When self-improvement advice fails, it’s time to build a reflection practice instead

We’ve all been there: When navigating a challenge or a tough decision at work, you turn to a friend or colleague for their perspective—only to have them give you a range of suggestions that don’t necessarily help! Anything from “Why don’t you take a mental health day?” to “Maybe it’s time to update your wardrobe” and “Sounds like you need to look for a new job.” And sure, each one of these pieces of friendly advice might be the exact right one for someone, somewhere. But the problem with these suggestions is that they are all actions, when oftentimes what we need in difficult situations is a practice of reflection.  

What underlying need, for example, would the mental health day address (and how could you ensure such a day would be spent meaningfully, not mindlessly)? Would the wardrobe update provide a helpful boost of professional confidence, or simply disguise a deeper issue? And wouldn’t it be worth investigating what’s truly lacking in the current job, before handing in that two weeks’ notice and hoping not to wind up in a similar situation in the next one? This is what we can uncover when we take the time to reflect.  

Unfortunately, most self-improvement advice suffers from something called the action bias: It tends to favor doing something—even something that’s not necessarily beneficial to the situation—rather than pausing to reflect on the purpose of that action, the values it reflects, and the outcomes that could result from it. Ultimately, this is why those well-meaning, action-oriented “tips” and “hacks” so often fail us.  

You may well be thinking, “I don’t have time to reflect! I need to get things done!” And fair enough: We live in a pretty action-oriented society. From grades to performance reviews, we’ve become accustomed to being evaluated based on what we can produce or deliver. But take heed: A reflection practice is going to save you time and effort in the long run! In this piece, we’ve collected some helpful frameworks for moving from an action-oriented to a reflection-oriented mindset. But first, let’s discuss what a reflection practice is, and when it comes in handy.  

So, what is a reflection practice and when does it come in handy?

In her book Experiments in Reflection: How to See the Present, Reconsider the Past, and Shape the Future (read our review here), Stanford professor Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, PhD, describes reflection non-definitively as “a whole-body process of transforming experience into meaning to shape the future,” and this description is an empowering starting point for thinking about the hows and whys of your own reflection practice.  

The process is “whole-body” because while the brain does most of the processing here, it is responding to information captured through our senses. This sensory information becomes our experience of the world. Through reflection, in Britos Cavagnaro’s view, we sculpt the “raw materials” of our experience “into structures of meaning that support our goals and shape our values.” As a result of this learning process, we are empowered to make informed decisions that mindfully, rather than accidentally, shape the future.  

In a routine context, we may not feel the need to reflect before acting—we may already know the best route to get to work or have a habit of going for a run first thing in the morning. On a day-to-day basis, we may get away with very little reflection on these kinds of activities. However, a novel challenge or decision brings with it the opportunity—if not the requirement!—to carefully examine the situation and our place in it before a plan of action can be made. By taking the time to learn from our previous experiences, look at our present from multiple angles, and imagine various future outcomes, we can see our way to confident, meaningful decisions. In this way, we spare ourselves the trouble and heartache of falling into the same mistakes again and again.  

Here are a few helpful frameworks and mindset shifts to consider as you begin building your own meaning-seeking, reflective practice.  

Unlock your potential with Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset”

In Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, psychologist and Stanford professor Carol Dweck, Ph.D, theorizes that our potential for achievement depends not merely on our innate abilities, but on our self-conception of those abilities.  

In Dweck’s view, there are two mindsets with which individuals view themselves: People with a “fixed” mindset believe that our abilities and intelligence are static—fixed from birth—while those with a “growth” mindset believe these things can be strengthened and improved through dedicated effort and learning. These mindsets inform what we imagine ourselves to be capable of, thereby having a predictive effect on our success in school and on personal and professional projects: Dweck’s research shows that students with the growth mindset tend to outperform their “fixed” peers.  

For Dweck, books filled with tips from “successful” people are beside the point. It is our beliefs that must be considered first, as they inform our thoughts, which influence our actions, which in turn shape our future.  

