How much time do you spend in reflection?
Like many people, I’ve had some time off this summer.
Although “time off” might be stretching it.
I seem to have spent most of it living at 100 miles an hour.
Fishing. Boats. Family. Friends. Projects around the house. And launching a fun new venture with the family which, pleasingly, has now made its first few sales.
It’s been brilliant.
It’s also been packed.
And I realised the other day that while I’ve been doing an enormous amount, I haven’t really stopped to think about any of it.
I haven’t reflected.
I haven’t sat down and asked myself what I’ve noticed, what I’ve learned, what surprised me, what worked, what didn’t, or what I might do differently next time.
I’ve just moved on to the next thing.
And it made me wonder, how often we do exactly with our working weeks?
We finish one meeting and go straight into another.
We complete one project and immediately start the next.
We solve one problem and another appears.
We have difficult conversations, make decisions, try things, get things wrong, occasionally get things spectacularly right.
And then we keep moving.
There’s always something else demanding our attention.
The challenge is that accumulating experience doesn’t necessarily turn itself into wisdom.
We have to stop long enough to notice it.
That’s the part I think we sometimes miss.
We place enormous value on experience.
Ten years’ experience. Twenty years’ experience. Thirty years’ experience.
But perhaps the number of years matters less than what we’ve actually extracted from them.
What changed because of what happened?
What did we notice that we hadn’t noticed before?
Which assumptions turned out to be wrong?
What would we now do differently?
Without those moments of reflection, it’s surprisingly easy simply to repeat ourselves.
I’ve certainly done that.
There are lessons I have learned more than once because I was too busy the first time around to pay sufficient attention.
Maybe that’s one of the strange contradictions of being busy.
The more that happens, the more there is to learn.
But the more that happens, the less time we seem to give ourselves to learn from it.
My simple task next week is this:
I’m going to stop.
Just for 15 minutes with nothing else competing for my attention.
And ask myself three questions:
What has happened?
What did I notice/ learn?
What will I do differently because of it?
There will of course, be loads in there that I’ve skimmed over.
Perhaps that’s true for you too?
We spend so much time asking:
What’s next?
Every now and again, it might be worth asking:
What did I learn from what just happened?
Quick Reflection:
How much time do you deliberately spend reflecting each week?
Less than 10 minutes
10–30 minutes
30–60 minutes
1–2 hours
More than 2 hours
Here are three experiments to play with around this idea:
Two Minute Experiment
At the end of today, ask yourself: What did I notice today?
Five Minute Experiment
Look back over the last week and ask: What did I learn?
Fifteen Minute Experiment
Sit with pen and paper and ask: What can I do differently next week?
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