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The Importance Of Reflection In Professional And Personal Development

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This essay provides discussion on the importance of reflection in professional and personal development. It glances at the definition of Reflection and how reflective practices could be used by professional bodies to ensures Continuous Professional Development (CPD). Moreover, it explores the roles of reflection in the provision of quality care and likewise focuses on a model of reflection and its application to practice. Individually, we reflect on things we have done in other to improve our ideas. Personal development is a way we as individuals reflect, assess and review our strength and weakness in other to set life purposes which attain and maximise our potentials. In everyday speech, Reflection can often be overlapped with reviewing in relation to common sense but according to the RCN (2017), “reflection is a conscious effort to think about an activity or incident that allows us to consider what was positive or challenging and if appropriate plan might be enhanced, improved or done differently on future”. Kottkamp (1990) described reflection as “a cycle of paying deliberate attention to owns actions in relation to intentions…for expanding one’s views and making choices about improved ways of acting in the future, or during the action itself” (p. 182). Schon (1983) in his book “The Reflective Practitioner” suggested that there are two types of reflection we are involved in regarding an experience. He described these 2 sections of reflection as ‘reflection in action’ and ‘reflection on action’. Reflection in action is a process required by professionals to assess and observe their own experience in practice as they occur while reflection on action has been described as a process used to review, examine, explore and evaluate their previous practices with an insight aim to improve their future practices. In relation to professional development, reflection is important to nursing in the sense that it helps detect areas for development which helps improve their skills and to learn from their past experiences whereby it provides the best suitable solution for the future experiences. (RCN 2017, Kottkamp 1990, Finlay 2008, life Coach Directory 2017, Schon 1983). Reflective practice could be described as a

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