Internal dialogues — self reflection and daily improvements — the road to a senior quality engineer!

I have this internal daily dialogue that I have with myself daily that looks at what work I’m doing and self-talk questioning. Can any other people relate with this internal dialogue?

My dialogue would be on the lines of have I got my priorities right? What do I think of the work I’m doing? Is there anything that I could be doing differently?

It’s a skill to critique your own work

This type of thinking someone mentioned to me once was a skill of a person that has some experience under their belt and can start to critique their own work. For example I was thinking about an assessment this week and realised that I had completely missed thinking about the assessment in a certain way. This then turned into a value add by suggesting a product improvement.

Career progression — skill of self reflection

This skill of self reflection is interesting and I believe that it might help with career progression when thinking of moving from a junior/mid level tester to a senior.

How could you develop this type of self reflection?

This type of self reflection seems to be taught to students in all types of education and I believe rather than a teacher/mentor/manager asking you these questions, you can ask yourself these questions to create that internal dialogue.

What I’ve come up with are some daily and weekly questions you can ask yourself. Perhaps you could come up with your own questions?

Daily Questions

• What did you get done today?
• What did you think of the work you did today?
• Did you set the right priorities for the day?
• What do you want to get done tomorrow?

Weekly Questions

• What did you focus on during the week? Have you focused on the right things?
• What weekly wins have you had / what are you most proud of?
• What are you going to focus on next week?
• How can you improve on what you did last week?