How to practice reflection

Understanding reflection

Reflection is the process of taking the time to learn from experience. It involves reviewing your day, week or project, without bias, to contemplate your performance.

Why reflect?

When you take time to reflect honestly, you will gain a deeper understanding of your motivations, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This heightened self-awareness will enable you to identify areas for improvement, challenge your assumptions and develop new perspectives. Through introspection, you can develop a mindset of accountability and the self-awareness you need to achieve your potential.

How to build a reflective practice

To get its full benefits, make reflection a habit. Here are some practices to get you started on building a regular habit of reflection:

1. Keep a daily journal: Schedule a few minutes at the end of each workday to do this simple reflection — ask yourself:
· WWW: What went well? What went well? Celebrate success and learn from it so that you can do more of it and build on your strengths. Why? Too often, we only reflect on when things go wrong, which means we miss out on opportunities to learn from success. Learn from success to be more successful.
· EBI: Even better if? Don’t ask what went wrong? This leads to blame. EBI leads to learning and action. It forces you to think about how to do things in the future.

2. Set an hour aside each week to review your notes: Schedule a meeting with yourself and block out the time on your calendar. Prepare for your review by setting yourself some guidelines: Be rigorous and honest. Even if a colleague let you down, ask: what could I have done differently? How will I approach this situation next time? It may be uncomfortable to examine your shortcomings but remember, you can’t get better until you know what to get better at.

3. Don’t just re-read your journal entry: Add to it. In retrospect, are there things about the situation that you can see differently? Press yourself. Were your initial observations correct or do they reveal something else, something you couldn’t see in the heat of the moment? Try to think of yourself as neutral observer.

4. Think about the future: Now the question becomes: what have I learned that I can take into the future? How can I do even better? In the case of something not going well, ask yourself what you could do differently in the future. This way you are cultivating a growth and accountability mindset that switches your thought patterns from judgement to learning.

Prompts for your reflective practice

Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle was developed by Graham Gibbs in 1988 to give structure to learning from experiences. It offers a framework for examining experiences, and given its cyclic nature lends itself particularly well to learning in a professional environment, allowing you to learn and plan from things that either went well or didn’t go well.

Final word to Peter Drucker — “Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.”