LESSON: If you make the space to reflect on your decisions, and explore more carefully what you are doing and why, you will free yourself to contribute to the very best of your ability.
RAKU WAS A GENERAL MANAGER for a pharmaceutical company. Originally from Japan, she had excelled at science in school and had initially started her career in the lab of one of her current employer’s main competitors. Her ambitions extended far beyond being a research scientist. She had always harboured the desire to go into general management and, with a combination of persistence and the MBA she’d got under her belt from Stanford, she had finally made it.
Raku had been used to getting virtually top marks all her life (she’d even been in the top 3 of her MBA class) so she had been mortified when she sat down with her manager Greg and received an annual performance rating of just 3 out of 5. After leaving the meeting visibly upset, she had asked to see Greg again the next day. Would he consider changing the rating, she asked, listing the things she’d achieved that year. He held fast, explaining that at present she was making decisions too quickly, even rashly, was too fixed in her mindset and wasn’t really listening to her team. She had been in charge of a project that had got into a mess and he’d had to step in to get it back on track. She recognised all this, of course, but her response was to grow sullen and withdrawn. He had then suggested that she meet with a coach to think through what was going on and why she had been given such a poor rating.
I had coached Greg for different reasons a couple of years before, and so he’d called to ask if I would coach Raku. He told me in confidence that he’d known he was being a little harsh by awarding her a 3 but explained that he wanted to shock her into some changes. Raku arrived early for her appointment, and when I came out to meet her in reception she jumped up from her seat and greeted me with a nervous smile.
Once we had settled into my office she was pleasant and forthcoming. After I explained a little about how I worked, I asked her to tell me her story. She began with her first job – in the research lab. I gently stopped her and asked her to start earlier, with her earliest memory.
This is something I always stress to my clients – I work in business but I am a business psychologist. The type of psychology I practise holds that our early years affect how we turn out as adults. When I assess people for recruitment, internal promotion or development I take a full life history. I always tell each one: ‘If I am going to get to know Jo the professional, I have to know Jo the woman and, as a psychologist, I believe that part of what made Jo the woman was what happened to Jo the girl.’ Another one of my stock remarks is: ‘When I ask you, in a moment, to tell me your story, you should start not with your first job, but with your first breath.’ Most people take this in their stride, some are surprised but OK with it; a few show some resistance. I assess and coach people all over the world, and in some cultures (such as those in Russia, Africa and Saudi Arabia), the resistance can seem greater. Actually, once people, whatever their background, feel they are with someone they can trust, they invariably open up and share some deeply personal experiences – even those who initially most baulked at the idea. Indeed, often initially the most reluctant end up sharing more than anyone.
Raku definitely fell into the category of more resistant. Indeed, she questioned the purpose of talking about her childhood at all. I explained that, not always, but time and again, I find that the fundamental development areas that someone has, have their genesis not in recent events, or even early career experiences, but in what happened earlier on, within the family, as they first formed their assumptions and attitudes about the world. There is a famous psychoanalytic paper called ‘Ghosts in the Nursery’ and I suspected that Raku, like most of us to one degree or another, was haunted in some way by a figure or figures from the past. The fact that she was resistant to talking about her early experiences, I’m afraid, just made me more suspicious.
Luckily, the scientist in her was intrigued by the hypothesis that there could have been factors from the past influencing her today.
‘OK,’ she said, ‘let’s give it a go.’
She started to tell me about what sounded like a pretty normal childhood on the outskirts of Kyoto. Her parents were very typical of their generation, low key and deferential. Her mother worked part-time in a flower shop while her father was a ‘salaryman’ for a big corporation. They both wanted her to do well but didn’t overly push her. Then she said something surprising.
‘What would have been the point anyway, my sister was the clever one.’
I often find clients do this, they will say something off hand, almost flippantly, that jars a little. I don’t always explore it there and then but store it away for later. Raku went on to tell me about school, university, being awarded her PhD and getting her first job. Just as I felt she was relaxing and I was getting to know her a bit, she abruptly changed her tone.
‘Can we get on to our plan now?’ she asked.
It was the first sign I’d had of her being a bit pushy, even impatient. Sometimes when this happens I intentionally act in a way that aims to surface what I suspect are underlying feelings and frustrations.
‘Oh, we’ll get to that,’ I said, in a laconic tone. ‘There’s no rush.’
As I went on to ask about what she thought her co-workers made of her, I could see that she was distracted and kept looking at the clock.
‘Is there something wrong?’ I asked.
‘We have twenty minutes left,’ she said, ‘are we going to end today without a solution?’
I asked Raku if she felt rushed.
‘Yes. Always,’ she replied.
This would have surprised most observers, as she initially appeared to have such a gentle, calm manner. I was to learn that she was like the archetypal swan – graceful and elegant on the surface, but paddling furiously underneath.
‘Do you know why?’ I asked.
‘Why what?’
