Progress on Evaluation of Self-Reflection Methods
Thursday, March 13th, 2008Earlier, I described five methods of self-reflection. For the past week or so, I’ve been evaluating how they work in practice. First, I went out and bought a nice Moleskine, since all the cool kids have one. I figured I better get something nice to document my self-reflections. It is a nice notebook. I’ve been adding about three pages every day and really like it. I of course got the one with lines in it, the one with blank pages was too “free form” for my structured mind. Here are the current evaluations of the five methods:
Naikan. This one has been one of the more surprising methods. Basically, you ask yourself three questions - What have I received from [insert someone here], What have I given to [insert same person here], and What troubles or difficulties have I caused [if you don't know who goes in here yet, you might need to ask a 5th grader]? At first, I thought this would be a lot of Zen mumbo jumbo (this is my term, I don’t believe it is officially sanctioned by the Zen crowd). But I’ve been surprised at how this is starting to make me think differently about my interactions with others. I’ve noticed that I receive a lot of things from other people on a daily basis. Unfortunately, I don’t normally realize this when it happens, and so don’t thank them for their “gift” to me. I also realized that I am woefully inadequate on giving things to others. (At least giving them good things) I definitely give a lot of trouble to people, which I also have not realized as much in the past. It has caused me to start sending notes to people thanking them after the fact, or apologizing for creating difficulty for them. The difficulty is that I wish there was a question “What troubles or difficulties has someone else caused me?” to answer. But this seems to be the whole point - stop thinking about what bad things others are doing to you, and start thinking about what bad things you are doing to others. This is definitely a method to keep in the toolkit.
Values / Virtues. Similar to Benjamin Franklin’s 13 virtues and his weekly evaluation of how many times he violated them, I’ve found this method useful. It is a good reason for continually reviewing your values, and thinking about how your daily actions are aligned with your values and personal vision. I step through the list of my values and identify how I have either done something to exemplify that value, or where I have failed to live up to one. This has been good for identifying those decisions or thoughts during the day that just don’t seem right (hmm…I wonder if I should have asked Betty if she was pregnant or whether she’s the reason the Girl Scout cookies box is half empty today). When you compare your decisions to your values, you immediately see that there is something out of balance. For example, I was reviewing my personal vision and noted that I wanted to maintain my work/life balance. That was when I realized that with some extra travel I’ve been doing lately, I was starting to feel disconnected from my family. Since this is not consistent with my personal vision, I could make a conscious decision that I needed to come home earlier that day.
Best/Better. This method is about reviewing your decisions and determining what you could have done better. This method seems to be most effective if you come back at some later time and review what you wrote. For a lot of decisions, you may not feel good about what you did today, but a few weeks from now (or even months), you may realize that you made a tough decision, but it was the right one. There is some value in the near term for following this method too. I’ve found that the decision itself is not what should be improved, but how you arrived at the decision or communicated it to others. For example, I’ve made decisions recently that could have used additional input from the team to get their buy-in. By not giving them enough time to buy-in to the decision, it is now difficult for me to get them to implement my decision. I still believe the decision is the right one, but the way I approached it could be done better in the future.
Reflect on Career. I haven’t worked on this one too much, other than making some notes about what I like about my current job, and what opportunities might be out there. I think the books referenced in my original post are useful for following this method.
Random Questions / Topics. So far I haven’t had to resort to the “pick a topic out of the hat” method yet. But I have found that I end up documenting how I feel about something one day, and then seeing how that changed by the next day. For example, I was fuming mad over a decision a team member made. I started writing about it, and started to talk myself down off the ledge. By the time I finished writing, I had opened up the possibility that maybe the team member didn’t actually make this decision, maybe there was a different bit of information I didn’t have. I decided to act calmly and ask the them about the decision. Sure enough, they were told to do it by someone else. The next day I had a chance to reflect on this, and was able to learn from this experience. Next time I’ll give someone the benefit of the doubt before blaming them for a bad decision.
Overall, I’m enjoying the self-reflection time, although not necessarily enjoying getting up at 5AM to have time to write. Speaking of which, tomorrow I need to write about a ‘Best/Better’ decision than the one to get up this early!
