This week’s post is by Chevy, our Chief Mentor Officer. In it he speaks about some of his personal thoughts on reflection and shares a few key ways to redefine our thoughts on reflection. Take a contemplative moment to think about how you’ve used or underutilized reflection in your own path.
Photo by Taras Zaluzhnyi on Unsplash
As I taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point, I became familiar with much of the literature regarding leader development of the self and of others. We defined development as that expansion of a person’s capacity to know oneself and to view the world around them through multiple lenses. I was placed in an environment that consistently asked me to set conditions for growth by designing and implementing new experiences. My job was to create new challenges and then help West Point cadets make sense of their experiences. As I prepared these cadets to be future Army officers, I came to find that a major component within any adult developmental model, be it leadership theory, moral/ethical theory, or organizational theory, was reflection.
Robert Kegan, a current Harvard professor who has expanded on the ideas of Erik Erikson, describes an individual’s identity-building process by saying that we take in reality and construct new perspectives based upon those experiences. Reality, then, is not the same for all people because we learn from our experiences differently through self-reflection. In this light development relates directly to “increasing one’s ability to comprehend complexity in the environment and integrate this complexity into a new model” for personal action. In other words, we must interact with and interpret stimuli and then utilize what we’ve learned in new contexts. If you read into this you’ll recognize that we all individually determine what is meaningful, so we must take ownership of the process. I’d argue that reflection is the key methodology of this ‘ownership’.
Reflection may not be automatic. It requires time. Many times it requires solitude, or at least a space for little-to-no distraction. Often it requires prompting, guiding or coaching from someone else. In all instances it is critical in order to unbox, examine, organize and repackage our individual experiences. It is a creative journey that is critical to discovering who we were, who we are, and who we can potentially be. In his work “Unthink: Rediscover Your Creative Genius” author Erik Wahl crafts a story almost holistically based on reflecting upon our experiences to build and develop not a new you, but a better version of who you already are. His intro is a reflective map of his own life and the sections of the book are simply ‘Then… (who you were)’, ‘Now… (who you are)’ and ‘How… (who you can still be)’. Reflection isn’t necessarily about redefinition as much as it is about reframing or refocusing. Remember, this is about gaining an understanding of the lenses that we perceive our experiences through. The combination of reflection, whether guided or introspective, with developmental experiences breeds new capacities for knowledge.
Life in the military brings about many challenges and opportunities. Dependent upon how we perceive and define each developmental instance they can be either a challenge, an opportunity, both, or maybe even the majority of one and a little of the other. A way we define what each instance may be is hindsight. While our military occupations expect and request that we all be reflective, we aren’t given a lot of space to do so. On top of this, we are also pushed into the dual role of trying to be as proactive and future oriented as possible so we can adapt, plan, readjust, and hopefully succeed. You can’t just let the future happen. My experience in the Army has pushed me to be very ‘present in the moment’ with decision making, as decisions have to be made quickly and successfully.
This takes an active focus on many different factors at once. It drives a very timely reflectiveness to take into account our experiences in order to make the best decisions. Put in other words, we must put the past in proper context in order to be present minded. We then have to develop an ability to draw this presence of mind forward to become future focused. Being present minded means “taking it all in”; this is inclusive of (but not limited to) all reflections, impact indicators, environmental cues, and new learning that you may have. This also means shutting the white noise out and focusing on the here and now. Being future focused is the application phase with regard to present mindedness. After each second ticks by ‘the now’ becomes ‘the past’ and through an iterative process you should be applying what was just ‘the now’ to ‘the next’. Sometimes this will be slow and deliberate, sometimes it will be rapid and creative. All in all, our developmental process has to be contemplative, efficient, and effective.
Let’s use a quick image to flesh this out. Picture a mirror. When you look in that mirror you see yourself as you are. But you also see who you’ve become. There may be a gray hair or two, a new wrinkle or age spot, or a scar from an accident during an event in your life. You most likely learned something from the event behind that scar, and the ‘age indicators’ bring forth memories of yesteryear. In that moment you are looking at both the past and the present. With regard to reflection, I’d ask you to look deeper. Obviously the mirror doesn’t give us x-ray vision where we can see skull, sinew, muscle and brain. That’s not the type of ‘deep’ I’m looking for. How many of you thought of a mirror hanging on the wall or in your bathroom? Now picture the rearview mirror in a car. You glance up and see all the same things that I described above in a rearview mirror, but now you have to also look to see where you are going. The mirror has to be adjusted just right to aid you in your forward progress. When I think of reflection, I think from this perspective. When I ask you to think deeper, I’m placing it in the context of a rearview mirror. The past is put in the right perspective in order to allow us to be appropriately present minded, assisting us to be future focused.
Viktor Frankl, in his seminal work “Man’s Search For Meaning”, says that “life is not primarily a quest for pleasure as Freud believed, or a quest for power as Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.” He goes on to say that “one cannot control what happens to him in life but he can control what he feels about and does with what happens.” This can only happen if you proactively foster and continually nurture the reflective capacity needed to associate the past to the present in pursuit of a desired future. There is no set timeline for this – inherent to this idea is constant adaptability to challenges and opportunities. At any point one can make an assessment to begin the cycle anew, whether to deal with new information or to manage our many changes in life. The only way this all will become a norm for you is if you repetitively self-reflect and purposefully create the habit. The brain gains and retains just like muscle memory, so be habitual. Remember – always be reflective, learn to apply it now, because your purpose is to accomplish the future.
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