A Guide to Reflection for Self-Discovery

Introduction

An essential part of self-discovery is revealing key factors in your inner world, such as your core values, beliefs, identities, and principles you live by.

If you come to know and really understand these aspects of yourself, you can better navigate life and different circumstances, you can make decisions and choices that are more aligned with who you are and what matters to you, and you can develop a greater sense of confidence in yourself and how you show up in the world.

But how do you do self-discovery? How do you discover these key factors in yourself?

The Hard Way

You’ll find lots of advice and exercises that instruct you to simply write out lists of what you value, what you believe, what principles you live by, and so on.

But generating lists like this is often very hard to do. It can be very difficult to simply sit down and try to write out all your values. The brain doesn’t work like that. It needs context and associations to recall the actual, truthful, and meaningful aspects of your inner world.

If you remove the context, your brain has a hard time bringing things to mind.

This is why list-creating exercises without the right context can often leave you feeling blank, or writing down things that sound good, but aren’t really yours.

This can have you spending time doing something that isn’t very productive. Self-discovery should be a powerful, transformative process. It should be a process where you’re reaching genuine life insights, you’re revealing new things about yourself for the first time, and you’re finding opportunities for change and new choices in your life.

You won’t get at this kind of experience if you’re forced to write down and come up with ideas that aren’t sourced from your direct experiences in life. And what’s worse, adopting values, beliefs, principles, and identities that aren’t yours, or that aren’t from the context of your own life, can lead to harmful consequences later on.

The Easier, More Natural Way

A much easier and more natural way to discover your true values, beliefs, identities, and life principles, is to explore the meaningful factors that aren’t directly about your “self”. These include things like significant chapters of life, challenges you overcame, goals you pursued, the important relationships in your life, the groups you’re a part of, and so on.

Start from these contexts, then ask yourself, what do these things show me about what I value, who I am in the world, the principles I follow, and the things I believe?

If you take this approach and ask yourself the right questions, you’ll find that your brain can almost effortlessly bring to mind the meaningful, significant, and truthful aspects of yourself that you’re trying to uncover.

In this guide, I include 10 big picture reflection topics for approaching self-discovery in this easier and more natural way.

I picked each one of these topics based on their ability to naturally reveal your own values, beliefs, identities, principles, and other meaningful aspects. There are many more topics that can be productive for self-discovery, but these should be plenty to get started.

Tips for Reflecting

Take Your Time

Each of these topics can connect to large and very significant factors. You need to give yourself and your brain time and space to consider and reflect on each one. Do not attempt to reflect on all of these topics in one day.

A more comfortable and effective pace might look like 1 topic per week, if you’re reflecting casually throughout the week. Or 2-4 topics per week, if you are reflecting more intensely.

Skip What Isn’t Relevant or What Feels Challenging

Only reflect on topics that are relevant to you. Some of these topics may not apply to you, and that’s ok. If a topic doesn’t apply to you, or it does but the example you have for the topic isn’t that meaningful or significant, you don’t have to spend time reflecting on it.

Likewise, if you bring to mind an example for one of the topics that feels too challenging, or that you don't feel comfortable going into right now, don’t reflect on it. There’s a myth that growth requires you to always examine the things that are painful from your life. This can be psychologically harmful. Your brain will let you know when you’re ready to reflect on something by creating a sense of curiosity or interest in the topic.

Reflect in a Quality Space

The space around you really matters for quality, insightful reflection. Make sure that the space you’re in is comfortable, private, and safe. You can reflect from a room, a place in nature, or while on a walk so long as there aren’t too many distractions. If you need to, you can make a space better for reflection by tidying it up, putting on some soft music, lighting candles, and changing the lighting.

Get Into a Reflective Mindset

Quality reflection doesn’t happen if you’re in a mindset where you’re rushed, stressed, or pressured. You need to be in a mindset that is open, curious, or interested in what you’re reflecting on. This gives you the greatest chance for reaching the insights you need about yourself.

If you’re feeling rushed, stressed, or under time pressure, try to address those things first before reflecting. If you’re in the middle of reflecting and feeling these things, try to stop and come back to it later.

Take Notes

When you reflect on each of these topics, you’ll probably want to grab a notebook or some other way to capture any values, beliefs, life principles, identities, or other meaningful aspects of yourself that you discover. If you like to journal, you may also want to write out and capture longer form thoughts.

Later, you can then take any of these meaningful factors you discover, and reflect on them directly to reach a deeper understanding about how your values, beliefs, identities, and principles work in your life.

Reflection Topics for Self-Discovery

#1 An Important Life Decision You Made

The important decisions we make in our lives can reveal what we care about, what we believe, and what our principles are. Whenever we make a decision, these factors are influencing our choice, one way or another. Although we aren’t always aware of these factors at the time of making the decision, we can reveal them later through reflection.

This can include things like deciding to quit or start a job or career, deciding to enroll in or leave a school, deciding to leave your home town or move to a new place, deciding to start or end a relationship, deciding to start a family, deciding to start or stop buying some types of products, deciding to start or stop eating certain foods, deciding to pursue or stop pursuing a life goal or mission, or other life decisions.

#2 A World Event That Deeply Affected You

There are things that happen in our world every day that are shared and talked about in the news and on social media.

Some of these events can create a strong reaction in us. We can feel angry, fearful, inspired, hopeful, moved to action, and more.