‘Why you rush?’
She answered straightaway. ‘No idea, it’s a busy world, right?’ She laughed.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m going to ask you again. This time, don’t answer straightaway. Sit with the idea, see what comes to mind.’ I paused. ‘OK, why do you rush?’
She sat, looking at me with a frown on her face. I waited. Her brow furrowed further.
‘Just say the thing that’s on your mind, even if it doesn’t seem to make sense,’ I said.
‘For some reason I am thinking – to catch up. But that makes no sense, right?’
‘Who are you trying to catch up with?’
‘No idea,’ she shot back.
‘Again, pause and let the notion sit in your mind a bit.’
She sat quietly, again, looking unhappy. I waited. Eventually, she repeated what she’d said before: ‘No idea.’
‘OK, let’s come back to that,’ I said.
I had begun to put together what I call my ‘formulation’. It simply means my sense of what was going on. What were the underlying dynamics driving the problem I was being asked to help with? What was Raku’s Core Pathogenic Belief?
This is a clumsy phrase (I haven’t been able to think of a better one) that just means a belief or assumption we have about ourselves that is inaccurate and harmful, hence pathogenic, or diseased. It is a concept that appears in various forms of psychology. In Cognitive Behavioural Coaching, people are asked to keep a thought record of how they are thinking, feeling and behaving, in an effort to identify what some Cognitive Behavioural Therapy practitioners call a ‘schema’. My colleague Paul is involved in an organisation called Clearmind International Institute where they call it ‘Suspicion of Self’ or ‘SOS’, and I know of a couple of people who call it, informally, your ‘SMB’ – ‘Shitty Mistaken Belief’. I first came across the phrase ‘core pathogenic belief’ when I lived in California and was briefly involved with the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group.
It doesn’t really matter what you call it, so long as you work on identifying it. Psychodynamic Leadership Consulting, which is what I practise, believes that our past affects our present, and therefore our future. The experiences we have early in life lead us to form assumptions about ourselves and the world that become a set of core beliefs. We usually only have a dim sense of what these are, as they have been woven into our psyche and are largely unconscious. Even if we are aware of them, we don’t necessarily see their influence on us or how they colour our approach to almost everything, it’s just how ‘we see the world’. It’s like someone who is colour blind and can’t differentiate between red and green: they could go through life blissfully unaware of their condition – until they first come across some traffic lights!
It is vital to bring core pathogenic beliefs to consciousness, to articulate them, name them and face them. As fantasy author Terry Pratchett says: ‘as every wizard knows, once you have a thing’s real name you have the first step to its taming.’
Core beliefs become pathogenic when they are out of kilter with reality; become extreme, or too fixed; or when they suited past circumstances but are now outdated. The psychoanalyst and writer Stephen Grosz explains it well when he says: ‘Experience has taught me that our childhoods leave in us stories – stories we never found a way to voice, because no one helped us to find the words. When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us – we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.’
A simple example would be if you grew up with parents who let you down and couldn’t really be trusted. You would very likely have inculcated a suspicion of people and whether they could be relied on. The ordinary misunderstandings and mistakes people make would take on a more ominous meaning. The psychological idea of confirmation bias would come into play and you’d only notice the times when things went wrong, further confirming your CPB. This could affect how easily you made friends, how you handled romantic relationships, and how you treat your co-workers, or, if you are a manager, your team. As one client I worked with told me, ‘I do trust people but I set the bar very, very high – and people don’t get a second chance.’ Imagine how enjoyable it is working for him.
Identifying and transforming your CPBs is vital if you are to develop on a fundamental level. As psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote: ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’
*
I was beginning to have a sense of what Raku’s core pathogenic belief might be, but I wanted to gather some more evidence. At our next meeting I asked her to do two short self-assessment questionnaires: the first was an online resource developed by Lawrence Wilkes that rates the degree to which you use reflective practice. Raku scored in the mid-range of this, which for someone of her intellect (and scientific background) was surprisingly low.
I also asked Raku to do a short questionnaire that is based on Kolb’s Learning Styles (which look at the interplay between experience, reflection and experimentation). This results in a circle with two axes: the vertical one is a continuum between ‘Intuition’ and ‘Analysis’ and looks at how we make decisions; the horizontal looks at what we do when we’ve made a decision, and ranges from ‘Action’ to ‘Reflection’.
Raku, as I’d suspected she would, came out in the bottom left-hand corner, showing that she was highly analytical, not that intuitive, very action-oriented, and with little tendency to reflect. To my surprise she looked impressed.
‘What are you thinking?’ I asked.
‘Well, I’m surprised. Nine short questions and you get a pretty good picture of me. It’s almost scientific. Unless,’ she added with a mischievous glint in her eye, ‘it’s just a fluke.’
‘Well, either way, if it feels right to you, let’s reflect on the consequences. What might this mean for how you are at work? What comes to mind?’
‘Actually, it’s interesting, you know,’ she replied. ‘What comes to mind isn’t here but my time back in the lab, in my first job. My old boss, he would say, “Raku, stop charging ahead like a bull”. He said I needed to stop starting new experiments without thinking through the implications of the results I already had.’
‘And that feedback reminds you of what?’ I gently prompted.
This time she didn’t blurt out an answer. I waited.
‘It’s kind of like what’s happening now, what Greg is going on at me about.’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘we’re going to do our own experiment now.’ Her eyes lit up.
‘I am going to get us some coffee, and in the ten minutes or so I’ll be away I want you to sit still and reflect on just one question … What is going wrong for Raku and why? Don’t write the first thing that comes to mind. Try and think a little more deeply, and also try and tap into your feelings – in other words don’t …’
‘… rush!’ she said, finishing my sentence.
I smiled. She smiled back, looking straight at me for the first time since we started talking and holding her gaze.
‘OK, here are some pens, there’s the flip chart.’
When I came back with the coffees she was sitting still, looking at the flip chart. On it were written a few words and phrases:
I rush
I don’t stop to think
I want to get on to the next thing
I leave people behind
This is EXHAUSTING
I passed over her drink.
‘One other thing,’ she said. ‘I worked out who I am trying to catch up with.’ She looked at me.
‘You know, don’t you?’
‘I think so,’ I replied but kept quiet.
Then she confirmed what we were both thinking.
‘My sister.’ She paused, seeming lost in thought. ‘Still, after all these years.’
‘And when you look at your management colleagues, all of whom have more experience than you, and have been managers for almost the whole of their careers, you want to catch up with them too.’
She nodded. ‘But the more I rush, the less well I do!’
This is the power of a core pathogenic belief. It works below the surface. Usually you’re not even conscious of it, or, if you are, just barely or fleetingly. Raku’s was: ‘If I don’t rush and do lots quickly, I will not catch up.’
The trace of that childhood trauma, of being incredibly clever but still not quite as clever as her sister, was being projected on to her situation today. It made no logical sense, but it was driving her to act in a way that was harming her.
The rest of the coaching was spent exploring what a new, more reflective style would look like (drawing on some of the ideas I outline later). Back in the office she was taking time to listen, digest and reflect on what she was learning. She had managed to wean herself off her rush to rush, conscious now that rushing wasn’t the means of catching up but the barrier to doing so. The feedback from Greg and her colleagues was good. One of them summed up the change when she said, ‘It’s like we’re getting all of Raku now, whereas before we were just skimming the surface.’
*
‘In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.’
Albert Camus, from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Raku’s story is one of rushing. She was driven by an unconscious need to catch up with those she perceived as being ahead of her. Projected today on her more experienced fellow managers that need was actually, it turned out, a replaying of a much earlier psychological dynamic – the desire to match the accomplishments of her gifted older sister. This early experience left an imprint on Raku’s psyche that was triggered whenever she had a feeling of being behind. Without knowing it, she would slot into a familiar track of behaviour.
One manifestation of Raku’s rushing was a lack of reflection. She didn’t take the time to stop and think through her actions, either before she acted, or afterwards. This led to her making mistakes and alienating her team. Ironically she wasn’t using one of her key strengths – her strong, logical intellect – to its full advantage, squandering it by not thinking deeply or richly enough about what she and her team needed to do. My experience of working with hundreds of business leaders convinces me that Raku is far from alone in this.
At its core, self-reflection is being able to think in a careful and considered way about ourselves, our work and our relationships. It empowers us to pause in the middle of the chaos, to zoom in or out, as needed, in order to get a deeper understanding of a situation – untangling the various thoughts, feelings and observations we may not immediately have been able to make sense of. The philosopher and psychologist John Dewey wisely wrote: ‘We do not learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience.’
Reflective practice is just a modern fancy phrase for something that humans have done since the beginning of history. In the 5th century BC, the Chinese philosopher Confucius wrote: ‘By three methods we learn wisdom: First, by imitation, which is easiest, second by experience, which is the bitterest and thirdly, by reflection, which is the noblest.’ About a century later, Socratic thinking – critical, deliberative self- questioning – was developing on the other side of the world, in Greece.
Since then, definitions of ‘reflective practice’ have embraced ideas such as ‘deep consideration’, ‘quiet contemplation’, ‘standing outside of oneself’, and ‘challenging conventional wisdom’ – especially when it’s your conventional wisdom. It requires a spirit of inquiry and a radical curiosity. It is about trying to take as objective a view as possible, analysing the situation around you, and interrogating your view of things to see what you might have missed, or what other possibilities exist.
