On this morning’s run I got a wonderful sighting of a hawk, high up on a telephone pole. I am on an island and over the dunes I can see out to the water. This morning the water was calm—almost lake-like. The air was heavy waiting for rain. High up on a telephone pole, the hawk was looking out to sea: looking for fish, pondering, scanning the horizon in the distance. He sat solid—still. I followed his gaze as best I could. I looked out at the horizon line. It looked endless-and impossible to fully take in.
Perhaps I was struck by the hawk more this morning than most because today is the day for looking out—or looking ahead. Everyone is asking about your plans for 2023—what do you want? What resolutions do you have? I envied the hawk his keen sight—wishing for a clarity of view that I imagined he had. But as I watched him longer (and got a bit of a respite from my run) maybe what I envied even more than his sight was his stillness. His ability to stop long enough to slow down and really see.
If you can take anything from the wisdom of hawks—this is probably one of the best. How to stop and be still. How to reflect and see. Here’s the thing: I have found that in most cases it isn’t that you don’t know what to do in difficult situations or in planning next steps. It is that you almost never slow down enough to know what you know. Most adults have accumulated a lot of experience – in their work, their lives, their healing. But you are always moving forward to the next thing—always looking for the next problem to solve. And often, looking for the answer outside of yourself—looking for an easier answer, or the right answer, or what other people think is ‘the best practice.’ Forgetting that you often have decades of experience to bring to the issue you are grappling with. Ignoring the vast horizon of information that you carry with you.
So, as you prepare for the year ahead, I want to stop you. I want to slow you down. I want you to sit still. Sit hawk-still and look out on the horizon of your last year. I want to nudge you to take some time to look back and reflect before you begin to plan for what you want to do next.
If slowing down and reflecting isn’t your thing—you aren’t alone. In her article on why we should make more time for reflection (even though we may hate doing it)-- Jennifer Porter notes that the most common reasons that we don’t like reflection: we don’t understand the process of reflection, we don’t like the process of reflection, we don’t like what we see when we do it, and we have a bias toward action[1]. But here’s something you may not know: research shows that reflection was more effective in supporting future action than additional experience was[2]. And while we often have a bias in our reflection on what went wrong—we learn important things when we reflect on both our successes and our failures[3].
Reflection is the act of slowing down to know what you know—to observe what you have done, what worked, what didn’t, and what you have come to understand about how to do what you do, and how to understand the meaning of what you do. Reflection supports both your ability to do the things that are important to you—and reflection supports the way you feel about yourself and your effectiveness.
So before you plan the year ahead—please take time to reflect. You could start by going through your dayplanner or calendar and even seeing what you did and who you did it with this last year. You could do it alone. You could do it in conversation. Make a list. Or write it on flip chart paper. Or make a slide show. You will be surprised by some of it—you will be surprised by what you have already forgotten.
Or if you are seeking even more structure you could use the framework offered by Burnett and Evans in their book Designing a Life. They use a dashboard of four categories: Health, Work, Play and Love. And I encourage you to reflect on the categories fully over the past year. What did you do? Highs and Lows? Surprises? What worked and didn’t? What you learned? What you lost and gained? What you would have done differently and why?
In my 5-phase model of healing from repeated trauma I strongly encourage everyone to start with preparation: gather your resources and build a foundation for the important work of healing. This foundation helps you sort through what did happen and what didn’t happen and helps you untangle the ways you protect yourself and can often get in your own way. And this transition into a new year is no different. You need to build a strong foundation from which to spring into what you want and need next. And this is as true for teams and organizations as it is for individuals.
Perhaps, because it is winter and most of the world is fallow, we forget the wisdom of nature and growth and planting new things. We aren’t reminded through our current actions how to support growth. You don’t just leap in to action. You reflect on what you grew and what helped. But most importantly you turn over your compost and add it to your beds—and then you till that compost into the soil so new things can grow. This is the invisible work of gardening—of taking the what is old and digested to support new growth. And this is the invisible, but crucial work you need to do: to turn over your learning and digest it enough to take forward.
© 2023 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD
[1] Porter, J. (2017). Why you should make time for reflection (even if you hate doing it). HBR March 21, 2017.
[2] Di Stefano, G., Gino, F., Pisano, G., and Staats, B. (2014). Making Experience Count: The Role of Reflection in Individual Learning. HBS Working Paper 14-093.
[3] Cannon MD, Edmonson AE. 2001. Confronting failure: Antecedents and consequences of shared beliefs about failure in organizational work groups. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 22: 161–177. Edmondson AE. 2011. Strategies for learning from failure. Harvard Business Review, July-August: 48– 56.
