Reflection, what is it and how is it used in psychology?

What is reflection and reflexivity

“Reflecto” translated from Latin means “return back.” The same term in French sounds like “reflexio” and means “thinking, reflection.”

Initially, the concept of reflection appeared in philosophy as a tool for observing the external world and a way of understanding human existence.
Through the analysis of phenomena occurring in nature and society, a person gets to know himself, seeks ways for survival and self-improvement. Today, the process of reflection is studied and used in other fields, in sociology and psychology. Reflection is a person’s look inside himself, analysis of his thoughts and actions and rethinking them.
But this process is not thoughtless, but based on acquired knowledge and experience, examined through one’s own mistakes. In addition, in sociology it is the ability to evaluate other people and make comparisons between them and oneself.

Reflexivity is the ability to analyze oneself, identify the motives of one’s own actions, including:

past actions and events;
successful or unsuccessful performance results;
emotional state;
personality traits and character that change over time.

The degree of reflection is different for each person and depends on the level of knowledge, intelligence, and upbringing. Some people constantly think about their actions and their motives, while others don’t think about them at all. An important role in this is played by a person’s desire to realize his misconceptions and mistakes, the ability to self-criticize and the need to compare himself with the people around him.

Developing Awareness

The development cycle of any person is hierarchical and it, like reflection, proceeds in the reverse order, against the flow of action.

First it is self-discipline, then self-education, then self-motivation, and then awareness of choices. And these qualities are hierarchical. It is impossible to learn to set goals for yourself if there is no self-discipline, because then these are no longer goals, but fantasies.

First comes a good worker who is self-disciplined.

Only after a person is self-disciplined can he be a qualified self-learning employee . At this level, the employee does not need to be trained and told how to do it. He will learn on his own.

Only after a person is self-educated can he be self-motivated - set goals for himself and start working with them. Only at this level does the ability to lead .

Anyone who cannot motivate himself cannot motivate other people.

This is a question both for self-reflection and for the appointment of new managers to management positions.
The next level of development includes all 4 qualities - this is a responsible employee who shares the company’s values . This category of employees and this level of awareness are extremely necessary to form flat structures: cross-functional teams, teams without a rigid hierarchy, when everyone is involved in one action and works as a well-coordinated team. This high level of awareness in the team needs to be developed.

Reflection in psychology

A sign of a mature person is the ability to accept responsibility for her actions and the life she has. If a person constantly blames others and circumstances for what happens to him, he is considered weak. Changing your worldview can be difficult.

Reflection in psychology is used precisely for such purposes. As a separate, independent topic in psychology, reflection was highlighted by A. Busemann. This scientist suggested that this process is nothing more than the transfer of circumstances of the external world to oneself.

In Russian science, the problems of reflection were studied by such scientists as L.S. Vygotsky, S.L. Rubinstein, B.V. Zeigarnik. In their opinion, the basis of the concept is thinking, leading to self-understanding, the ability to find the motivation for one’s actions, and answers to questions about personal characteristics. Scientists first defined reflection as an opportunity to “learn the truth about oneself.”

Today, reflection is one of the main directions in psychology used to expand the client’s consciousness. For example, if a person is stressed due to negative daily thoughts, but does not understand this, then he will not be able to get rid of his bad mood. In this case, it is possible to stop suffering only by understanding the underlying cause of the decadent mood, and by determining steps to eliminate it.

With a conscious decision, you can stop the flow of unnecessary thought forms and accept yourself in the “here and now” state. The specialist encourages you to look at yourself “from the outside,” as if at the hero of a series on a TV screen. The goal of a good psychologist is to teach independent introspection and obtain answers to nagging questions. Within psychology, reflection and introspection are identical concepts.

When analyzing a certain situation or action, it is necessary to realize and work through the following points:

A person’s sense of self at the current moment in time. What he experiences: anger, fear, shame, guilt, resentment, etc.
A weak point in self-awareness that has been damaged by events that have occurred. For example, inflated expectations regarding the behavior of a spouse or other family members, which led to resentment.
The ability to use the situation, as well as the difficulties that arise, to your advantage.

