Brought to you by Jeff Thoren, DVM, ACC  

Are you taking time to slow down and learn from your daily experience?  Or are you a slave to the tyranny of the urgent, constantly putting out fires and wishing there were more hours in the day?

The practice of reflection, like many skills that make a leader more effective, doesn’t always come naturally. But you can learn to take time out to learn from every experience so that you can apply that learning in the future – as a leader, in your business, and in your life.

Here’s this month’s feature ...

When Doing Nothing is the Right Thing by Chris Musselwhite

From Inc.com - Leadership Resource Center - December, 1 2007

Highlights from the article:

• While it may sound like some New Age practice, reflection is basically just structuring time to stop what you're doing long enough to assess what's working, what's not and why so that you can adjust future actions in order to achieve a better outcome.
   

• Consider structuring time into your late afternoon to reflect on your accomplishments and personal interactions of the day. Make a list of what you think you handled well and what you didn't, and how you think you could do better in the future. By turning your observations into behavior goals, you consciously learn from your experiences.
   

• Questioning our decisions and assumptions around an issue can be challenging. Once we form a mindset, we look for validation of that mindset. Over time, we reinforce our norms to the point that we can't see beyond them. When this happens, we stop learning. You can avoid falling into this trap by structuring time to reflect and by modeling that it's okay to challenge accepted assumptions at any time. Structured reflection can create opportunities to learn even before we know we need to learn, which is key to creativity and innovation.
   

• Adding reflection to your individual or team’s routine significantly increases both the quality and the speed of your learning. The learning takes place when you debrief your experience and evaluate what just happened. The learning process looks like this: 1) you do; 2) you reflect on what you did; 3) you identify what you think you could have done differently to get a better outcome; 4) you do it again, a little differently and hopefully a little better.
   

• When individuals and organizations view challenges and setbacks as learning opportunities, they are far more likely to be agile and resilient.
   

• It's more natural to draw on reflection as a tool when we're stuck or after a failure, but don't discount what success can teach you. Reflection on our successes can teach us a lot about ourselves. Self-awareness is being conscious of what you're good at while acknowledging what you still have yet to learn. When you practice self-awareness, you're modeling that it's okay to admit you don't know everything and that we all have room for improvement. This can net you the trust of others and increase your credibility - both critical to leadership effectiveness.

  
For the full text article, go to ...
http://www.inc.com/resources/leadership/articles/
20071201/musselwhite.html

   
The Action-Reflection Learning Cycle

Leadership expert Peter Koestenbaum emphasizes two attributes of “the leadership mind.”  They are … 

1. Dedicating yourself to the continual development of self-awareness.

2. Changing your habits of thought, attitude, and mindset.

These attributes can only be developed when you take time to reflect! But our Western culture usually encourages us to do just the opposite – have "a bias for action", be productive, and don’t ever let up. Author Joan Ryan notes that, “We are a nation that shouts at the microwave to hurry up.” How true.

Disciplined reflection (either self-directed or with the help of a coach) is a great way to maximize your learning and improve your outcomes, so it’s essential to make it a priority. You can only do this by intentionally stepping off the treadmill of your busy life and carving out the time you need to think and apply the “Action-Reflection Learning Cycle.”

I believe Gandhi was on to something when he declared, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.” Perhaps it’s time that we take him seriously and see if it’s really true that you have to slow down to speed up.

 
Next Month

The brain is a social organ. Its physiological and neurological reactions are directly and profoundly shaped by social interaction. And since the brain experiences the workplace first and foremost as a social system, the ability to intentionally address the social brain in the service of optimal performance will be a distinguishing leadership capability in the years ahead.

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