Live Chat w/ Laura: Developing Your Self-Reflection Skills! Friday 11/6 at 2PM ET!

Link to participate is here!

Starting now!

Hi guys,

I will work on the transcripts for those who battled to understand in the morning.

This Kitten needs to sleep.

Anyone is welcome to watch! We ended up doing 2 vidoes:

1) Self-reflection

2) Questions from the community

Enjoy :)

Big thank you to everyone who joined in!

Live Chat with Laura: Developing Your Self-Reflection Skills!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUcnzsz-AXc

Ok, hi everyone, I think a bunch of you are in the 7 Cups Live chat room right now and I hope that you can hear me and see me okay, I was having a little technical difficulty before starting. So thank you for your patience, I see that Im starting about 10 minutes late. And I first want to say that if youre not aware we have to chat rooms going on right now called 7 Cups Live, they are both public, so guests and listeners and members can all join and participate and enjoy this chat while it is happening live. And for those of you who dont know me, my name is Laura and I work with the 7 Cups community here at 7 Cups and it is my pleasure to engage with you, to get to know you, to chat with you and I love working with all who are here, both working as listeners but also here getting support and participating in your journey to better emotional health and well-being. Both are incredibly important and I value both groups incredibly highly and Im excited to share in this discussion with you.

So today I wanted to focus on the idea of reflection; specifically self-reflection and then sort of external reflection and I was thinking about this topic, I was thinking its sort of firstly how it connects to listening and as a listener, if youve gone through your training you know that reflection is the first lesson that you go through when you go through the training and so you know this in one of the primary skills of being an active listener. On the flip side if youre a member and havent gone through our yet or its not the right thing for you right now, self-reflection is also an important skill to have in your life and in your personal journey towards becoming the best version of yourself. Its a great life skill to have. So I wanted to touch on both of these skills both how they can relate to you personally and how they can relate to your work here at 7 Cups.

So without further ado Im going to get started. I didnt get a lot of questions from people on this topic in the forum so what Ill do is speak briefly about internal self-reflection and external reflection, how they both relate to 7 Cups in our work here and then I will go into the chat room and see if there are any specific questions I can answer and then we will conclude the chat.

So first and foremost there is internal reflection and that self-reflection, self-awareness, being aware of you personally are felling emotionally, physically and in yourself generally and I think theres a lot of different ways to think about this; but one is how Im feeling, but then also hows my body feeling. And one of the ways you can spend time getting to know yourself is to reflect on how your body is actually feeling in a given moment, so one example would be hunger, when you feel hunger your body is given a signal that you need to take an action to provide substance to your body and not as a for you to reflect on a behaviour and then take action to support that behaviour and take care of yourself.

And so thats sort of the bottle east side of it and then theres also the side of it where youre in tune with your emotions and reflecting on your emotions and youve seen at 7 Cups. Weve spent a lot of time developing a mindfulness community practice into the growth path and into our forums and we now have a mindfulness chat room but this idea of mindfulness is being aware of how you feel in a given moment, its a very calm, relaxing practice that can bring more awareness to your daily life, bring more understanding and a great way to support yourself as youre dealing with very challenging emotions that you need to work through so that you can continue to live your life and be as productive as youre able to. So I encourage you all to participate in a mindfulness practice if you havent tried anything like that. I think the easiest one is to just quietly in a calm environment where theres no distractions and just breathe in and out and just take 5 or 6 deep breaths in and out; and youll be surprised how calming this can be. So that is sort of self-reflection, another way to sort of understand your emotions or understand what you are feeling at any given moment is to write. Sometimes Im writing and I didnt even realize I was feeling something until I wrote it down and I was like ‘oh where did that come from. So it can be a really good way for you to express yourself and then learn and reflect on those specific things; and you know one of the important things about self-reflection is if you know what a certain feeling is, a certain emotion is, then you can tackle it. Then you can understand it and you can work towards it and try and understand how to get through it, work around it, figure out how it can be a part of your life so that its not something that holds you back so this awareness brings you a lot of opportunity for personal growth. And once youre aware of howre feeling on a given day or moment or week or month or year, youre able to be really proactive to address whatever that feeling or scary thing might be and I think one thing Ive often thought about is this is really hard work. Its really hard to be self-reflective so that you can get to a place where you want to overcome these feelings and youre aware of them and its an ongoing thing you can have a really emotion or a really painful feeling that you just never want to feel again and that its just harbouring and you want it to go away but if you work through it, if youre aware of it. If you research it, and try and address it. Talk to a listener, go through your growth path, be mindful. You do the hard work to get through it, then you come out on the up on the other side but that doesnt mean that there wont be challenges in the future and to me has been a really important lesson in sort of myself reflective practice is that its an ongoing thing you dont get to the end. It doesnt end. There is always something to learn and grow from and theres always something for you to be aware of perceiving within yourself so that you can continue to move forward and be as productive as you can; and I think that sometimes people have told me they worked through this hard thing and it was so hard and I thought that other side of it was going to be awesome and easy and then they find out that the other side that they still have more work to do and theres more to get through. But theyre still better off from having gotten to that other side and it made them stronger and more robust in their life and their meaning and their activities.

External reflections this relates more to daily life things, when youre going about your life and youre interacting with other people or other humans are in environments that maybe youre familiar or unfamiliar and it has to do with being aware of your surroundings. Being aware of your environment and then using that information to put yourself in a good position to respond to people, to interact, to support one another, to support the group on a whole and then also yourself. It shows that you are aware of your environment and this can be incredibly good for building relationships with other people too and in terms of being a listener and this is part of listener training but I think that this is also applies to all of our members who participate in group chat rooms and community in general who are not listeners yet or are not looking to be but are aware of how other people respond to you and then you know using that awareness to summarize what theyve said, help them feel supported. You can do this in a group support chat room it doesnt have to be in a 1-on-1 chat and encourage one another to be aware of these behaviours. So summarize what someone is saying, that if someone says something to the group support chat room, you summarize back what you heard, you say okay, I heard this, that sounds really challenging and then you empathize with what theyve said and that is a really simple thing that we can all do in our lives. To show that we are aware of our surroundings, aware of our external environments and make us feel safe and comfortable in the environment.

So that, is that and anyone who wants to talk more about reflection, I encourage you to go over to the listener training page, its the first lesson and you can learn a little bit more about reflection. So that is all I wanted to say about reflection. I want to encourage everyone to engage in a self-reflection practice, whether it be writing or meditation or deep breaths or summarizing someone elses comments and using active listening skills and can really try to embrace this the moment and be aware of where you are personally and then where you are externally.

So Im going to head to the chat rooms now and see if anyone has any questions. Okay, I dont see any questions from anyone and I just wanted to say thank you for everyone who listened in, I hope that this was helpful. I really see this as an opportunity for me to connect with all of you and enjoy in community building so that you know who I am and I know who you are because you are in the chat room and you can interact in a different and dynamic way. So till next time.

Live Chat with Laura: Q & A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjdEWqOjbqI

Hi everyone, Laura again. Got some question from the group on self-reflection so I wanted to come back on answer a few questions.

Im going to be answering these on the fly and Ill do my best to answer them in a way thats really helpful for you.

Question 1: I know how to be reflective and I know how to be considerate and I think that was kind of the point, and I think they just needed someone to listen and care, so I did.

Answer 1: So yeah youre right being reflective is also largely about being considerate, nice person that people want to be around and someone you know they can trust, who will be there for them even when the topic needs to be discussed is difficult or challenging so being considerate it is a very important part of being reflective not only to those who might be communicating but also to yourself, so being gentle and kind with yourself is incredibly important part of being self-reflective.

Question 2: How do best handle someone not responding to reflective questions?

Answer 2: Interesting, so this sounds more like a listening skill, so if you are asking someone to be reflective in or about a particular experience or moment or feeling they happen to be having right now, I would say thats a really smart line of questioning and I would stick to open-ended questions which are questions that dont have a yes or no answer. Theyre questions that the individual can answer in their own way with no real point or lean towards a new direction about what the answer might be but if they dont want to be reflective you certainly cant force them to be and I would encourage that you back off and sometimes theres no reason why people dont want to be reflective about a particular thing and as their listener and as a person who might be supporting them you know the best thing for you to do is just be aware of that and support them where they happen to be that day. And being reflective can be really challenging so as long as we understand that we can be a good support for people.

Question 3: I have a terrible reputation, I also feel like I dont belong. I dont think anyone can every love me, all I ever do is fail. What can I do?