When we have a strong reaction to such an event, there’s an opportunity to reflect and reveal something about ourselves, such as what we care about, what we believe, how we see others, or how we see ourselves.

#3 A Challenge You Overcame that Taught You Something

The challenges or adversities we overcome in life always leave us with new knowledge, understanding, and lessons that we didn’t have before. These can come in the form of principles that guide our future decisions, as well as a new purpose or new goals to pursue in the world. Sometimes we gain these principles and goals automatically, but other times we reveal them only through looking back on challenges once we feel done and over with them.

This can include challenges related our health, challenges related to our financial or living situation, challenges related to our psychological well-being, challenges related to how others treat us, challenges related to our work or career, or other challenges.

#4 A Culture or Group of People You Feel at Odds With

Cultures, groups, communities, and other social contexts are some of the most under-examined aspect of our lives, yet they can be the most powerful for discovering different factors in ourlife, such as what we care about, what we believe, our identities, and our principles.

When we choose to participate in or avoid a group, we are often making that choice based which of these factors the group enforces or discourages.

When we come across a group we feel at odds with, that creates an opportunity to reveal our own values, beliefs, identities, and principles in contrast. For example, if a group values someone we don’t value, that can show us what we value instead. Or when a group believes in something we don’t believe in, that can reveal the differing beliefs we hold.

Cultures and groups can include things like clubs, local communities, online communities, meetups, work groups or cultures, political parties, religious communities, school cliques, groups defined by a nationality or geographical region, or other kinds of cultures and groups.

#5 A Culture or Group of People Where You Feel Like You Belong

While we can discover aspects of ourselves through reflecting on the groups we feel at odds with, we can also benefit from reflecting on groups and cultures where we feel like we belong, or where we feel at home.

When we feel a sense of belonging within a culture or group, the values, beliefs, identities, and principles of that culture or group can become invisible to us, acting like ‘the water we swim in’.

But by taking time to step back and reflect on these cultures or groups, we can reveal a surprising number of things about ourselves. This can not only help for self-discovery, but in seeing how this works in our life, we reveal a newfound freedom and choice about how we navigate the cultures and groups in our lives.

#6 Family

A family, whether by blood-relation or not, is a unique kind of social group that can greatly influence key factors in ourself. We can adopt many kinds of values, beliefs, identities, and principles from an early age, often without realizing it. We can also reject certain values, beliefs, identities, and principles enforced by our family.

When we directly examine the impacts that our family has had on different factors in ourself, it can often be surprising how much we live our life according to these key factors that we adopted from our family, and how much they make us who we are today.

Taking the time to explore these influences can allow us to discover a lot about ourselves, while also helping to reveal opportunities to make new choices that may diverge from the influences of our family.

#7 A Goal You Achieved

Achieving a goal can be an important and transformational moment in our lives. The achievement of a goal can unlock new opportunities, create new changes, and start new chapters in our lives. When we achieve a goal, we can take on new identities, new beliefs, new values, and new principles that we now live according to.

When we look back on a goal we achieved, we can trace our steps to reveal how we were successful and gain lessons that we can apply to our future goals or to help others who are pursuing the same goals.

#8 A Goal You Failed to Achieve

While it can be painful to fail at a goal we set for ourselves, we can discover a lot about ourselves by looking back on past failures with distance and fresh eyes.

Pursuing goals, no matter if we are successful or not, are journeys that force us to make priorities in our life, face and react to barriers and roadblocks within ourselves and from the outside world, and challenge our assumptions about how the world works, what we really want for ourselves, and what we really care about.

Goals can include things like learning a new skill, stopping an unhealthy behavior or habit, improving one’s relationships, increasing one’s education, changing one’s financial situation, pursuing a dream career, or other goals.

#9 A Person Who Supported You

By taking time to reflect on people who have supported us and influenced our lives, it can shine a kind of spotlight on the aspects of ourselves that they may have recognized from the outside, but that were less clear to us.

#10 A Person Who Challenged You

The people we have relationships with can have an enormous impact on our lives and who we are as a person. We can adopt certain ways of seeing the world, begin to focus on certain things more than others, develop new understandings, and see ourselves in different ways.

When we experience a relationship with someone who challenges us, either in a negative or positive way, it can place tension on different factors in ourlife such as what we believe, our sense of ourselves, what we value, and the principles we live by, often forcing things in us to change.

Reflecting on these kinds of relationships can not only help us discover aspects of ourselves that were shaped by the relationship, but also, aspects of ourselves from before the relationship began that we may have since changed or abandoned.

This can include relationships with a romantic partner, a business partner, a coworker, a boss, a friend, a family member, a child, or someone else in our lives who challenges us.

Conclusion

These are not the only reflection topics that can make it easier and more natural for you to discover aspects of yourself. You can take these topics as inspiration to come up with other topics to explore and reflect on, the important thing is that they feel connected to meaningful and significant direct experiences in your life.

Self-discovery can be a valuable journey that lasts your entire life. As we grow, experience new things, meet new people, and are challenged in new ways, we continue to change and adapt. This creates so much opportunity to continue learning and discovering more about ourselves.

I hope that following this guide and reflecting on these topics shows you that self-discovery doesn’t have to be vague or unproductive. And I hope you’ll see that self-discovery can be a profound, enriching, meaningful, transformative, and energizing experience that genuinely improves yourself and your life.

MacLain Christie

Co-Founder of Inqwire

Inqwire is a Public Benefit Corporation on a mission to empower people to make sense of what matters, alone and together.