Well said, and definitely an important, oft-neglected point. One thing I'd like to add is that if you can control what you feel good and bad about, you can do some nifty things to your behavior. For example, at some point I managed to flip my reaction to noticing flaws in myself from negative (boo, I have a flaw) to positive (yay, I noticed my flaw and can try to fix it now). This made me significantly more reflective.