How to Approach Reflection with Curiosity Instead of Criticism

The gist: Learn how to approach personal reflection with curiosity instead of criticism to help prevent rejection sensitivity.

Have you ever avoided looking at your bank balance because you know it's going to make you feel bad?

The avoidance feels protective…until you accidentally overdraft and realize not knowing exactly how low the balance was made everything worse.

There’s a similar dynamic with habits like reflection and review…especially being neurodivergent and prone to burnout.

In the past, I wouldn’t want to do things like check in on goals I’d set, do regular reflections, or anything like that.

It just felt like reminding myself of all the things that didn’t go my way, all the things I failed at, and all the goals I didn’t meet.

And to that I said, “no, thank you.”

But here's the thing: without reflection, I wasn’t understanding why things went wrong, which meant I just kept running into the same problems.

Eventually I realized that I just needed to approach my reflections differently, and I want to share what I landed on.

But first, let's talk more about why avoidance doesn't work.

When avoidance becomes self-sabotage

Avoiding reflection is an example of something that feels protective in the short-term, but can be harmful in the long-term.

Because if you never look back and reflect on why things happened the way they did, you’ll never have the understanding or context needed to change the situation.

It creates a cycle where you have a problem bothering you, but avoiding thinking about the problem makes it harder to find a solution…so the problem keeps bothering you.

But over the past few years of working on reducing my rejection sensitivity and increasing my self-compassion, I’ve been able to approach reflection differently.

By approaching reflections and reviews with the right mindset and questions, you can get through the process without going into a shame spiral.

Here’s how I try to go about it.

How to reflect without feeling like a failure

Step 1: recognize rejection sensitivity

The first step is noticing when rejection sensitivity is warping your thoughts.

It's common to over-personalize thoughts about your goals, making them more about you as a person than they really are.

For example:

• "This project was a failure" turns into "I'm a failure"
• "I have a problem" turns into "I am a problem"
• "This system is broken" turns into "I'm broken"

None of those things are true.

But recognizing this pattern is the first step to breaking out of it.

Step 2: refresh your mindset

Next, you want to replace the self-critic mindset with one based in self-compassion instead.

That means reminding yourself that:

• You're already doing your best.
• You're not the problem, some specific things in your life are.
• You don't need to change to fit your goals or systems, your goals and systems should change to fit you.

You can't let go of all your baggage around personal development in a day, and you don't need to.

But literally reminding yourself of these things—writing them down or saying them out loud—before any reflection can help you remember this is the truth when rejection sensitivity starts to say otherwise.

Step 3: think like a scientist

After you've adjusted your mindset, it's time to dig into the reflection process.

At this point, you want to embrace curiosity as much as possible.

Think of yourself like a scientist collecting experiment data.

This can help create some distance between yourself and the stuff you’re reflecting on so it feels less personal. The dataset just happens to be your life, and the data sometimes includes qualitative data like feelings.

If a judgmental or critical thought does pop into your head, you don’t need to accept it as truth. Question it like an experiment hypothesis.

Try asking yourself things like:

• Is that really true?
• If it is, why is that the case?
• If it's not, why does it feel true?

For example, let's say I'm reflecting on my fitness goals for the year. I tell myself, "I’m a complete failure" because I didn’t meet my goal of doing zone 2 cardio three times a week.

Next, I would ask myself if that's really true.

Well, I could look at the data and see I did do about half as many cardio sessions as I should have, which isn’t a “complete” failure. That should already make me feel better.

Then I could ask myself why I had trouble doing cardio as often as I planned to, and remember I haven’t adjusted my cardio workouts since my last big flare-up. So they probably got too hard when my health got worse, and I don’t have the fitness for them as often anymore.

That contextualizes things even more, and helps me figure out what to do moving forward: either adjust my workouts or how frequently I try to do them.

Thinking like a scientist like this works way better than beating yourself up ever could.

Curiosity is key

Remember that reflection isn't about judging your past, it's about understanding it better.

Because that’s the only way to change anything.

So the next time you're tempted to avoid reflection because you're worried about feeling like a failure, try approaching it with curiosity instead of criticism.

Ask yourself what you can learn from the situation, instead of what you did wrong.

And remember: you're already doing your best. Now let's figure out how to make that best even better.

And if you liked this post, you'll also love:

• 4 Steps for a Simpler Year-End Reflection (Notion Template Included)
• 14 Creative Prompts to Add Novelty to Your Year-End Reflection
• Feeling Off? 9 Signs a Life Reset Can Help
• The "New Year, More Me" Approach to Setting Goals