Personal reflection is the competency to exercise introspection and observation of one’s fundamental conscious purpose and the nature of their emotional and mental processes. It simply means that we learn different things due to our willingness to learn more and more by thinking about our life’s experiences and seeing and realizing any intentional actions in a different way. Dewey (1997) affirms the notion that reflective thinking always leads to learning. We are always busy in the hustle and bustle of our routine life and therefore cannot find enough time to reflect on our strengths and weaknesses so we can perfect our skills. It is believed that reflection on actions will allow individuals to revisit their every experience with the strong intention of learning and exploring new things and information from any event (Dewey, 1997). I always have a deep-rooted passion for the nursing profession and if I were to drop into that position in me being 35 years old with a daughter I must confess that I would feel the luckiest pursuing my favorite profession by putting my plans and dreams of helping others into reality. One of my strong attributes is that I am a hands-on learner so I would enable myself to serve my patients while learning new things, helping and managing the medical conditions of my clients, and investigating novel health care plans and strategies to quench the thirst of my curiosity as well as to become an effective health care provider. To demonstrate an effective awareness of my learning outcome, I know that I would flourish in many things related to healthcare but I know that this field has diverse challenges so I would admit my failures as I wear my success as my crown because no one can ever thrive in any field without admitting to their failures along with their success.
I have worked in the healthcare setting and therefore my background would definitely back me up to pay strong attention to details to enhance my prior knowledge and skills. I have always inspired new nursing students to think of themselves as a “dry sponge” because the years of my experience have taught me the lesson that if anybody jumps into a new goal or duty. I could explain this catchphrase of mine to you in simple words that you should think of yourself as you know nothing about that profession before so that you could “absorb” more knowledge and then “ring out the wet (full of knowledge) sponge” onto others. As I have inquisitive nature, so I would love to ask questions and also answer queries because the field of healthcare demands humility and confidence to ask questions. David Dunning (2011) states that the real ignorance starts when we look out for shortcomings in others but “we don’t see them in ourselves” so I understand that discovering my own shortcomings and working on them to inspect my abilities would be a character-defining time for my personal as well as professional life.
References
Dewey, J. (1997). How we think. Courier Corporation.
Dunning, D. (2011). The Dunning–Kruger effect: On being ignorant of one’s own ignorance. In Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 44, pp. 247-296). Academic Press.