Answer 3: So this is a very challenging question and in your question, I can hear that youre struggling and were all struggling with something or another. And I just want to you to know that our community is here for you and is here to support you and Im really glad that youve joined us and theres a lot of opportunity for you to get support as you continue on your journey. I will say though that spending some time on your growth path being reflective and worrying more about with whats going with you as opposed to what you believe everyone else believes or thinks about you will be really helpful for you. Focusing on you and not letting anyone elses doing bother you. And when you bring yourself centred to yourself a little bit more there will be a lot of reflection and that It could be challenging but it will be a good opportunity for you to really see where youre at without the external distractions of a group of people who you perceive may or may not like you or have certain feelings towards you. And with that said starting a relationship that we have with our self is incredibly dynamic, weird, silly thing that we have with us for the entire duration of our live and I would encourage you to be reflective of how you feel about yourself and work towards developing some self-love and being gentle and kind and forgiving towards yourself at all times because these are the types of things that make us feel like we belong and make us feel solid and good in our lives. And so developing that relationship of love with yourself will be really helpful here but its not easy to do, so encourage you to lean on your listener for support.

Question 4: When we do go through a challenge, how can you self-reflect to make yourself feel positive about the situation?

Answer 4: Its a really good question and Im glad that you asked it. And we all face challenges everyday whether it be with family or friends, or at school or in the workplace. We all have something that were dealing with that we need to get through thats a challenge. And at any given point some are harder than others and some are easier to get through. So one thing I would recommend is going through a particularly difficult time right now to reflect on sort of what the most challenging feeling or experience that youre trying to overcome is and isolating that thing and then developing some specific action plans for how youre going to work through that particular challenge so that you know where youre going, what the plan is and how youre going to work through that particular challenge. And in terms of sort of how you manage yourself and keep yourself on track with that action plan is, I found that a lot of positive self-talk can be really helpful so that saying things to yourself like; ‘I can do this, ‘I am worth it, ‘I belong here, ‘I am enough, ‘Im happy, ‘Im good, Im worthy; all of these types of thoughts that you repeat in your mind are incredibly self-fulfilling and realizing and can really help you get through a challenging situation, especially when you are feeling really down and sometimes you have to say these thoughts even when youre not sure you a hundred percent believe them but thats when you need them the most. So even if youre not sure if you believe yourself, just keep saying these positive thoughts to yourself and of course go on your growth path, talk to a listener, say I think Im feeling this could you help me work through it to get to a better place here.

Question 5: How do we know that we are correct while we are self-analysing and reflecting?

Answer 5: In that question I hear that there is right and there is wrong in self-reflection and there is no right or wrong in self-reflection. There is only here and now and what you believe in, if you believe something to be true then thats your beliefs, if youre not sure about a particular thing or challenge that youre going through that would be a good opportunity for you to seek support from someone outside of yourself, like a trusted friend, a family member, maybe you have a therapist or youre working with a listener who can help you in getting some extra guidance if youre really not sure the way that youre thinking about something is the correct way to think about it but I would say, never judge yourself for the way that you were thinking about something because thats all you know what you can do is if youre not sure if the way youre thinking about something is true or not is to just ask someone. Is this the right way to think about it? How do you see it? If heres what I know about this situation, here is how Im feeling about it what do you think? Just getting another persons opinion you trust and then using that opinion to inform how you analyse and reflect on the given situation. Ive done that so many times, if Im not sure about something, call a good friend, I talk to a family member and I lean on people for some extra eyes and ears so that I do make sure that Im headed in the right direction. And I will say that it can be really challenging to talk to our friends and family and trusted companions about things that were going through but this is something that I encourage you all to do, it helps you build string relationships, it helps build trust and it is incredibly good for self-reflection because it gives you another set of ears and eye to really bounce ideas off of.

Question 6: How do we balance between analysing and self-reflecting and is that healthy?

Answer 6: Thats about the same question as before, but I think maybe the added question here is, can you reflect and over analyse too much, can you go too far? And I think thats not why I cant say either way, Im not a therapist or trained person, I will say that if you think that youre having the same spot over and over again and you know that its happening, that would be a great time to talk to a trusted friend or get some extra help because those can be uncomfortable but that is up to your discretion of course you dont want to spend too much time thinking on any one given thing to make sure theres a balance of good, of all these different things that are going on in your world and in your thoughts and in your external existence in your life so just be aware but its really up to you to decide if it feels like its not right, if it doesnt feel good, then I would get some help and just asked for another person to see how they felt about it and just put some feelers out to see how you might be able to better understand that thought or feeling or that situation.

So that is it and thank you all for listening again.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/87155833/Live%20Chat%20with%20Laura.docx