The former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was once mocked for talking about ‘unknown unknowns’, but he was actually saying something very profound:
‘… as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’
So reflective practice is thinking about thinking and knowing about knowing – so-called meta-cognition. Psychoanalytic writers have variously called it ‘the ability to see oneself from the outside and others from the inside’ and ‘thinking about feelings and feeling about thinking’. For that reason it requires honesty, vulnerability, a lack of defensiveness and a high sense of accountability. At its core it is simply an ongoing, meaningful conversation you have with yourself.
Reflecting, however, is far from just an intellectual exercise. It has very practical, tangible benefits. First, the quality of your decision-making will improve. This was Raku’s big lesson. You’ll make fewer mistakes and learn from the mistakes you do make more quickly. Because you have heightened your questioning of yourself and your observation of your impact on the world, you will grow in flexibility and agility – able to seize opportunities and change course when necessary. Moreover, you will also increase your self-awareness, a key element of your emotional intelligence and therefore your ability to build relationships, collaborate and influence others. You will also have more clarity about what you are doing and why – those bigger questions that underpin our professional lives but are often repressed or neglected because we don’t make the space to think about them. All this accelerates your self-development as a leader. (In Chapter 12 I outline a practice I call ‘Your No.1 meetings’, which shows how you can do all this systematically.)
Counterintuitively, taking time to reflect increases productivity. By pausing to reflect you actually get more done, not less. The authors of a Harvard Business School study conducted in 2014 define self-reflection as ‘the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience.’ The research found that when people added fifteen minutes of reflection into the end of their work day, as opposed to working an extra fifteen minutes, their productivity increased by nearly a quarter in just ten days; and when reassessed a month later, that spike in productivity had stuck. The authors argue that, ‘Once an individual has accumulated a certain amount of experience with a task, the benefit of accumulating additional experience is inferior to the benefit of deliberately articulating and codifying [or in other words, reflecting on] the experience accumulated in the past.’
Other research backs this up. One study of UK commuters found that those who were prompted to use their commute to think about and plan for their day were happier, more productive and less burned out than people who didn’t.
Reflecting matters perhaps more than ever in the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) environments, which have become the norm in the last few decades. Yet it’s all too easy to lose touch with the ability to do what the behavioural economist and Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman describes as ‘slow thinking’. This involves reflectively examining underlying thoughts and beliefs, challenging assumptions and identifying connections between seemingly disparate pieces of information. This is in contrast with lazier, more automatic and shallower ‘fast thinking’. If you’ve ever spent a morning churning through one email after another in your inbox and then trying to turn your attention to a task which requires you to focus more deeply, you’ll understand the difference between slow and fast thinking. Even the most senior of leaders are at risk of becoming over-reliant on fast thinking, unless they deliberately carve out white space in their day, and they may even find that their ability to think reflectively and strategically begins to atrophy. Without a pause for reflection you run the very real risk of constantly working from a place of reactivity instead of creativity.
To make matters worse, even when we see its value and strain to practise it, self-reflection is often the first thing to drop off our agenda when things get busy or stressful. Collectively, we are addicted to the illusion that the busier we are, the better. We mistake activity for productivity, failing to acknowledge that productivity actually requires reflection, as those Harvard researchers found. Since so many of us work in the knowledge economy, the most valuable asset we have is our attention, and – like a battery on a smartphone – it gets depleted fairly quickly. The onslaught of demands and information that comes our way every day via emails and social media alone are actually reason enough to turn off the noise and give oneself enough space to be able to hear oneself think.
Collectively, however, we have a long way to go if we are to see a tangible change in the culture of the modern workplace: A 2015 Harvard study found that CEOs typically have less than 15 per cent of their working week available for solo work. Moreover, most of these few precious hours are consumed by reviewing information and dealing with urgent issues, rather than in taking ‘quiet time’ to do the reflective work that is so critical. Further down a company, the demands on people are often no less intense.
Consciously cultivating a reflection-ready mindset and attitude requires commitment and application. If you attempt to plough your way through self-reflection, as Raku initially did in her coaching session with me (‘Why do I rush? It’s a busy world, right?’), you won’t reap its many rewards. Being reflective, by its very nature, has a different cadence and rhythm to it than most of our working day, which is exactly why it enables us to see things differently and to think new thoughts. Eventually you might even begin to enjoy – perhaps even relish – this opportunity to slow down. Most people I work with do, even those who are most ‘busy’.
Finally, be aware that we all have an inbuilt psychological barrier to self-reflection because it will sometimes make us feel bad. We will discover that we have been short-sighted, foolish or inconsiderate. We need the self-confidence and resilience to embrace this rather than live in a fugue of comforting self-delusion. Urging deep, profound self-reflection is a little like asking Superman to take off his cape and confront the frailties that lie beneath. It takes a true superhero to do that.
For that reason, and because of the relentless demands the modern world makes on our time, self-reflection isn’t always easy. But the more you do it, the more you’ll see the truth of that feedback from one of Raku’s colleagues: ‘It’s like we’re getting all of Raku now, whereas before we were just skimming the surface.’ Without creating the space for regular, rich self-reflection you are operating as a shallower version of yourself. By creating that space you give yourself – and offer the world – a richer and deeper you.
