Reflection

Perhaps you’re making the same mistakes over and over again.

You know you are. Same arguments with your partner. Same problems at work. The same patterns repeating themselves in your life. The same poor decisions leading to the same disappointing outcomes.

Why? Because you’re not reflecting. You’re just repeating.

Reflection in its simplest terms is the process of remembering a previous event and learning from it. Not just remembering it, not just dwelling on it, learning from it. There’s a big difference.

Too many people try to forget the past rather than learn from it. They want to move on, put it behind them, not think about it anymore. Sounds healthy. It’s not.

What happens instead is they repeat the same poor responses, the same poor behaviour, in similar situations, they never learn. They never improve. They just keep making the same mistakes.

I’ve spent twenty years teaching GP trainees and young doctors, the ones who reflect properly become better doctors faster. The ones who don’t reflect? They make the same clinical errors again and again, the same missed diagnoses, same communication failures and the same issues crop up time and again.

Lack of reflection causes patterns to repeat themselves, mistakes happen time and again. But with reflection, you learn from the past and improve your decision-making process to cope with similar problems in the future.

Here’s the problem though, most people reflect badly. They get stuck in the emotional feelings of what happened, they ruminate and they beat themselves up. They replay the event over and over in their minds without extracting any useful learning from it. That’s not reflection. That’s torture.

Or they rush through it superficially, they think about what happened for thirty seconds, decide it was bad, and move on, that’s not reflection either. That’s avoidance.

Proper reflection requires a process. I use this process with trainees, with patients, and on myself when I need to learn from something that went wrong. It’s called Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle, and it has six steps.

Step one is description. Describe the event factually. Who was there. What was said. What happened. Keep it brief and factual. No emotions yet. No judgments. Just the facts. What happened?

Step two is feelings. Now you can describe your emotions. How did you feel during the event? How do you feel now thinking about it? Don’t describe the event further. Don’t talk about how things should have gone. Just your feelings. How did you feel?

Step three is evaluation. Evaluate how the event went. What went well? What didn’t go well? Do this for yourself and for others involved. Be honest. Be balanced. What was good and bad about the experience?

Step four is analysis. This is where you make sense of it. Do your research. Ask colleagues. Look at the books. Read relevant material. Try to understand why things happened the way they did. What sense can you make of it?

Step five is conclusion. Bring together all the previous four steps into a short statement. This concentrates your mind into a logical conclusion and gives you clarity. What else could you have done?

Step six is action plan. Plan how to take action in the future if the event happens again. What would you do the same? What would you do differently? What do you need to learn? How would you learn it? If it happened again, what would you do?

That’s the process. And it works. Not because it’s magic. Because it forces you to extract learning from experience instead of just experiencing things and hoping you’ll somehow get better.

Most of your learning is situational learning. You learn from doing. You can’t expect yourself to do things perfectly the first time. You need a process to help you learn effectively from what went wrong and that’s what reflection gives you.

It’s really important to remember that reflection is a process that helps you learn from the past, rather than just remembering the past or (even worse) getting stuck in it.

Remember earlier when I talked about the rear view mirror effect? When you’re driving, you frequently look at the rear view mirror to see what’s behind you, it keeps you safe, it gives you context, it helps you make better decisions about where you’re going.

But imagine trying to drive by only looking in the rear view mirror instead of through the front windscreen. You’d crash, probably even immediately, maybe spectacularly.

That’s what happens when you reflect badly. You get hung up on what happened. You get stuck in the emotional feelings of the past. You fail to come to terms with the past. You fail to make sense of it. You fail to learn from it. You’re driving by looking in the rear view mirror looking backwards and wondering why you keep crashing.

Without a proper reflection process, you can’t move forward. You’re stuck looking backwards.

Here’s another warning about reflection. People often use it wrong. They use it as a tool to focus only on weaknesses, not strengths. That’s a mistake. Reflection needs to be balanced.

If there’s a problem and something went wrong, you absolutely need to reflect on it to improve your performance next time. But you also need to reflect on what went well. What you did right. What your strengths are. Not just your weaknesses.

Lionel Messi is one of the best football players in the world, look him up, he’s a creative goalscorer and an exciting attacking player. But if you used reflection badly, you could focus on the fact that he’s not a very good goalkeeper, he’s a bit too small to be a defender, and he favours his left foot too much.

You’d miss the point entirely, his strengths are what make him exceptional. Reflection should also help you identify and build on your strengths, not drag you back to average by obsessing over your weaknesses.

Here’s a simple process you can use right now for something that’s bothering you.

Step one. Think about that problem and how it makes you feel right now. Don’t try to solve it yet. Just acknowledge how you feel.

Step two. Take yourself back to a similar time when you handled a similar problem well. See yourself handling it. Remember what you did. How you felt. What worked.

Step three. What can you learn from yourself in the past? What did you do well? What could you have done better? What can you bring from the past to help with your present problem?

Step four. Think about applying the learning you have from the past to your current problem and future problems. What will you do differently?

That’s it. Four steps. Takes about ten minutes if you do it properly. But those ten minutes can save you from making the same mistake again.

Reflection is a skill. Like any skill, it needs practice. The more you reflect properly, the better you get at it. The faster the process becomes. The more natural it feels. The more you learn from your experiences instead of just having them.

But if you don’t use a proper reflection process, you’ll keep making the same mistakes. You’ll keep feeling the same way about problems. You’ll stay stuck. You’ll keep crashing while trying to move forwards, because you’re looking backwards.

Use reflection to move forward. Not to stay stuck in the past. You’ve already lived through whatever happened. You can’t change it. But you can learn from it, you can reflect and extract the lessons. You can use those lessons to make better decisions in the future, you can turn your experiences (good and bad) into wisdom.

Or you can just keep repeating the same patterns and hoping for different results.

Your choice. But know this. If you’re making the same mistakes over and over again, it’s not because you’re stupid, and it’s not because you’re incapable. It’s probably because you’re not reflecting properly. Change that, and everything else changes with it.

Further reading

• Gibbs, G. (1988). Learning by Doing: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Methods. Oxford: Oxford Further Education Unit.
• Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.
• Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Boud, D., Keogh, R., & Walker, D. (Eds.). (1985). Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning. London: Kogan Page.
• Syed, M. (2015). Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes—But Some Do. New York: Portfolio/Penguin.