Having read the first and second blogs in this series, you should now have a thorough understanding of what Resilient reflection is, and how to do it as part of your ongoing business and personal development.

In my third blog, I now want to discuss why regular self-reflection should be a consistent element of your ongoing business planning and strategy.

Self-reflection can help you achieve your goals in several ways:

• Self-reflection helps you to examine your time in the workplace whilst looking at your experiences from a distance.

• In the heat of the moment, it's easy to go through tasks without analysing what you're doing, leading to missed mistakes and failures in the long term that won't see correction until you go through a period of reflection.

• Self-reflection allows you to examine previous events and find problems you didn't notice before, allowing you to rectify them. A great example of “Springing Forward with Learning”.

• Self-reflection teaches you a lot about your personal development. Looking back over the past year or more is an opportunity to compare your current professional self to the version of yourself that you envisioned when first setting your goals.

• Periods of reflection are beneficial when setting future goals, as they provide a good sense of scale and the rates of development typically achieved in this period.

• Self-reflection increases your self-awareness, which helps your ability to understand and use your emotions in a positive way (emotional intelligence).

• Self-reflection helps you to find meaning and purpose in your life, which is important for your mental wellbeing. Mental health covers everything to do with your emotions, and how you think and feel. You can think of mental health as being on a scale, with having good mental health at one end, and having a mental illness at the other. Having good mental health doesn’t mean that you’re always happy – everyone has good and bad days. It just means that you’re able to live well with normal day-to-day stresses and challenges. Between the two extremes, your mental health may impact how well you’re feeling or coping to different degrees. Everyone may be at different points on this scale at different times. And you can move up and down the scale all the time. However, those people that manage to shift from coping to Thriving will be demonstrating true Resilience.

• Self-reflection can improve your future performance.

• Self-reflection can help you to set more realistic and achievable goals, which you’re then more likely to be successful in.

Look out for my last blog in this series – “What Are The Benefits Of Reflection?”

If you need further information about this approach, or any other resilience topic, please contact russell@theresiliencecoach.co.uk.