So how do you build reflective practice into your life? About the past (what has happened); the present (what you are trying to make happen now); and the future (what you want to happen next).
The simple model of reflective practice – the ‘Reflecting Cycle’ – that I use with clients looks like this:
The Reflecting Cycle
The idea is that you constantly recycle your experiences – before and after they happen – asking yourself three key questions:
1. What do I think about this?
2. How do I feel about this?
3. What could happen/have happened instead?
This draws on Kolb’s learning cycle, which inspired the second test that I asked Raku to take:
1. I had an experience
2. I reflected on it to evaluate what went well or badly
3. I considered some ideas and options for change
4. I planned a different action
What might this look like in practice? You could use your reflecting time to mull over any projects or concerns that have been nagging at you. If you have encountered any challenges in communicating with your colleagues, clients or stakeholders, explore the possible assumptions, biases or expectations that might have played a part in you misreading or misunderstanding the situation. You could do a ‘post-mortem’ on a project, analysing what went well, observing your own reasoning processes, articulating lessons learnt and identifying problem areas and errors in judgement or flaws in the decision-making process. You can also do this in advance of an upcoming project, in which you aim to identify all the possible pitfalls and failures, and put the relevant contingency plans in place.
ASK YOURSELF: Do I understand what reflective practice is? Do I know how to follow this or some other model? Have I committed to being more reflective?
To develop and really embed your reflective practice, there are four aspects that require attention:
1. The temporal space – How do you make time to reflect?
2. The physical space – Where should you reflect?
3. The relational space – Who can help you?
4. The psychic space – What internal resources do you need?
This is the sine qua non of your reflective practice. You might really ‘get it’ and be good at it, but if you don’t actually do it what’s the point? Carving out time is essential for reflective thinking, particularly since it goes against the grain of our ‘always on’ culture. Before we look at how you might do this, we need to pause to look at a couple of prerequisites that will be required if you are to succeed.
I address wider issues of time management later. Here I just want to flag up the first prerequisite for making more time to reflect, which is that you are using the time you already have as efficiently as possible. In summary: are you focusing and prioritising enough? Are you delegating wherever you can? Are you accepting ‘good enough’ solutions when ‘good enough’ will do? Are you making full use of the time you do have (e.g. the early morning or your commute)? Or do you habitually waste time, the classic examples being spending too much time on Facebook, or surfing the web looking at funny but ultimately inconsequential videos.
The second prerequisite involves a shift in mindset: changing from a mindset that either neglects reflection altogether, or de-prioritises it due to ‘not having enough time’, to a mindset that puts it front and centre of your priorities during your day-to-day working life. Embracing this mindset – that reflection isn’t a ‘nice to have’ but a ‘need to have’ – will be the psychological foundation of your efforts to carve out more space for it.
When working with clients I find that reflection is required on three overlapping levels:
1. The day-to-day or tactical (what should I say to Jane this afternoon about that issue that came up on the call?).
2. The big, strategic questions (am I even in the right career?).
3. The level in-between (who should we partner with to get this project done?).
This in turn informs the issue of having time to reflect. Often, people will assume that reflection requires large chunks of time to be set aside, but that is only half the story. As well as setting aside specific blocks of time to reflect, it is also important to incorporate reflecting into your daily modus operandi.
That is why I talk to clients about two types of reflecting: deep reflection and ‘on the job’ reflecting. The former requires setting aside blocks of protected diary time where the focus is on key fundamental questions. But, and this is a crucial point about reflective practice, it isn’t only about the ‘big things’, neither does it necessarily have to take a long time, or need to be a discrete process quite separate from the hurly-burly of the everyday. There are degrees of reflective practice.
Certainly, when you are reflecting on the bigger stuff you need to make sure you won’t be disturbed. Deeper reflection requires going under the usual surface patterns of thinking to draw on the more peripheral aspects of our intellect and emotions. Without uninterrupted time you simply won’t get there. You also need time to stick at it. Even when you think you’re not getting anywhere, keep going – don’t pick up your phone or rush back to your inbox. Keep going because the light-bulb moment may just be another few moments of frustration away.
We usually organise our calendars to respond to the demands of others and the day-to-day pressures of work, and that way time for reflecting is squeezed out. This needs to be flipped around. For periods of deep reflection you need to build chunks of reflection time into your calendar and protect them as you would a crucial sit-down with your boss or a big client meeting. Obviously, in practice you may sometimes have to sacrifice this time, but at least start off with a commitment to the importance of time for you to think.
