent over time. That said, they do change naturally and, of course, with awareness we can start consciously targeting these elements, for example by building reflective habits and goals. However, sometimes we might also want to be aware of things that vary faster such as our mood, or how we feel about something particular.

The questions and activities you can access from this page will help with awareness of both more stable traits such as strengths and weaknesses, and traits that vary more rapidly.  They include simple check-in questions we can ask ourselves in the moment, and get us to think slightly differently about a problem.

Challenge your answers to remain reflective

One very important aspect of these types of activities and questions is that they lend themselves well to reflection, but don’t necessarily require a reflective approach. Therefore, to remain reflective it is important that you challenge your initial instincts and look for evidence – ask yourself ‘How do I know?’ and ‘Why?’ regularly.

Example activities and approaches for self-awareness

There are many ways to build self-awareness.  The activities and questions available below are not exhaustive, but give you a place to start when trying to increase your self-awareness.