Reflection promotes understanding of how a person is perceived from the outside, and not just for self-analysis. The result of reflectivity is self-analysis, the formation of desired personal characteristics, and an understanding of the connection between actions and results.

Psychological reflection functions in the following directions:

Consciousness control, which includes awareness of one’s own thoughts and actions. Formation of logical thinking.
Understanding your strengths and weaknesses is self-criticism. The ability to recognize the relationship between current events, successes, failures and actions taken.
Finding the keys to solving complex problems and tasks. The ability to plan your steps to achieve goals.
Getting rid of destructive, destructive attitudes and thought forms.
Finding opportunities to make thoughtful, correct, useful decisions.
Accumulation and identification of latent abilities, talents and resources.

There is an opinion in psychology that reflection is not always good. In practice, there are cases when soul-searching and excessive thinking led to negative consequences (“woe from mind”, “many knowledge, many sorrows”). For this reason, it is important to learn to reflect competently, preferably accompanied by an experienced specialist.

Areas of manager development

The same thing happens to a manager.

The most important and difficult transition is the transition from the performer, that is, responsibility for oneself, to the level of team lead and responsibility for other people .

At the same moment, the type of activity changes. At the performer level, the developer programs, writes code and implements features, but the main performance area of the team lead is different and is located in the area of communication. This is a rather difficult transition to comprehend.

The next level is the transition to management control . This is also a psychologically difficult transition that can be made in the process of reflection. In simple terms, it's beating yourself on the wrist for trying to fix a particular situation and admitting that you're no longer an expert.

When we become managers, we immediately lose our expertise.

There is such a difficult thing as managing expert employees.
Control management is about finding systemic things that can be automated, turned into a standard, into an algorithm. The task in management management is to manage formats, not to analyze specific cases. This is the time to solve problems at the system level and build a system.

The next difficult moment is the transition to the level of entrepreneur , or, as it is fashionable to say, internal entrepreneur (interprenership). This is where the hardest part is moving from “doing things right” to “doing the right things.”

A person at the level of an entrepreneur constantly destroys the existing system, structure, and processes, because it is always necessary to follow what the customer (the market) requires. This is important for us, because digital business requires being extremely customer-oriented. Focus on the client is more important than the system built within the team. This is exactly what an internal entrepreneur does.

Then the following transition occurs: a person in the position of an internal entrepreneur begins to understand that he alone is not enough to serve the market - there are too many options. The involvement and inclusion of a team that shares common meanings becomes necessary.

There are fashionable words “turquoise organization”, holacracy, flat structures, and these also include cross-functional teams - organizations that we designate as organizations of the future .

In order to build a team of the future, you need two things:

Performers whose performance level shares the values and meanings of the team. That is, the level of awareness of each employee in the team is such that the person is self-disciplined, self-learning, self-motivated and shares the company’s mission. Only such a team can become a link in a flat structure.
The leader of such a team can no longer be called a leader. He is focused on the market, knows how to build a market service system, when each team member becomes a self-motivated leader.

Concept of self-reflection

Self-reflection is often identified with reflection. This is partly true. The difference between the concepts is that the prefix “self” indicates a reflection of oneself, and not just the external world, events and other people.

Self-reflective people constantly listen to their own feelings and emotions and try to analyze them. Such exercises are very useful for understanding your own self, personal desires and needs. How often do we focus on the expectations of other people, looking for an assessment of our actions from the outside. As a result, one’s own dreams and internal needs remain unfulfilled.

Young people enter training in prestigious professions, and their souls are drawn to creative delights. As a result, the profession does not bring satisfaction, but the parents are happy! A person lives an uninteresting life, suppressing existing talents.

There is another side. In hypertrophied cases, a person constantly listens to emotions. He becomes fixated on personal experiences and becomes neurotic, not seeing the outside world, which is beautiful. A person stops enjoying life, constantly analyzing his own condition.

In this case, it is important to get out of yourself in time, take a deep breath, feel material things: table, floor, wall, hands, feet, sounds and smells.

Many people are wary of their own body signals. Often, excessive reflection leads to neurotic diseases, for example, hypochondria (a pathological condition in which we find ourselves with all possible and impossible diseases).

Cases have been recorded when women find all the signs of pregnancy, and only the results of repeated laboratory examinations (for example, ultrasound) can dissuade them from this. Of course, if you suspect a disease, you must undergo a medical examination. But when a person realizes that his fears are far-fetched, he should move away from focusing on personal feelings and ignore them.

Team development

In order to understand who occupies what roles in group work, let’s turn to the analytics obtained on the Seendex platform based on large-scale studies of the behavior of employees of Russian organizations in a situation requiring development.

The picture is as follows:

72% of people have no attitude towards development; they don’t really need it. They live and live, work somehow, earn money and don’t think about development at all.
Only 1% of people, let's call them leaders, always strive for development - they constantly need something, they constantly change something, study something.
The remaining 27% behave situationally: if there is a leader, they follow him, if not, they join the non-developing majority.

That is, if an organization has a strong leader, then the whole company develops, new projects and interesting tasks appear, people change, their standard of living is constantly growing, their salaries and influence increase. If there is no such leader, then these 27% join the majority, act like everyone else, and everything for them moves steadily, without development.

From a management point of view, in almost any team you can find all categories of employees.

There is a very simple rule in team development: you can develop those who are developing.
You cannot force a person to develop; most people (72%!) do not need this. If we talk about the value of reflection, not everyone needs it - not everyone understands it and not everyone can be involved in it. When you manage a team, look at who is in front of you, act situationally for reasons of common sense . In this sense, there is no need to try to make all people happy, because it will not work.

There will always be people on the team who simply work for results. Next we will see what to do with this. And there are people who look to the future. Now they may achieve good results or not so much, but they are developing and will become better and more productive in the future.

Unfortunately, in Russian there is no suitable word equivalent to performance. Productivity, for example, does not fully convey the semantics of a word. Therefore, I will leave performance in the empirical formula:

The denominator is resources, and an important component of them is the manager’s brain, which is especially important in today’s management realities.

Thus, there are always people on the team who are not ready to change. It is important to understand how they work as a team and what motivates them.

There are several accepted types, for example, a service person . This is quite surprising, but nevertheless such a concept exists and is being actively studied. This is the most unreflective and unconscious type of people. Fortunately, I think there are few such people in development teams. An official person works exclusively in strict management conditions, he needs a context: goals, tasks, execution, a fixed work schedule, an overseer (supervisor). This type of people was popular until the 20th century - from slave times to the beginning of active work with machines.

An executive person already does as he was told . Generally speaking, not everyone has this property, because sometimes we like to do things the way we like best, or we think that “it will be better this way,” and not the way we were told.

The next stage in the development of an unconscious person is a motivated person . It works well with KPIs and with such a well-motivating thing as salary: do more - get more, do less - get less. Other simple motivations also work here.

The person involved needs an idea, a meaning to the work. It will work well if there is an interesting project, an interesting movement, a good team or company. Fortunately, there are many such people in IT teams.

In general, it seems that there are almost no service and executive people left in IT, and motivated and involved people are a common practice.

To take a step towards team development, let's turn to the concept of norm.

On the graph, the vertical line shows the number of employees in the team, and the horizontal line shows performance according to the formula.

We live in an age of continuous innovation, improvement and acceleration. This was not the case 20 years ago, but now the company cannot survive without constant development. Conventionally, every day you need to do something and come up with a new norm.

The graph shows the old norm (on the left) and the new norm (on the right). It turns out to be a simple formula: to get into the new normal, you need to do two things:

leave those who have high performance, that is, are in the highest (right) part of the old norm - constantly demonstrate outstanding results;
develop those who develop.

Team development becomes an integral part of the team lead’s work.

