Using a Critical Reflection is common to review coursework to understand your biases and assumptions about a topic. However, by taking a critical reflection a step further, critical reflection can also be used to address understanding your own biases and help you in your personal growth journey.
What is a Critical Reflection?
Critical reflection is a “meaning-making process” that helps us set goals, use what we’ve learned in the past to inform future action, and consider the real-life implications of our thinking. It is the link between thinking and doing, and at its best, it can be transformative.
John Dewey, American Philosopher
People seldom take the time to go through a critical reflection. However, studies show that engaging in critical reflection helps us articulate questions, confront bias, examine causality, contrast theory with practice, and identify systemic issues. Taken together, these benefits help foster critical evaluation and knowledge transfer.
Why do we need to do a Critical Reflection?
Modern life continues to speed up, leaving less and less time to reflect on how we live our lives. If anything, we need the time to slow down more than ever in our life. There have never been so many opportunities to live the life you want.
You can be a creator with access to millions of potential fans, you can connect with CEOs through email/zoom calls, live in Paris for 3 months working from home, or anything you dream. What matters is it is a dream that matters to you and leads to you living a life you love.
There are 3 main reasons why Critical Reflection, and reflecting in general, is important for our lives.
The below chart shows the overall idea. Taking the time to do a Critical Reflection allows you to process to the content in a way that lets you reflect on the learnings and lets key lessons stick out more in your brain.
1. You Figure out what Matters to You
Getting to your dream requires constant realignment. First, to figure out what you want from life – it takes time to reflect, shift through any notes, and assess what matters to you. Not what society says is important – what means the most to you.
For instance and putting politics aside, John Kelly stepped down as Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff. Two months later the Biden administration offered him his role back. Mr. Kelly turned it down stating he wants to spend more time with his family. He had the potential to be one of the most important people in the new White House Administration, and instead, what he wanted was to focus on his family – even though others were telling him to resume his mantle.
2. See Your Roadblocks
When you work through the process of doing a critical reflection you confront your hidden biases, systemic issues, emotions, and articulate questions for further reflection.
For instance, let’s say you want to start a side hustle. When you sit down to brainstorm – you don’t get much of anywhere and doubt creeps in saying you aren’t good enough for taking on this money-making passion project.
By taking the time to slow down, you can see where these biases and issues come from and confront them more gently and productively. Some common fears include:
You might sense you have inexperience and are suffering from imposter syndrome, or that you aren’t sure if you have the dedication to work the extra hours to see the business come to fruition, or you simply have anxiety about showing the world your product or service.
The good news then is you can tackle each of these challenges on your own. By researching your idea, people like you, and what others have done – you can overcome imposter syndrome (also realize everyone ever has felt this way!). Building in a habit of working on your side hustle can alleviate the time stress. Showing your product to a few beta testers lets you get constructive feedback before going live to the whole world.
When you step back, you can overcome strong emotions, and biases that are holding you back from your ideal life.
Similar to WOOPing for achieving your long-term goals, what is important is you know you will hit roadblocks – what matters is proactively planning to overcome them!
3. Prioritize and Get Results
After running through your critical reflection, you might see you have a lot that you want to do, or want to improve upon. Writing them down helps you develop a backlog of goals or areas on which to work.
Then using your gut, understanding where you are in your life, and knowing what would help you the most – you can better pick which items to focus on without having to forget the rest. The goals on the backlog are not a priority at this moment in time. You can always revisit and shuffle around your goals as your life evolves.
How to Gather Your Material
Part of a critical reflection is gathering material to reflect upon.
Typical Coursework
For coursework, that means gathering notes, books, tests, lecture notes, and anything you’ve jotted down as it relates to the subject at hand.
Personal Development
For personal development or goal setting, gathering items is also important. Your journal, maybe the scraps of paper with business ideas, any notes you have about goals, books you read about the topic, and any Podcasts you’ve listened to about the subject. Basically, any brainstorming, or research you have done.
The Critical Reflection Process
Critical Reflections are divided into two processes:
1. Analyze
In the first phase, analyze the issue and your role by asking critical questions. Use freewriting to develop good ideas. Don’t worry about organized paragraphs or good grammar at this stage.
2. Articulate
In the second phase, use your analysis to develop a clear argument about what you learned. Organize your ideas so they are clear for your reader and yourself.
Parts One: Analyze
Studies like to use the “what, so what, and know what” model.
The basic idea in the analyze stage is to get everything you are thinking, feeling, or have experience out of your head onto the paper. For instance, using the side hustle idea – let’s say they want to sell art online. They would write out their goals, fears, feelings, etc in the analyze step.
1. The What?
A description of the incident/experience with just enough detail to support doing your “So what?” section. For example, description about who, what, why, when, where. Also, think about what happened? What did you do? What did you expect? Reaction? What did you learn?
The goal is to identify what triggered this feeling or goal you have for yourself? Along with the feelings, thoughts, and emotions that arise when you think of the situation or goal.
2. So What?
This is the sense-making section that asks you to surface general meaning, significance, your position/viewpoint; actions; emotions. Often you review your notes before diving into the “so what phase” of the critical reflection.
The goal is to try to understand on a deeper level why the issue (or goal) is significant or relevant to you.
3. Now What?
This section makes connections from the experience/incident to further actions. For example, what would you do differently / the same next time? How come? What are key points, lessons learned to share with your colleagues, network, and/or group outside the network?
The key is you want to explore how the experience will shape your future thinking and behavior.
Step Two: Articulate
Typically, after completing the analysis stage, you probably have a lot of writing, but it is not yet organized into a coherent story. You need to build an organized and clear argument about what you learned and how you changed. To do so, develop a thesis statement, make an outline, write, and revise.
For our purposes, I’ve often found that organizing my notes into themes, and then seeing common patterns is more helpful for personal reflections than making a story for an academic setting.
1. Review Your Notes
Group your notes into similar sections. What are common themes you are seeing? Going back to the side hustle – what did you find is your motivation for wanting to start one? What are your fears of starting a side hustle? What biases do you have that are holding you back?
Bunch your thinking into the common themes you found.
2. What Matters
Continually writing is bound to bring up topics that are not relevant to your task at hand. Look through and identify what matters in your notes. What means the most to you and what are the most valuable takeaway lessons?
3. Craft Your Guiding Thesis Statement
Taking all your meaningful notes – craft a short statement that encapsulates your feelings and desired behavior about a topic. For instance, let’s say your side hustle is to sell art online. You could write:
My goal is to develop an online art store where I sell my inspired art to people helping brighten their day while helping pay some of my monthly bills. I am excited to create my original art and will persevere even if imposter syndrome and self-doubt creep in because I acknowledge these are feelings everyone has. If I am too anxious to post my art – I will show it to a few trusted critics to get their insight for feedback before taking the art piece to the public.
Sample Thesis Statement
The above thesis statement identified the goals, feelings, and changed behavior that is necessary to bring the goal to fruition.
Key Take-Aways
- In the busy world we live in, there seems to never be enough time to sit and reflect on our unconscious biases and emotions.
- By taking the time to dive into them, we can better understand our automatic responses and change our behavior to match our desired goals.
Action item
Do the Critical Reflection on your next day off. What is something that has been bothering you for the last few months? Reflect on it. See what is moving on auto-pilot and analyze where you can make changes to live the life you want to be living.
