What Could I Have Done Differently?

NFL champion Andrew Whitworth said, “How you handle attention and success, or how you handle negativity or negative times and adversity, and how you are willing to stand up and own those moments are things you can’t know about yourself until you have walked through them and experienced them.”

Boxing great Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

We live life and we make decisions. Some of those decisions work out great, and many of them don’t. But we have to continue to live life with courage through the good times and the bad.

Peter Drucker is known as The man who invented management. He once said: “Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection, will come even more effective action.”

Reflection is about careful thought. In an article for the Harvard Business Review, executive coach Jennifer Porter wrote:

"Reflection gives the brain an opportunity to pause amidst the chaos, untangle and sort through observations and experiences, consider multiple possible interpretations, and create meaning. This meaning becomes learning, which can then inform future mindsets and actions. For leaders, this “meaning-making” is crucial to their ongoing growth and development."

She also wrote that a research study about call centers showed that workers who spent just 15 minutes at the end of the day reflecting on lessons learned performed 23% better after 10 days than those who did not reflect.

A simple way to see growth is through spending some time thinking about your day, what you did well, what you could have done better, and what you are going to do the same or different tomorrow.

In some games, I do a great job of leading and executing. In many games, I don’t. Nobody is perfect, nobody wins every game, and nobody wins every interaction. But we can all learn from every experience if we value and practice self-reflection.

Practicing self-reflection can help us learn and grow as we go through life. Practicing self-reflection can help us gain wisdom through the process of living life. And research shows that just 15 minutes a day of self-reflection can change your life.

4 QUESTIONS TO DRIVE SELF-REFLECTION

1 – What did I do well today?

2 – What did I struggle with today?

3 – What is something I need to do more of?

4 – What is something I need to do better or differently?

REFERENCES

Porter, Jennifer. Why You Should Make Time For Self-Reflection. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/03/why-you-should-make-time-for-self-reflection-even-if-you-hate-doing-it