Let’s pretend for a moment that you have been hired for the most challenging job of your life, to build something from the ground up, with entirely raw material. Your training consists primarily of your past experiences, tons of conflicting information from all your colleagues around you, and whatever you can pick up instinctively on the fly. How would you approach this project? Would you forge ahead blindly, regardless of the outcome, without ever pausing to plan or evaluate how you’re doing? Would you blame the material when things go wrong? Would you disregard the feedback of experts in the field and push through with your own method even if it wasn't working?

It’s likely if you did any of these things in a “traditional” job, you’d be sternly rebuked or even fired. But when it comes to parenting, many of us set ourselves on automatic pilot and allow ourselves to be controlled by our subconscious. Sometimes, this works out in our favor, but other times, when those subconscious drives are maladaptive, it can have disastrous consequences. We may be stuck in a counterproductive pattern of behavior that causes harm to ourselves and others. To gain back our power, we need to become conscious of what we are doing, feeling, and thinking- and this is exactly what self-reflection can do for us.