A tale of two reflections
Having started the practise of reflective writing after each coaching session I’ve recently extended this to my training and facilitation work – possibly a bit belatedly but better late than never! This has lead me to start reflecting on my reflections, what aspects of my coaching and facilitation work do I naturally home in on for reflection – the good, the bad or the ugly.
A good case in point occurred yesterday, delivering two training sessions for groups of around 50 graduates. During the first session I suffered major IT problems within MSTeams, leaving me still connected but with a blank screen, unable to see the participants, the slides (which were being operated by a colleague), or any other functions. I simply had no choice but to keep going with the delivery and hope the slides were being changed to match up with what I was saying. Needless to say this was quite stressful, my brain was telling me to run but I had to fight this urge and re-establish my internal control of the situation (ironically part of the session was discussing Julian Rotter’s Locus of Control!). Thankfully, for the next session, same content but different participants, MSTeams managed to hold it together and the delivery went as planned.
Looking back on my reflections from the two events where was my focus, on the good or the bad? Needless to say, I had much to reflect on from the first session, and most of this was focused not on the positives - how I managed to gain some control in a very challenging situation - but more on my feelings as I felt the ‘ship started to sink’. On the second session I had very little to reflect on - it all went to plan so where’s the learning there? But that’s just the point. Even for those ‘uneventful’ events, there’s still learning to be had, reinforcing things we do well and reminding ourselves of our successes.
Clearly the primary goal of reflective writing is to learn from our experiences, and there is always much to learn from our failures and mistakes. But my learning from yesterday’s reflections is that another important aim of reflective writing is to reinforce our achievements in order to build our self-confidence and resilience. Sadly, to date in my reflections, with my focus purely on the learning, I have tended to focus more on things that can be improved, or my areas of development. This has clearly led to a bias toward reflecting on the negative (or not quite so positive). However, as research has shown, we need a good balance of positive to negative – a ratio of 5:1 has been found for healthy marriages (Gottman, 2000) and individual performance (Losada and Heaphy, 2013) – and perhaps the same is true in our reflective writings.
So my takeaway from this is to maintain a healthy balance in my reflective writings between the good experience and the less good. Understanding that there is more to reflective writing than just understanding areas where we need to develop, but also to reinforce past learning - think about what we have learned in the past that is still working for us.