Here, it is worth engaging with Dweck and Britos Cavagnaro’s ideas side-by-side. In her introduction to Experiments in Reflection, Britos Cavagnaro challenges the way we think about “the future” with a profound statement that bears repeating here: “What lies ahead of us is not a single future, but multiple possible futures.”  

Indeed, by cultivating a practice of reflection (per Britos Cavagnaro) and benefiting from the mindset shifts that follow (per Dweck), our futures can be something we create—not something that merely happens to us.  

Embrace reflection as a team or organization with Chris Argyris & Donald Schön’s “double-loop learning model”

In Teaching Smart People How to Learn, business theorist Chris Argyris uses this example to illustrate something called “single-loop learning:” If your home falls below a set temperature, your thermostat kicks on. It doesn’t know whether you’re home or not or how the humidity might be affecting your perception of cold: It just does its job, repeating the same actions as a response to the same feedback. In other words, your thermostat doesn’t ever try to change or improve. It operates on a single loop.  

At work, many individuals and teams operate on a single loop as well. Deadlines and tight work schedules may not allow time for reflection and improvement, and rigid office hierarchies may discourage the acknowledgment of errors–Argyris’s 1977 Harvard Business Review article illustrates this with near-comical accuracy.  

Argyris, alongside social scientist Donald Schön, pioneered the application of “double-loop learning” in organizational settings. When we’re engaged in double-loop learning, the systems, rules, goals, and values governing our actions can be questioned and changed. Note: Dweck’s growth mindset, with its flexible and adaptive approach to feedback, really comes in handy here. 

When teams and organizations take a step back, identify what isn’t working, and adapt accordingly, they are engaging in reflective practice at a collective level. And as Argyris and Schön’s work shows, the business benefits and increased job satisfaction that result are well worth the time spent reflecting.  

Let your subconscious do the work with Graham Wallas’s “four stages of creativity”

Stuck on a problem at work? Have you tried…walking away from it? It sounds counter-intuitive, but creative types have known for a long time that long hours at a desk don’t necessarily produce innovative results. Under the right conditions, you can get your subconscious to do the work for you. 

That’s what Graham Wallas, social psychologist and co-founder of the London School of Economics, observed in his 1926 book The Art of Thought. In his book, he shares his “four stages of creativity,” his theory of the creative process.  

Wallas’s four stages are:  

1. Preparation, in which you gather ideas, materials, or information you’ll need;  

2. Incubation, a stage in which you deliberately do something else for a bit, letting your ideas marinate in your subconscious;  

3. Illumination, that “a-ha moment “when you know just what to do or try; and  

4. Verification, when you test your ideas in the real world.  

You’ll notice here that in one of these stages, “incubation,” nothing appears to be going on at all—but this is where the subconscious mind is working hardest, turning the raw material you gathered in the “preparation” stage into valuable insights. By delaying outwardly perceivable action in favor of thoughtful preparation, then trusting our subconscious processing, we can reach insights that would not have been otherwise impossible.  

Importantly, the process does not necessarily end with the verification stage, either. More work will likely be needed! For a designer, “verification” might mean creating a prototype of a new product. For a writer, it could mean sharing a first draft with a trusted editor. In either case, the learnings gathered from this stage can be applied to subsequent rounds of the four-stage process. Like other learning models in this article, the stages work best when applied iteratively and with a growth mindset. 

Make mindful, lasting change with Robert Carkhuff’s Explore, Understand, Act (EUA)

The last reflection-oriented framework on our tour, and a favorite here at MeaningSphere, is called Explore, Understand, Act (EUA).  

This deceptively simple, iterative learning model is at the heart of a healthy reflective practice. Developed by psychologist Robert Carkhuff, author of The Art of Helping, EUA is best described as a feedback loop by which we are repeatedly self-reflecting (Explore), identifying insights (Understand), and testing the insights (Act). Once we’ve acted, the feedback from our actions leads to further self-reflection and a new EUA cycle can begin.  

The following illustration shows how this learning process is never finished, but constantly in motion: