The Journey Of Personal Reflection To Achieve Personal Development

Abstract

Counselors whose main jobs are helping others achieve personal growth should have self-understanding and self-awareness to be effective. In order to achieve that, counselors should regularly reflect on themselves. It can be argued that students who are prepared themselves to be counselors/helpers need to do personal reflection too so that they are aware of self-characteristics which potentially impede helping processes and self-characteristics which facilitate helping processes . With this self-knowledge, they can improve themselves and experience personal growth too. The aims of this study were to elaborate and evaluate teaching methods or assignments in Counseling Psychology course in the efforts to assist students to have higher self-awareness and better personal quality. Qualitative approach was chosen as the research method and focus group discussion was selected as the data collection tool. Four focus group discussions (FGD-s) which consisted of 6-9 students were conducted in this study. The participants were undergraduate students in Psychology who just passed the counseling course. Results of study and recommendations on ways of helping students in achieving personal growth through self-reflection will be discussed further in this paper.