In relation to the norm, there is an expression: “Only a reflected action can acquire a norm!” It is impossible to simply move from raw accumulated experience to a new normal. Experience needs to be reflected on.

Forms and types of reflection

We described reflection as a complex process directed both within oneself and into the external world, leading to benefit for the individual, or, on the contrary, to its destruction. Let's consider what forms and types of introspection exist in psychology.

From the point of view of the impact on the future state of a person:

Correct constructive self-analysis, which allows you to understand yourself, draw logical conclusions and not step on familiar mistakes again.
Harmful destructive self-analysis, leading to neurotic disorders and deep fixation on problems, often imaginary. In such situations, feelings of guilt, helplessness and hopelessness are cultivated. A person needs the help of a specialist.

Taking into account time periods, reflection occurs:

Event-based or situational . The individual analyzes a problem that takes place in the present time, “here and now.”
Retrospection , looking to the past. A person evaluates past events and his actions, draws conclusions about their correctness and timeliness.
Perspective , facing future events. The individual plans further actions and events based on self-analysis.

Based on the object of study, the process can be divided into the following forms:

Self-reflection , turning to one’s own inner world, personal experiences and emotions.
Communicative . In this form, reflection is devoted to other people, interaction with friends, relatives, and colleagues. A person tries to analyze relationships and interactions.
Sanogenic is a type of self-analysis in which a substantive study of strong emotions is carried out, a search for means to minimize or eliminate unnecessary suffering and experiences.
Intelligent . The individual’s attention is focused on the application of knowledge, skills, and the possibilities of their use in the material world.

A combination of forms of reflection under given conditions gives the best results; it is always necessary to combine methods of analysis for a specific situation.

What does it mean to reflect?

To reflect is to think, to think logically, to analyze actions and actions, to know oneself.

Is it worth understanding your personality? Of course yes. If a person has not understood himself, he is led by others and lives someone else’s life. Low self-esteem, complexes, and feelings of guilt sit deep inside and interfere with further development. They need to be found and neutralized.

By reflecting, we learn:

Think rationally.
Stop mental “garbage”.

A low level of self-analysis is the path to making the same mistakes and blunders throughout your life. At the everyday level, the concept of a reflective person is often associated with such definitions as: “to be nervous”, “to worry”, “to worry too much”. Therefore, in any action, moderation and reasonableness are important.

It is necessary to approach your inner world soberly and calmly, without allowing emotions to overwhelm the arguments of reason. A person who knows how to reflect is his own psychoanalyst; not everyone is capable of this.

In order to “self-examine” for the benefit of your business, you need to avoid the following mistakes:

You should think about the motives for your actions, not the actions themselves . For example, a husband who cheated on his wife may realize his betrayal and vow not to do it again. But if a man does not understand what pushed him to cheat, no force will stop him from repeating the mistake, since the motives for the need to go “to the left” will remain undeveloped.
“Saw sawdust ,” as D. Carnegie said. This means constantly grinding past sins and failures in your head, coming up with possible other consequences of what has already happened. What was is no longer there, think about the current moment, make plans for the future.
Cultivate feelings of guilt . Yes, we made a mistake, but we got our lesson for it. There is no point in berating yourself for something that cannot be fixed. Everything is not without sin.
Responsible for the whole world . Processes in the world occur against our will. We should not take responsibility for something we cannot influence.

If you follow the rules outlined, then reflection is not only possible, but also useful.

Five areas of team lead development

To summarize the above, the team lead has 5 areas of development:

Execution/GTD. Focus on the performance of the individual employee. If the team leader sees that there is a person on his team who does not perform, then he either does the work for him or, as a supervisor, monitors the performance. The manager’s work efficiency is extremely low (1:1) - he actually replaces the executive level.
Knowledge/Competencies. Develop professional competencies in the team. In this case, the manager’s effectiveness is much higher and amounts to a conditional 1:3. If you develop knowledge and competencies, you can work with a team of 3 to 10 people.
Goals/regulations. Identify systematic phenomena, formulate regulations, standards and algorithms at the level of management management. The effectiveness of the manager, that is, the time spent on the result, is conditionally 1:5. It can be significantly higher - 1:10, depending on the company.
Values/Meanings . Transform the system based on market requirements, develop customer-centricity. This level of responsibility and this direction is the real work of a leader - a manager.
Team development. The highest level is what you need to strive for in the work of a team lead.

