Mirror mirror on the wall: reflective practice at its best
(6 min read)
We consistently hear the importance of reflective practice for both learning and for our own personal development. As part of people or leadership programmes I have contributed to, reflective practice is a cornerstone which is embedded from the start. Without the effective understanding and application of reflective practice, we may find it challenging to really make sense of what just happened and how we can learn from this.
But what is reflective practice? Simply put, it is the ability to generate learning from our experiences. In previous blogs, I have spoken about learning has two components, the acquisition, and the application. So, reflective practice is the ability to acquire more insights from our experiences to then apply them to future actions.
You can Google reflective practice and will find numerous models (Gibbs, Kolb & Machel to name a few). The challenge is these don’t really provide more than an overview of what we should consider. What they all do, however, have in common, is action orientation; a focus on taking the acquired insights into actionable outcomes and opportunities.
We all have the capability to reflect to some degree in all parts of our life. For example, we may think about current or previous experiences, trying to make sense of it and on occasions asking ourselves could we have done something differently. In these circumstances, it is often like holding a mirror up to ourselves. We view this through our eyes and may only see what we have always seen. However, we are all biased individuals, with how we perceive ourselves and the world around us through the perception, selection and interpretation facts, which in turn influence our assumptions and beliefs. The ladder of inference is a nice model to highlight how our actions maybe influenced through a chain of events. Without deliberate attempts to view an experience from alternative perspectives, our perception is likely to be unchanged.
Ladder of inference
Wayne Dyer, stated ‘when we change the way look at things, the things we look at change.’ Sometimes we need to view the experience from an alternative perspective. While the experience hasn’t changed, how it is viewed is. This can be likened to entering a house of mirrors at an amusement fair; you are still you, but you observe yourself from an alternative perspective. Some of these views from the house of mirrors provide perspectives of ourselves we’ve never seen and there maybe some that are less than flattering, others more so. How do we get these unseen or hard to see perspectives of ourselves? I’ve found two effective ways. The first is through a skilled mentor and the second through critical friends who we have given permission to be critical. Both of these have provided me the opportunity to explore alternative perspectives and to gain greater clarity and understanding of what I do and where needed challenge me on my thinking and actions.
Developing personal reflective practices can also achieve this. However, self reflection is not always easy. If we use the metaphorical mirror, we can take a momentary glace at ourselves and we know what jumps back is us. This is a superficial reflection. We are so used to seeing our reflection, we almost view ourselves in the manner we desire. The alternative, yet harder option is to pause for a moment to take a more persistent view and take greater notice of the reflection in the mirror. We will view our beauty, but we can also view our blemishes; we all have them. As I have gotten older and take longer views in the mirror, I notice more about myself that I hadn’t noticed before. Self reflection is the same. If we hold the metaphorical mirror up for longer, and really look, we will find out things about ourselves we didn’t previously know or have chosen to ignore.
Johari’s Window is a simple way to consider reflective practice. It views the insights provided on 2 scales, known or unknown to self and known and unknown to others. However, when we get an alternative perspective, it is likely to be more weighted in unknown self highlighting our blind spots and hidden self. We then have a choice to accept or ignore these alternative perspectives and new insights. If we choose to accept them, we can begin to understand how they can inform and contribute to our next actions.
Johari’s Window
Reflective practice is often undertaken over prolonged periods of time. For instance, when deciding to leave employment, I had been reflecting on this for well over 12 months. The hardest bit with this is being able to track reflections over these periods and being able to make sense of all the reflections. Some of us will use journals to write in which gives us an excellent source of intel. However, this can also be a challenge to reread all these reflections and even more of a challenge to make sense of them. When we are reflecting over a prolonged period of time, we can also get caught up in the recency effect. This is where the most recent reflection is more memorable and therefore becomes more focal. This can blind us to more relevant or consistent themes within our reflective practice.
Over the last year, I created a digital reflection tool which allows us to longitudinally collate our reflections. It has been used by 60+ people around the world during the pandemic. It has been a powerful tool in that those using it have been able to capture what is most important to them and observe how this has changed. The reflection tool overcomes the need for written journals and the recency effect, giving a simple yet powerful insight to ourselves and others. Having access to a tool that collates and feedbacks reflections made the group debriefs highly interactive with a greater focus on the future. Using the reflection tool with those I mentor provides a much richer context to start a conversation to focus on areas which have consistently been important, not just the most recent experiences. The likelihood is we will spend less time on our personal development while we try to navigate these uncertain times. Finding ways to make reflective practice easier and more impactful to influence future action will become more important so we don’t forget what is most important to us. Now more than ever, keeping track of our reflections and making sense of them has never been so important.
If interested in the digital reflection tool and how it maybe useful for you or your team, please feel free to email me.
Digital reflections tool
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