hey everyone and welcome back to my channel and also happy New Year if I haven't said it already and this is the first video that you're watching on my channel now for today's video I wanted to talk a little bit about reflecting and how to reflect in a way that is constructive and leads you to learn from the experience that you had be it a positive or negative experience and I think this is really important to come here and do at the start of a new year I've watched a ton of videos about um you know starting the new year right habits or goals um and what you want to achieve on the year but a lot of it is in vain if you haven't reflected on the year before or on your past experiences on your last week on yesterday if you haven't done that self-reflection to make sure that you actually understand what happened what could have been done better how you could do better next time and actually put in some actionable steps and so in today's video I'm going to be talking about it using an academic framework called the gibbs's reflective cycle and this cycle includes six steps it was developed to help give structure of learning from experiences so it's typically a cycle that you can use if for example you need to write a reflective piece at University this is the exact structure that you would use and I would also say that it's the exact structure you should use in your personal life as well when you want to reflect on any occurrence or any thing that's happened in your life okay so the first step is description so for the first step you want to write down exactly what has happened so remember here you're not evaluating you're not saying why it's happening you're not saying causes you're not going into any detail as to the reasoning behind the event but just to describe what's happened so let's think about this in maybe we want to just reflect on 2022 and you want to describe what's happened I would maybe reflect by just saying what happened in January what happened in February maybe just writing down the top three things that happened in each month or if you're reflecting on a specific event then just describing what's happened in that specific event and some questions that you might want to ask yourself are things like what's happened when and where did it happen who was present what did you and the other people do what was the outcome of the situation why were you there and what did you want to happen so here you are simply describing that is the first step it's very important to describe because it means that you are able to just have like the picture painted you've gone over in your head you've rehashed it and it's there on paper and that is always the first step to then being able to then move on and say how you felt about it so step number two is feeling and this is where you actually say how that particular event made you feel so again if we're going back to 2022 you've said what happened how did you feel overall in the year did you feel accomplished did you feel happy did you feel sad did you feel disappointed were you hurt what was the feeling you're able to feel multiple feelings as well so you might say the first half of 2022 I felt really accomplished I was on a roll then the second half was a bit more disappointing or maybe something else what were your feelings that you felt after relating to that particular occurrence so remember when you're reflecting pick a specific experience that like I said it could be reflective on last year it could be reflective on a particular experience you had with a friend or a family member but just stick to that and then say how you felt about it so some questions you might want to think about are things like what were you feeling during the situation what were you feeling before and after the situation how do you think the other people were feeling about the situation and how do you think they feel about it now and what were you thinking during the situation and how do you feel about the situation now so this allows you to put into perspective okay this has happened and then this is my stance on it this is how I feel so you've not invalidated yourself you're validating your feelings and you're saying this is how I feel you also have empathy to show how other people might have felt as well so you write that down you say this is how I think they might have felt or this is how they said they felt if they communicated that to you but the second bit is all about feelings the third is evaluating so now we're starting to get a little bit more critical and if you think of like higher order learning we started you know right at the bottom we started where we're just describing really basic and now we're getting more and more specific and we're thinking a bit more critically so when it's evaluating you're thinking about what went well in the situation but also what didn't go well and here you have to be really honest with reflecting the more honest you are the more you get out of it so if you're able to really pick out and say look I could have done this better I didn't and do a great job here it allows you to then later on correct that and give yourself steps and actionable steps to be able to fix it but if you're not being honest with what's happened it does make reflecting a bit more a bit more kind of pointless I suppose because you're not really getting out of it what you should and so just be really honest with yourself and say what went well and what happened in the situation that allowed it to you know go well if it was a good thing or what didn't go quite well so let's go back to the reflecting on 2022 you might be like the first six months went really well because I was waking up early I had a plan every day I was time blocking I did this I did these things and that's why it went well however the second half of the year I wasn't being financially smart I wasn't being um kind to myself I wasn't doing things like self-care and being really honest with yourself so now you know those are things that you can Target for next time to make things better so just really reflecting some questions you can ask yourself are things like what was good and bad about the experience what went well what didn't go so well and what did you and other people contribute to the situation and like I said either positive or negative now moving up on the pyramid is the fourth thing and that is analysis now analysis is where you are trying to make sense of the situation and we're trying to actually understand why and give reasoning as to the the occurrences for what's happened so um again going back to something quite simple going back to 2022 and the reflection you can obviously do this for um things are a lot more serious and things that have a lot more meaning and I'm just going to be doing on something quite simple for the purpose of this video and I'm thinking of analyzing I'm thinking of Rights so in the first six months I was waking up early every day because you know maybe it's because it was summer right the sun was out um it's not but let's just say maybe because the summer the sun was out it made it easy to wake up I had more motivation I was being paid more at work um I had a really good relationship with my friends and family and so overall I was you know I felt good but then the second half I found that maybe I I fell out with a friend and um I got a pay cut at work and so I wasn't able to spend as much money and I felt like my mental health has been it wasn't as great and you're really analyzing the situation in more depth to understand why you act acted or why the actions happened and this is where someone who was writing an academic literature um and someone if you're writing you know a reflective piece this is where you kind of put that those things in and this is where you bring the references in the citations in to prove why certain events are good and bad um this is where you'd bring that in so like I said this is a really academic way of doing it and that's why it actually works so some questions you might want to ask yourself is why did things go well why didn't it go well what sense can I make of the situation and what knowledge my own or others um can help you understand the situation here you might want to think more about you know approach theories literature and just reading more into the science and understanding why you acted that way or why that situation happened and then penultimate the fifth one is the conclusion so you've understood what's gone on and now you want to conclude and this is kind of wrapping up everything that you've learned um from your reflection and kind of trying to think about what can we done better next time and giving yourself that sort of like action plan give yourself that sort of step to what can actually what can I do better next time ultimately you want to improve the outcome in the future and so the conclusion is where you can make that change and some questions that you might want to ask yourself are what did I learn from this situation how could this have been a more positive situation for everyone involved what skills do I need to develop for me to handle a situation like this better in the future and what else could I have done um remember that when you're reflecting you really want to use I everything should be first person so if you're writing this down you should be saying I want to be able to do X Y and Z in future I will do X Y and Z and really using first person to make sure that you are giving yourself that accountability and putting it on you and then last but definitely not least is the sixth point which is the action plan there's no point of reflecting if you walk away from it with nothing kind of taken away with nothing learned so the sixth point is the action plan and the action plan is where you have a step-by-step sort of guide as to if this situation happened again what do I do what do I do to overcome it what do I do for this to not happen again or like I said if it's positive to allow this to happen again what exactly do I do and some helpful questions for this would be if I had to do this again what would I do differently how would I develop the required skills that I need how can I make sure that I act differently next time um and you know being able to realize that these are things I need to change it is enough but sometimes it isn't quite enough to make sure that you actually do you need to have a reminder you need to have actions um to say to yourself this is what I need to change and this is how I'm going to change it so um I hope this video was helpful in helping you understand how to reflect like I said this is an academic framework that they use up to you know Master's PhD level to be able to reflect on um situations that happen and to be able to learn they use this in clinical practice quite a lot um to be able to learn how to do things better next time and change workforces and work and workspaces so it's definitely quite a powerful method of being able to reflect using the six steps and if you found this video helpful then let me know if you want to see more like this and like I said hope you have a lovely New Year 2023 and I'll see you guys in my next video okay bye