Achieving Goals

Once you have set a number of goals to work towards you need to remain focussed. A key way of doing this is to reflect.

What is reflection?

Reflection has many benefits:

• Reflecting on and learning from your experiences, including your mistakes, can help you to avoid repeated errors.
• Identify successful aspects of an experience and those principles which might usefully be applied to other situations.
• Explore thoughts and feelings, work through difficult or painful experiences, develop self awareness and fresh insights.
• Move away from routine or knee-jerk actions and make conscious and informed decisions after weighing up all aspects of a situation.
• Make links between theory and practice.

Reflective Log

The backbone to the whole Award is the Reflective Log; it affords you an opportunity to acknowledge on a regular basis your general development, what has been achieved, what challenges you have overcome and what further action is required.

How do I reflect?

The basic approach is that you describe an ‘experience’, what happened and the circumstances that surrounded it and then jot down your reflection and its meaning for you. During your account you should reflect on the skills you have utilised from your degree. This is useful as it will give you an opportunity to identify whether these skills need further development, but will also enable you to see the links between your degree and your placement.

You should then discuss the progress made towards each of your goals. You can discuss this with colleagues and your line manager to allow you to use others’ viewpoints and take any further action required in order for you to meet your goals.