Come to Saint TeamLead Conf on September 23 and 24 in St. Petersburg, we will continue the topic and look at some patterns of behavior in teamwork. Let's talk about when leadership can look like toxicity and vice versa, and how a team leader should approach organizing teamwork to solve complex problems (as opposed to working with tasks).

How to develop reflection

The best way to learn a skill is to start practicing it. To develop reflection, you need to start practicing it.

How to do it?

Try to understand what feelings you are experiencing at the current moment. The habit of being attentive to emerging joy, anger, melancholy and connecting them with ongoing events or communications with certain people.
Monitor stories in which you react too harshly, painfully. If certain events hit you particularly hard, you need to understand what the trigger is.
If you notice that in the process of thinking about something you experienced melancholy or painful emotions, then it is better to stop soul-searching and return to the roots of the problem a little later. Highly sensitive people cannot do without the help of a specialist.
Give up total control of reality. Reflection is not a reason to put the material world into pieces. Allow life to flow outside of your participation.
In the evening, you can “scroll” your day in your head, all its pros and cons, and form plans for tomorrow.
To develop reflection, make it a rule to think systematically about any phenomenon or object that interests you.

After gaining reflection skills, you can ask yourself a few questions and give honest answers to them:

Think about whether there is something in the past that would be worth returning to and trying to start over. This could be family, work, hobbies, friends, etc. Sometimes a return to the past means the beginning of a new stage.
Clearly establish for yourself what brings pleasure and makes you happy. This will be the strategic goal to which you should devote your future life.
If you are not happy with the point you are in now, determine the actions you need to take to get out of it. Do not slip into self-flagellation or attribute all problems to external circumstances.
Truthfully answer the question of what you are doing wrong. You should not wring your hands with the question: “Why do I need this?” Take responsibility for failures personally. Where was the mistake, the flaw? The truth can be unpleasant, but without it it’s difficult to fix anything.
If you fail at a question, analyze whether everything possible has been done or whether you can try something else.
Analyze actions from the point of view of achieving the goal. This does not mean that you cannot be spontaneous and that you need to think through every step. However, when time is short, prioritization becomes necessary.

There is an opinion that the purpose of life is life itself, getting pleasure from it and those things that correspond to our internal needs. Reflect wisely, achieve what you want and be happy!

Activity

Let's consider the scheme of human thinking through the cycle of action. There are 4 main processes corresponding to the 4 types of communications that we discussed in detail last time.

The cycle of action in this diagram goes clockwise. The “I” with its values receives a call to action that determines the meaning of the activity. Ideas and emotions arise, the next step is prioritization - goals and objectives, motivation arise. At the stage when tasks are defined and need to be performed, knowledge and competencies are needed. GitHub, Google, communication with colleagues helps to upgrade them and begin the execution stage - GTD. Getting Things Done is the performance zone where the actual creation of value that meets the initial call to action occurs. Sooner or later we get a result that creates a new experience. New experiences give growth and new opportunities (new meanings).

If we repeat the cycle many times (and we do this all the time in our work), sooner or later our brain will turn into a pile of unsorted experience. Only one person, and even then with difficulty, can figure it out. He relies in his reasoning on fragmentary, unsystematized cases, operating, let's call it, thinking based on examples .

If everyone in a team thinks based on examples, then a new task is discussed at the level: “I have this experience,” - “And I have another, and what are we going to do?”

When experience is unclear, it is very difficult to decide what to do in a new situation. Conversation at the level of sharing life experience does not work if you need to find a solution to a new problem. Therefore, with the “curl” that occurred on the basis of experience, something needs to be done - “develop” it!