Sometimes clients tell me this is impossible, especially if they have calendars that are visible to everyone. I urge them to be bold and push back. Explain the blocks of time. You would be amazed what can be achieved by explaining what you need, and being tough about it. One client said his boss would never allow it, but when I persuaded him to try he came back to the next session and said, ‘You know, I put those big green slots into my diary marked “thinking time” with a slightly sick feeling, and sure enough my boss emailed saying “what the hell is all that for?” I explained that this was how I wanted to work, and that it would lead to better decisions and more efficiency, and she replied, “OK, cool”. I was gobsmacked.’
Such discipline is often a feature of the working routines of the world’s top businesspeople. Jeff Weiner, CEO at LinkedIn, blocks between ninety minutes and two hours each day for reflection and describes these buffers as ‘the single most important productivity tool’ he uses. Yana Kakar, Global Managing Partner of Dalberg, reserves three, two-hour blocks of time for reflection each week. She makes a great point: ‘Thinking is the one thing you can’t outsource as a leader. Holding this time sacred in my schedule despite the deluge of calls, meetings, and emails is essential.’ Others concentrate reflection in a single day. Brian Scudamore, the serial entrepreneur at O2E Brands, sets aside all of Monday for thinking and organising the rest of the week, which is filled with back-to-back meetings. He also creates a suitable environment for deep thinking by not going into the office that day. At AOL, Tim Armstrong has instructed executives to spend half a day of each working week on reflective thinking. However you decide to do it – by having a change of scene and/or blocking out time in your diary – actively creating space to reflect will reap dividends, as these business leaders testify.
While I was writing this, I was working with the newly appointed global HRD of a big tech company who was nominally responsible for tens of thousands of employees and was feeling swamped by the multiple demands on her time. ‘I don’t have time to stop and think,’ she complained. After listening to her moan for a bit, I asked if we could go through that day’s diary. By being very tough we managed to claw back two hours. Half of that time consisted of things that, on reflection, she realised could be delegated to someone in her team, or left for them to do alone instead of her feeling she had to ride shotgun. The other hour was the result of cancelling two ‘get to know you’ meetings. She really resisted this, feeling that she would hurt the people’s feelings if she cancelled, and get the relationships off on a bad foot. In the end she sent both an email telling the truth: ‘I feel swamped and need to create some space to think, so although I’m looking forward to meeting I’d like to do it in a few weeks rather than now. I feel rude doing this but hope it’s OK.’ She got two lovely, empathic emails in return, one even said, ‘Good for you – I need time for that too and now I have an extra half an hour today to pause for a moment.’ All too often we end up doing what we think we should do rather than what we have decided we need to do.
As I said earlier, as well as trying to carve out space for deep reflection you should also create space for ‘in the moment’ reflecting. If we are faced with a problem to solve or a decision to make, we will often feel rushed into a solution because we don’t feel we have time. But rather than bang off an email with your instant response, try and find a short breathing space to reflect. I know of one executive whose every important email goes into her draft box before she then reads them again later and sends them off. She says the number of times she ends up changing what she wrote, or at least fundamentally finessing it really surprises her. After all, she says, I haven’t really done any thinking in between. But of course she has – just unconsciously.
The idea of constant ‘in the moment’ reflecting was really brought home to me by a leader I worked with a couple of years ago. This often happens. While I spend my time trying to help others develop, they invariably end up developing me. I’m lucky to spend time with some very accomplished business leaders and receive an endless stream of such lessons. I always note these down afterwards and offer them as suggestions of possible best practice to others I work with. In this case, I was helping this guy with the restructuring of part of his business. After we had left a particularly difficult meeting, we strode to the lift in silence, then as we stepped in, and the doors closed, I tried to start a conversation. He smiled and held up his hand, signalling for me to be silent. He then spent our descent breathing deeply with his eyes nearly closed. When we reached the ground floor he turned to me and said, ‘Sorry, I was just wondering if I could have handled that better. I do think we could have offered something and I’ll need to send a quick email when we get into the car.’
I think someone else would have reached for their smartphone straightaway in order to move on from the downbeat mood of the meeting, or allowed themselves to get over-emotional and expressed some annoyance – what one psychoanalytic writer labels ‘chuntering’, filling up space with unproductive grumbling about something. Not this guy. He spent what could only have amounted to a minute or so checking in with his thoughts and feelings but in a focused, productive way. As I got to know him, I saw him do this dozens of times a day. Even sitting next to him in the back of a car, I’d see him end a phone call and stare into space, lips silently moving as he reviewed the conversation, reaching a conclusion about whether he could move on or should revisit some aspect of it. If the latter, he would scribble something down in the little notepad he always had ready in his inside jacket pocket. This way he didn’t need to set aside a big chunk of time at the end of the day or week to review what had happened, it was a practice that he wove into his working day from dawn till dusk. He had grown accustomed to asking himself:
1. What sense do I make of what just happened?
2. What sense can I make of what will happen next?
So should you.
ASK YOURSELF: Have I consciously thought about what time I have for reflecting, on the big stuff and the more day-to-day? If I need to create more time to reflect how am I going to do that?
