Learning Through Reflection
By Murray Johannsen
The Trap of Experience
"People Don't Learn From Experience — J. Edward Deming
Deming, as the founder of the quality movement, takes an extreme position. However, most people don't learn from experience. There are people proud of the 15 years of experience they have put on their resume. But it's really a bit misleading. It's really one year of experience repeated 15 times.
When I was young, I have a paradigm that went something like this, "People learn from their mistakes." However after watching human behavior for many years, I've concluded just exact opposite--some people learn from their mistakes, but most do not. The vast majority make the same mistake over and over and over again.
One of the primary reasons for this phenomenon, I believe, is a lack of reflection.
Definition of Reflection
Reflection has been part of Buddhist philosophy for thousands of years. However, reflection is a relatively new term in the West.
Reflection, in essence, is when we focus our attention on the processing of either external or internal experience. It is different than just being aware of something. We are also making a judgment on whether this experience is worth changing or keeping the same. Reflection has many many different types of uses and represents a major way we learn. It's absence is a major problem preventing our ability to learn from experience.
Self-Awareness and Reflection
 Source: The Smithsonian.com
Reflection is very closely related to self-awareness. And self-awareness, is associated with consciousness and our self-concept and self-identity.
One of the more interesting experiments in this area was done a few years ago in a zoo in America. They had an elephant stared a very very large mirror. In the mirror she saw herself, but she also when she was looking at her self salt white mark on her for head. This is known as the mirror test. When she saw the red dot she was able to touch it with her trunk. She knew it didn't belong there. She was reflecting, I suppose, that this wasn't fashionable or elegant.
Four Types of Reflection
One way to think about reflection is to analyze how it is used. This breaks out into four general focus areas: external and internal experience; and two aspects of time: delayed and real time.
External reflection
External reflection is to look at the environment. To give you one example, most people review the days events, but rather than refect, "reive the past." Normally, we pick out a situation which occurred during the day in which someone causes us some distress. And then, we run this over and over and over in our minds.
Each time we review it, the associated negative emotion becomes stronger and stonger. So that the comment, that afterthought, that statement which went, "I'm not really sure you know what you're doing?" After 10 reruns, becomes a major problem in the relationship. And so, a small fire, threatens to burn down the entire forest.
Delayed Reflection
The power of this technique was taught to me years ago by a young man who went to work without having a few years of preparation known as the University. When I met up with him, he was running a half million dollar machine center, the heart of the small manufacturing company, despite the fact he did attend classes to learn how to do such a thing. He was a classic success story, having started his life as a janitor; and now was a master machinist consulted by engineers in the company when they had questions on new design and designing to manufacture.
One day, I asked him what he thought was a major reason for his success. And he said, "Teacher, this really not so hard. Throughout my entire life, I've always been willing to learn. I always can never know enough to stop learning. And the other thing, I never believed in making the same mistake twice. And so every day, on my drive home, I would review the days of events and put them into two buckets. One bucket was the things that I needed to continue. And the other bucket, were the things that I should throw away. I think those two things made a major difference in my life."
Internal reflection
This is what occurs when we are process thoughts. Doing so, allows us to determine whether particular thoughts are productive or nonproductive. This is surprisingly hard to do. First, most of what we think is forgotten very quickly after it occurs. It's like a bird flying by your window, one moment you know it's there the next it's gone. Also, very few people understand how important it is to monitor thoughts. Throughout the day, positive and negative thoughts come up--most positive ones we want to keep. The negative ones we should reflect upon and determine, if there is some useful purpose there.
A negative thought actually might have a grain of truth that we need to act on. The thought briefly surfaces, the then eating too much lately, and not exercising and, should reflect upon where that is a true or false statement. Rather than, like a bird, just let it fly away and never have it come back again.
Also, we want to be aware of another type of thought, which indicates false beliefs. There are certain types of triggers in fact that indicate these words are false. To that I always look for is always and never. Few things are always true, or always false. I might think, I can never sing, when in reality, it's just a personal choice. I could sing if I want to but choose not to.
Besides reflection being internal or external, it can also think about whether it is occurring real time or whether we ever are analyzing something that occurred in the past. Often times we need to understand and to understand we need to review events after they have occurred. This can be very powerful.
Real-time Reflection
Tthis is a very difficult thing to do. We tend to allow our thoughts to exert impact without much great screening. Just a couple examples. You think, " today's going to be a bad day." Unless one is able to predict the future, there's really no way to know whether this is true or false. If one were able to real-time reflect upon this thought, one would challenge it or examine the some assumptions underneath it to know whether it was true or false.
Another very common thought is, "I can't do this." This one is particularly insidious for it prevents us from even trying. If one accepts this is true, then you have a self-fulfilling prophecy in which people do make what they think happened.
Application of Reflection
Daily Reflection
One of the best places to start, would be to allocate a few minutes at the end of the day or at the beginning of a new day for daily reflection. Daily reflection in essence means the ability to go over past experience and determine what one should keep and what one should stop doing. It's not that difficult, everybody has time, bu we we have to start a new habit.
Improving Meeting Processes
A key meeting might be a face-to-face sit down with the boss. Another key meeting might be held in a conference room where there's seven or eight or more people sitting around each trying to solve a problem, each trying to make themselves look good.
It's been my observation, that there's always something that could've gone better, there's always a change I could have made, and there's always something I missed. I'd rather pick it up after it happened, then miss it completely.
Mastering a Skill
The third very high payoff application for reflection concerns its value as a feedback mechanism when learning we skills. If you have a personal coach, you probably don't have to do this.
However most of us will have to reflect upon our performance to determine what we could do better and what we need to change. This is a process step that we incorporate into all our skill building programs.
Wrap-up
If one wants to learn from experience, one must master reflection. It's as simple, and as complex as that. |
