The reflection game: enacting the penitent self was a very intriguing read, because it touches upon something that I’m personally interested in – the entanglement of the economic structure with live in, with our personal selves. The article discusses a certain mode of performativity that is apparently required to complete the PG Cert. It focuses on the idea that doing the PG Cert requires the student to perform and ‘emotional journey’ like the ones we are used to when watching TV transformation shows. It’s a provocative comparison considering how cruel, shallow, and exploitative these TV shows are. 
What really stroke me about the article though is this sentence: ‘The subject is corralled into an insidious form of performativity wrapped in a therapeutic discourse of self-discovery which requires a ‘textual enactment of academic life’ (Ruth 2008, 99): at best formulaic, at worst amounting to a colonisation of the private self.’ 
There are several points to think about here:  
As a student, you play along the rules to achieve a pass / good grade etc. You have an assignment, you read it and you try to solve it. But usually, these assignments do not include your personal involvement / opinion of them, nor do they define you. 
I can take on a job and understand what sort of duties and responsibilities the job entails. If I don’t agree with them being the most efficient/ helpful for the organisation and the environment, I can always go to my manager and discuss it with them. But how my manager responds, ultimately shouldn’t affect me personally, because at the end of the day, it’s just a job. I should be able to find my personal / life satisfaction outside of the work environment. 
A counter argument would be, that this attitude leads exactly to alienation and depression. Job satisfaction comes from being able to make a change and see how your work directly influences a potential outcome. So, we are personally involved in our job life if we want to or not. 
Maybe what interests me is not only ‘the colonisation of the private self’ (because at work the private self is automatically colonised to a certain degree, as I wrote above), but ‘the colonisation and standardization of the self, modelled after the narrative of overcoming a struggle’. As the author playfully alludes, there’s something suspiciously religious and meritocratic about it, but it’s very covert. 
Maybe the issue is that ‘reflections’ are being measured against a certain score system. That’s not what reflections are usually for. They’re free thinking, which might sometimes lead to conclusions, but often might just stay observations, entirely ‘without use’. And maybe that’s where the frustration comes from; the private self in this case are actual musings and observations we might have, and we are confronted with the idea that they must be productive. Since we must measure our own thoughts respectively against each other, we start to perform ‘worse’ observations / thoughts and ‘better’ ones. Involving emotions becomes a further banalisation with the goal to exemplify the difference between these thoughts. 

Bruce Macfarlane & Lesley Gourlay (2009) The reflection game: enacting the penitent self, Teaching in Higher Education, 14:4, 455-459