There’s an old saying where I was born in the North West of England – ‘there’s nowt so queer as folk.’ It’s a truism that can be lost in the coaching and development world. An American aphorism captures the same idea, ‘Dif’rent strokes for dif’rent folks.’ And the question of where you should reflect has as many answers as there are people who want to do the reflecting. The issue isn’t obeying some writ handed down, it’s discovering for yourself the environment that is most conducive to the deep, contemplative thinking that reflection requires.
I’ve had clients whose dedicated ‘thinking space’ is the closing moments before sleep, their morning shower, exercise routine, or their commute into work. I have worked with someone whose best environment for thinking is on long arduous bike rides, while another cycling fanatic said that his mind totally clears and he thinks of nothing as he speeds along (though maybe his unconscious is at work, who knows?). Several clients have told me they love to think while taking walks. This doesn’t have to involve backpacks and mountains, it could mean a few leisurely laps around the block. I worked with one founder of a tech start-up who drew quizzical looks from new employees when he regularly left the office to stroll round the nearby park, until they interacted with him and realised that he would invariably return energised and full of fresh ideas.
Some people are great compartmentalisers. They can walk from a loud open-plan space into a conference room, take one breath and find themselves at peace and worlds away from the hurly-burly just a door away. Others take hours to decompress from what faces them on the computer at their desk. Some find the occasional day working at home is a great chance to step back and take stock, for others it’s the last place they feel they can have profound thoughts about work. A 2013 Gensler WPS survey found that 16 per cent of employees believed they could focus most effectively at home against 73 per cent who said they preferred an office setting. Yet all too often working practices diktats are issued that apply to everyone, rather than allowing people to choose what they feel is best for them.
I coached one CEO from Italy whose company, just before she took it over, had decided ‘democratically’ to get rid of all individual offices in their Milan HQ and operate on one big open-plan floor. As an introvert she found such an environment uncomfortable, draining and actually psychologically hostile. She shared the story of a friend, a fellow CEO (of an Italian bank), who worked in similar conditions and had taken to sitting in a toilet stall for half an hour every day to get some alone time. This is utterly ridiculous. I reminded my client that she was, after all, the CEO, and she had the right to the working conditions she needed. Having explained her feelings to everyone in an all-company email, she brought in the carpenters the next day.
If you don’t have that level of power, there are still things you can do. Think imaginatively about how you can create a space for thinking in such an environment. There are countless creative ways to communicate this to your colleagues. Elena Kerrigan, the Managing Director of productivity training company Think Productive, puts a china cat out on her desk to signal to colleagues that she is in a time of deep focus and does not want to be interrupted. Not that such tactics always work. In one firm I worked at I would put on some very large headphones when I didn’t want to be interrupted. One old school colleague persisted in walking over to my desk and actually knocking on the headphones with his knuckles whenever he wanted my attention. Bless you Charles.
As well as thinking about physical space, you might want to consider other ambient issues. If you know that you can’t think straight in complete silence, consider using an app that plays white noise or playing some music that aids self-reflection. Services like Spotify offer great playlists designed to support focus and concentration. As I write this I am listening – as I always do when writing – to a Spotify playlist called Baroque Study Music, created by someone called Bobby Kennedy. Cheers Bobby – I should probably have put you in the acknowledgments.
ASK YOURSELF: What physical space is best suited to helping me reflect deeply? How can I spend more time in that space?
When working with clients, I try to help them work out the type of thinker they are. A question I often ask is ‘if you have a problem to solve, how would you go about it?’ I might then prompt them with some examples: Would you find a quiet room and shut yourself away with a notepad or a laptop? Would you crave a whiteboard and lots of coloured pens so you could sketch out ideas and images, a sort of ‘mind-mapping’? Or would you want to call together a few colleagues and brainstorm together?
I am a more introverted thinker, but I recognise that others are different. The secret to collaborating is not to be judgemental. Picasso once remarked that ‘without great solitude no serious work can be done.’ This was true for him (and for me) but not, of course, for everyone.
I like to do my initial thinking on my own and then present my ideas to a few key people to get their feedback. I remember a colleague who was the polar opposite. She liked me to sit down next to her with the proverbial blank sheet of paper – or in this case screen – and start an open-ended, winding and (what seemed to me) unfocused discussion. I could literally feel my brain freeze and my capacity to think shutdown. When we discussed this she said that was exactly how she feels if she sits alone staring at blankness. I wanted to reflect internally, she had the need to reflect externally. There is no right or wrong way, what matters is that you are aware of your own style – and the needs of others – and are able to find a way of working that works for everyone, even if that requires a bit of give and take.
Incidentally, such insights are invaluable when building high performing teams. I have seen really harmful discord in teams caused by a lack of understanding of different team members’ individual thinking styles. One team I worked with had built up a story about one member being aloof and withdrawn, but actually the issue was just her reflecting style. Once we identified what was going on, and the team recognised her need for some private thinking space before contributing in a group, they changed their ways of working (for example, distributing drafts and ideas in advance) and the person in question’s contribution soared as a result.
