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Aug 28 2016

3 Reasons Self-Reflection Matters In Business

Reflection_1

In a life of business, it can become tempting to look forward and outward. You’re always striving for success, dealing with competition, and looking to better yourself, your company, or both. There are external forces at work, and there’s always someplace higher to climb. This is good. It’s a spirit of pursuit that drives some of the most successful people in business! But I’d also argue that it’s important for anyone who hopes to be successful in this kind of environment to learn the value of self-reflection. With so much focus outward and upward, here are three reasons I’d argue looking inward matters, too.

1. You Can Understand Yourself Better

The clearest benefit of self-reflection is that it can help you to gain a better understanding of your own personality or tendencies. This is true both in general and with regard to your performance in business. Self-reflection is the process of asking yourself questions to develop a deeper level of understanding about yourself, as stated in a blog post at a tech communications site. It’s actually one of the more effective definitions out there. You simply get to know yourself better, and you do so in a way that can allow you to better shape yourself as an business owner, employee, or entrepreneur.

2. You Can View Your Own Development

In addition to gaining a better understanding of yourself in a given moment or situation, self-reflection can also help you to better view how you’ve developed over time, and what that development might say about you. At an online coaching platform for MBA applicants, one student discusses the benefit of making sense of previous experiences while writing about himself. This in essence is another way of saying that through self-reflection, this student gained a more thorough understanding of what had driven him to a given point, including successes and failures. Feeling out your own history this way can help you to understand what works and what doesn’t work for you, and it can influence your actions moving forward in a very real way.

3. You Can Increase Your Leadership Capacity

It falls in line with the idea of understanding yourself and your own tendencies. However, an article at LinkedIn pointed out that self-reflection in a business environment can also help you to gain an increased awareness of problematic performance traits, the same way you might look to recognize them in employees or co-workers. With this in mind, you can actually approach self-reflection almost as a kind of performance review for yourself, particularly if you happen to be in a position of leadership. You can recognize problematic traits and address them so as to become a more effective leader and co-worker.

It’s always a good idea to look inside, perhaps particularly so when you’re in the middle of a fast-paced, competitive work environment. With too much focus on external forces and the drive forward, you can easily lose sight of what it is that makes you effective in your job, or what it is you might need to work on. Taking regular time for self-reflection can work wonders.

Patti Conner

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Written by Dwania Peele · Categorized: Patti Conner · Tagged: business, Business Woman, Canadian Small Business Women, capacity, development, entrepreneur, forward, Linkedin, outward, self-reflection, small business owners, success, understand

Jul 04 2014

Handling Negative Feedback with Poise and Professionalism

 

Praveeni

Negative feedback – it’s something all professionals deal with. Not everyone is going to love you, your products and services or the way you do business. Negative comments and feedback can either bring out the best or the worst in you as a professional. How you handle it is entirely up to you.

 

Here are a few tips for handling negative feedback with poise and professionalism:

1. Don’t take it personally
This is easier said than done as we all have feelings, some of which get hurt from time to time.  The main thing to remember with negative feedback is that it’s just an opinion, which may not necessarily be the truth. In the business world most feedback is based on your work, products or services so it’s best not to think of negative comments as a reflection of you as a person. People may like you but hate your work and vice versa.

2. Never respond in anger
Whenever you get a negative or “mean” email, voicemail, letter or phone call never respond in anger. If you’re dealing with negativity over the phone simply listen to the comments, let the caller know you understand their concerns and tell them when you will get back to them. The last thing you want to do is to respond to a caller or reply a message or email when you’re angry. Anger can affect your thinking and judgment causing you to respond in an unprofessional manner.

3. Don’t retaliate
If a customer, client or competitor makes comments that you don’t like or agree with, do not fight them. Retaliating and arguing with them will only make the situation worse. Listen to what they have to say and think about whether it is valid or not. If valid address it on a professional level. Do not trade insults or sling mud, if they wish to take that route let them it’s up to you to be the Polite Professional.

4. Distill and understand the issues
When faced with negative feedback it’s important to properly understand where it’s coming from and what it’s regarding. Take some time to process what your clients or customers are displeased with. Once you identify and understand the problem you’ll be better equipped to find a solution.

Praveeni Perera is the CEO and co-founder of Professional Edge Consulting a corporate training company based in Ottawa offering training and coaching services to clients around the world.  She can be reached via Website, Twitter, Facebook or her Blog.

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Written by Dwania Peele · Categorized: Praveeni Perera · Tagged: anger, business, business development, Business Woman, Canadian Small Business Women, Email, entrepreneur, feedback, feelings, issues, negative comments, Negative Feedback, personally, poise, Polite Professional, Praveeni Perera, Professional Edge Consulting, professionalism, respond, retaliate, small business development, understand, voicemail

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