I am now at the halfway point in the first unit of my Masters degree, and so will be taking a mid-point retrospective. I have been asking myself recently “what is reflection” and have taken time to look at how I write these blogs and what their purpose is. I have also decided the take the writing of the blog in a different direction, I feel I may have missed the point of the blog on the posts before this one, and hopefully, the following posts improve and will better structure.
So what is reflection? Reflection is a way to look back at ways to improve or refine future endeavors, analyze how successful a piece of work has been, and prepare one’s mind for the next one. With that in mind, I look back at my first 6 weeks. I have struggled to blog during this time, it was new to me, and it’s not a skill I feel particularly well versed at.
In order to improve the blog posts, I feel I need more structure in my writings. A guide for me to follow in order to properly collect my thoughts. I was advised about the Gibbs Reflective Cycle while developing my own process. The cycle focuses on a description of the topic, a discussion about feelings about the topic, an in-depth evaluation, an analysis, a conclusion, and an action plan. It’s not like any other academic process for writing I have ever looked at due to the focus on self-reflection and improvement instead of factual writing with the goal to answer a specific question.
The second thing I want to start doing in the second half of the unit is to write my blogs with the intention of answering a question. I feel this will help direct the topic of future posts towards research that will help me write the blog while accelerating my own personal growth through more purposeful and directed research because of the more defined question. For example, my question for this post is “What is reflection”, and as a tangent, I will be self refecting following the process I found.
The final thing I want to do is to make more time for the blogs. To be totally honest, I hate blogging, its not for me and I don’t get it. I am a person who does things, writing takes take from doing those things, so therefore I do not like it. So with that in mind, I want to get it out of the way quicker and I think that set time to write the posts would be more effective overall. I did debate the idea of creating an AI to write the blogs for me from audio snippets of my ramblings but thought better of it given the point is to self-improve. Ultimately the blog needs writing, and I am the one who has to do it. Hopefully, writing grows on me with better writing processes. I initially thought that I would be better off waiting a couple of weeks behind the actual work week to give time to learn how the week affected what I would write but this doesn’t seem to have worked very well as any delay puts me far behind and I don’t gain the benefit of seeing what my initial thoughts were before I learned about the weeks content making it much harder to self crit my own work. The action plan will be to a) catch up to the “live” point. and b) keep at that week.
Things I want to stop doing should be discussed too. I have noticed I have been avoiding challenges in favor of analyzing what’s possible, relying on my existing skills, and ensuring I can provide a finished product. While this is great for the world of business, it’s not pushing me to be my best, it’s me doing the thing I know and am comfortable with, I also have the luxury of time to fail and learn on this Masters course. So with that in mind, I will consider this personal challenge: If it seems impossible, Find a way to make it possible. I will be trying much harder to push myself out of my comfort zone
The second thing I want to stop doing is working without care for the time. I have a bad habit of working all hours of the day on various projects. I like to fix things I see as I work and so after starting will work until it’s done. Instead of working like this, I want to set aside time for specific projects so that each project gets its own dedicated time. This should allow better focus on each thing at its own time, it should also improve productivity. I did try a trial run of this workflow where I allocated 2 hour periods for each project and then looped around when I hit the last one, given I was always 2 hours from a break/deadline, I found that I was always working at my peak, carefully racing against my opponent, time itself and staying motivated for much longer with a much-reduced burnout.
I can improve or optimize many aspects of the way I take this course, however, one thing I want to keep prioritizing is that I want to continue to attend as many sessions and meetups with the other students. Seeing their work inspires me with my own, and reminds me of what I am working towards. And what am I working towards? Well at the moment I am learning just that and am pretty sure I am narrowing it down. For now, I just want to improve, test myself where possible and get used to the course structure. A future post will cover my recently discovered career goals.
Bibliography
Adeani, I., Febriani, R. and Syafryadin, S., 2020. USING GIBBS’ REFLECTIVE CYCLE IN MAKING REFLECTIONS OF LITERARY ANALYSIS. Indonesian EFL Journal, [online] 6(2), p.139. Available at: <https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/IEFLJ/article/view/3382/2034>.
Geoghegan, D., 2021. Expert Program Management. [online] Expert Program Management. Available at: <https://expertprogrammanagement.com/2019/05/gibbs-reflective-cycle/> [Accessed 4 July 2021].Geoghegan, D., 2021. Expert Program Management. [online] Expert Program Management. Available at: <https://expertprogrammanagement.com/2019/05/gibbs-reflective-cycle/> [Accessed 4 July 2021].