Another team I worked with typified a different dynamic. In this case, a majority of members tended to pre-prepare everything and wanted short, sharp discussions that cut to the chase. The minority, who liked to reflect aloud, were seen as distractors and time wasters. Once their ‘reflective styles’ were out in the open they were more understood, and the team added on just ten minutes to the main agenda item so that a slightly more abstract unfocused discussion could take place. While this sometimes left the more introverted contributors being frustrated, they also admitted, when we reviewed things together a few months later, that certain useful ideas and insights had been expressed that wouldn’t have been under their old way of working.
Some organisations actively try to create a relational, reflective culture. Ways of doing this include building in collective points of reflective inquiry. For example, asking a ‘big question’ of the whole company once a month, or encouraging an open, honest community blog.
Even if you are an introverted thinker, it may pay to involve others in your thinking. At NextJump each employee is assigned a ‘talking partner’ with whom to check in on a daily basis, venting any frustrations, exploring their weaknesses and devising the best way forward. Talking Partnerships are two-way coaching relationships where each partner helps the other to get to know their blind spots. Interestingly, the idea tends to grow on those to whom it didn’t initially appeal.
Finding a balance between the two extremes is important. If you tend towards a more introspective style of thinking make sure you have a way of somehow getting the input of others, if you are more extravert make sure that you haven’t just reacted to the input of others and have brought your own deeper thoughts to bear too.
ASK YOURSELF: What’s my way of maximising my own self-reflection while also getting the input of others to my reflective practice?
Reflecting requires us to get into the right headspace, ideally entering a different level of awareness or consciousness. A simple, sure-fire method to do this involves taking a moment to centre yourself before you start reflecting. Inspired by Yoga techniques thousand of years old, US Navy SEALs use the technique of ‘square breathing’ or ‘4×4 breathing’ to reduce anxiety on the battlefield. Hillary Clinton used it when Donald Trump goaded her during the 2016 US Presidential debates. But it is also useful in less dramatic situations, calming you down and allowing your mind and body to pause and re-centre.
1. Sit comfortably and take a deep inhalation through your nose, filling your lungs and expanding your stomach for around four seconds, 1, 2, 3, 4.
2. Hold that breath for the same time, 1, 2, 3, 4.
3. Then slowly exhale through your mouth, contracting your stomach until all the breath is exhaled, 1, 2, 3, 4.
4. Hold that empty breath for another four seconds, 1, 2, 3, 4.
Repeat the exercise a few times, until you feel your mind clear and your body relax.
Go on, stop reading and try it now. Feels good doesn’t it?
As you can see a practice such as this doesn’t require a huge amount of time, or a special environment. It is available to you every minute of every day, wherever you are in the world.
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It’s important when we are reflecting that we are not only drawing on the conscious but also the unconscious – the vast netherworld where connections and inspirations lie hidden. It is the workings of this unconscious that leaps into view when we feel we have our ‘Eureka’ moment of intuition.
There is a (possibly apocryphal) story about legendary adman Charles Saatchi. He was at lunch growing increasingly bored and restless as a prospective client laid out his problem – going in to some detail about his business, its marketing issues and the competitive challenges it faced. Finally, Saatchi interrupted him mid-flow and, as he called for the bill, scribbled out a slogan on the napkin. The putative client stared at it dumbfounded, eventually mumbling, ‘But … yes … that’s perfect, exactly what we need, you’ve cracked it!’ ‘Yes,’ replied Saatchi, ‘and that’ll be £50,000 a month starting today.’ ‘But it only took you about ten minutes,’ blustered the client. ‘On the contrary,’ retorted Saatchi, ‘it took thirty years. Of reading, talking, learning and thinking.’
Saatchi knew that in order to excel at reflecting you need to feed your mind. This aspect of ‘reflecting’ takes us neatly on to the need to create space for learning that we’ll be looking at in the next chapter. If your brain is just stuffed with quotidian low-level stuff, you will only ever have that to draw on. Make space to read beyond your day-to-day work, and/or attend events and conferences. This is less about ‘keeping up to speed’, though that is useful, and more about broadening out and opening up your mind to new ideas and influences. This intellectual nourishment shouldn’t just draw on business material – history, novels even poetry can all become threads that our unconscious weaves together and that one day may present us with an ‘obvious’ answer. As one rather forbidding boss put it to me once: ‘What you’re saying is the next time I catch a junior Associate with his feet up on the desk reading the Economist I should say “well done” rather than give him a bollocking’.
He looked sceptical, but – within reason – exactly.
ASK YOURSELF: What do I do to feed my mind? How can I do more? Can I commit to doing ONE thing now that would enrich my knowledge and experience?