We live and work in a high networked, stress and complex global business environment where little time devoted to reflection. It is an over-looked skill but crucial skill for effective business leaders.
What do we really mean?
Reflection and critical reflection terms have been borrowed from education. Simply it’s having the skill and ability to ‘turn experience into learning and take skilled action’. Sounds easy? For a good reflection process you need to allow –
(1) Time
(2) Skills Development
(3) Action Learning
(1) Time
We get so immersed in our daily activities we rarely pause for quiet, reflective thought. Actively stopping, turning off all the electronic gadgets, and allotting a specific time each day or each week for reflection is crucial. I recognised on reflection, that while I work with the process and enjoy critical reflection, it’s not always easy to find the time but it would be more purposeful to develop a habit, a regular time to be alone to reflect on the week’s activities, challenges, and results.
A good habit to develop is to consciously create time for refection at the end of the week. Take your diary now and pencil in a meeting with yourself, then you can ask yourself these three questions.
(1) What did I do well this week?
(2) Where was my time spent most productively?
(3) What will I do differently next week?
(2) Skills Development – Critical Reflection Skill
There is effective thinking and non-effective thinking. Have you observed the number of thoughts that race through your head every minute? Now we need to slow down those thoughts and become more self-aware. Mindfulness has become popular in this regard over the last five years offering many various techniques. But it’s simple. Stop. Think. Reflect. Do. For our purposes we’ll focus on effective thinking skills of critical reflection.
What is critical reflection?
It’s the ability to be an active listener rather than a passive recipient of information. It helps you to become aware of your assumptions about an issue so that you can assess more accurately what you read and hear. Critical thinking is reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do. It’s conducive to good judgement. Finally critical thinking is a meta cognitive skill, it is thinking about your thinking, while you’re thinking, in order to make your thinking better. It involves 3 characteristics: Standards | Authenticity | Reasonableness
Reflection requires 2 skills: Developing Good Question and How to Answer these Questions Skilfully
Ask yourself good questions that need to be addressed.
For example, What is the purpose behind the problem? Do I have all the information I need? What are some alternative ways of solving the problem? Can the problem be solved?
And, Answer these questions by reasoning
What was the purpose behind my actions? How do I evaluate where I should spend my time? What is the evidence for this? Remember it is easy to misunderstand a situation, issue or problem without questioning.
(3) Action Learning – Believing the results of our thinking.
Finally making a decision based on reflection means taking into account all the points, though at times this may leave you unsatisfied with a decision. The difficulty not believing the results of your own reasoning, paradoxically as it may sound, is because it is hard to become aware of what we actually believe and don’t believe.
Reflection Skills Development
Reflection and critically reflection is an essential skill developed over time. It requires time, questions, reflection and action. While ‘reflection’ skills derive from education they are indispensable for effective leaders. It’s crucial to take time and reflect each week for efficient and effective decision making in business.
For more information on our new 6 week Reflection Skills Development Program Contact Us
