The Benefits of Reflective Thinking
How often do you take time to reflect? To think about your achievements, your challenges, and who you want to be as a leader. We’ve shared some of our reflections… on reflection. In particular, the importance of it as a year-round practise to help your leadership, performance and wellbeing in the workplace.
What is reflection?
Reflection is a very specific type of thinking. It’s less about solving immediate problems (aka critical thinking), and more about introspection to gather learnings and meaning from your experiences. It’s also something most of us are guilty of only making time for when we’re signing off for the Christmas and new year break.
While end-of-year reflection is important, you’ll actually experience the most benefit to your leadership, performance and well-being when you practise reflective thinking consistently throughout the year.
Take a moment to imagine your typical work day as a pie chart. How much of it is meetings? How much is managing people? How much is emails, phone calls, and (excuse our language) getting sh*t done?
Now your pie is populated, we’re guessing not a huge amount is left for reflective downtime. And from what is left, is it even a priority?
If you answered ‘not really’ or even ‘hard no’ that’s totally understandable. When work is fast-paced, challenging and there’s targets and milestones to hit, we can be forgiven for thinking busy = productive and downtime = wasted time.
But let’s leave that way of thinking behind and challenge this mindset by prioritising reflective thinking alongside our other critical to-do’s.
Why is reflection important?
Reflective thinking facilitates success and performance by helping you stay in touch with the bigger picture. It also:
Creates space for creative and visionary strategies
Offers clarity in decision making
Encourages emotional commitment
Helps you move from operational to strategic outcomes
Gives you the tools to cope with a busy workload
Tips for year-round reflection
Here’s our top three tips to help make reflective thinking a priority in the new year:
1. Get comfortable with discomfort. Reflective thinking can be hard as it requires a level of honesty with yourself. If you’re struggling, find someone in your organisation or industry who you can speak with openly and honestly. Have them ask you questions and challenge your beliefs.
2. Reflect with intent and structure. Without a structure, reflective thinking can be drawn into the weeds rather than focusing on the big picture. Create a foundation for your reflective thinking by asking yourself questions. What intrigues you? What would you do if you had a blank slate? Who do you want to be as a leader?
3. Make it a recurring ‘to-do’. Just like you wouldn’t cancel weekly one-to-ones with your team, don’t cancel on yourself. Schedule reflection into your diary so it becomes a permanent slice of your pie and a regular, indispensable habit.
