What Does Reflective Practice Have to Do with Resilience?
In case you’re not currently engaging in some kind of reflective practice or need some convincing, let’s start with the science….
Reflective Practice is essentially a form of “mindfulness.” I know, the term mindfulness has been used to the point that it makes us go “ick!”. And the science of the documented benefits of reflective practice on productivity is undeniable. The mental health benefits at the individual level are enormous including improvements in attention, emotional regulation, empathy, body awareness, communication, and work performance, and reduced burnout.
There are wide-ranging estimates on the rate of burnout in among human services and education providers. It is estimated between 50-80% of those working as educators and educational administrators report ongoing high stress levels and/or burnout. If half or more of us are burned out, now is the time for us to collectively identify and pool our best practices as resources to build our resiliency!
Need more convincing or interested in a deeper dive into this topic? Check out the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center.
In the previous blog post, we did a quick review of Solution Focused practice broken into three key focus areas. This post will focus on a deeper dive into how you can harness SF for your practice in each of the 5 steps. Read the overview here(LINK TO PREVIOUS BLOG POST).
01 Future Vision
Harnessing motivation through getting clarity on your future vision, is the key component of Solution Focused practice. Whether it’s a vision for a few days or 10 years from now, the key is to get clear on what the future can be.
In some cases, your future vision might already be very clear. If that is the case, great! You may not need to spend a lot of time in this stage. But in many situations, what we think is the future vision is or can be is not as clear. We know what we don’t want, and sometimes that obscures our ability to see what we do want. In this most common case, we intentionally spend a little extra time here, at the beginning of our Reflective Practice cycle. With this intentional time spent at the starting place, we often find the rest of the practice moves even more quickly and smoothly.
In this future visioning stage, get comfortable spending some time with your imagination. For some this is easy, but for most of us we’ve slowly had that creativity squeezed out of us. We are told as we are very young to dream big, and as we approach and live in adulthood we are told to get practical and live in the real world. But that’s a trick, the real world that exists today, is not the world that will exist tomorrow. We need our imaginations and creativity to actively participate in creating the future we see for ourselves and others.
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are in a state of heightened emotions related to the problem (anger, fear, desperation, deep sadness, anxiety, etc.) there’s a little pre-step - emotional exploration.
In this emotional exploration time, you will intentionally spend time with these emotions. This can look different for different people and different issues- venting, verbally complaining, maybe even fuming, exercising strenuously while meditating on the issue. The important part is not to dismiss those emotions or skip past them. Leaning into them first will allow you to truly accept what is real today and understand what you can actively create in the future.
Need someone to process these feelings with? Contact us - we love holding space and guiding you through a process of exploring, accepting, and releasing your feelings so you can get to your next steps and create your future vision!
Creating your future vision: Scaling as Foundation for Reflective Practice
The Solution Focused Scale is an intuitive tool that can help us start our reflective journey and activate our internal reward centers to harness motivation as fuel to continue.
Using the Solution Focused Scaling for Reflective Practice
Imagine a scale. 1-10 scale, with 1 being the worst the issue can possibly be; 10 best imaginable future (when the problem is absent or greatly minimized). Define 1 & 10 as clearly as you can.
Having trouble identifying your 10? Here are some questions that can help you identify your preferred future. The clearer your future vision is, the more illuminated your path will be.
What might a better future look like with this problem eliminated or drastically reduced?
Why is this important to you?
What will the positive impacts be to you? To others?
02 Identify the Next Small Step
Now that you have an idea of where you want to go, we can identify where things are today and use that to determine the next step forward.
Return to your scale, and ask:
Where am I, we, or the problem on this scale right now? Pick a number, any number that feels right to you. Fractions are okay. Don’t be too precious about the number, what feels right to you is right.
Spend some time with that number. Identify what is working where you are currently even in the less-than-ideal situation you are in. Identify as many of these as you can, and look at this from many angles. Here are some questions to help you identify what’s working currently:
What am I intentionally or unintentionally doing that allows me to be where I am on this scale and not one or two steps lower?
What are others doing that leads us to where we are on this scale and not one or two steps lower?
What other situational or environmental aspects brings you to where you are on the scale today and not one or two steps lower?
We we know what is working, as identified in 2, then we can ask “If I/we were to move just one step the scale, what are the next smallest steps I/we can take to get there?”
The inspiration bug may nip you here and you might get inspired with many steps that you can take. That’s fantastic and this means your creativity and imagination are piqued, which is key for long-term motivation. And to best harness that motivation is to honor and hold on to these great ideas and the brilliance of your brain. And don’t include all of them in your action steps quite yet. Critically review all the amazing things you found and identify the one easiest, smallest, and most actionable thing you will intentionally do next.
Believe it or not, the less you try to do to get started, the more successful you will be at moving along the scale. That doesn’t mean holding yourself back from taking organic steps that are logical and natural, but it means not forcing it by doing too many things and burning yourself out.
Future Vision Check: Before you move on to step 03, take a quick moment, a minute or two, to ensure your step aligns with your future vision, which is what you identified as the 10 on your scale.
03 Step
Now is the time for action - intentionally, or if I dare say it, mindfully, take your step. And with this reflective practice, your brain is now turned on and watching for the future vision to become a reality.
We are intentionally harnessing what is known by many names and is the strange phenomonon of seeing something everywhere that we didn’t see before, even if it was all around us.
This is known as the Frequency Illusion, Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, frequency bias, or as my beloved graduate school advisor the brilliant Dr. Bill Goodwin called it, “Yellow Volkswagon Theory”.
04 Reflect
Reflection can happen in many forms and despite much of what we are led to believe, doesn’t require hours of our time. It can happen in mere minutes. As we have set our brains up to see the preferred future and all the small changes that come with it, our reflection time does not have to be long, and in many cases happens passively in the background of our brains while we are doing other things. And while that is true, it is important to pull that background processing to the front of our minds. Intentionally time for active reflection is essential in helping keep our brains focused and motivated towards the future state we envision.
05 Celebrate
This is the step we most try to skip, and it is just as important, if not more so, in bolstering you forward. This is where long-term resilience is built.
First, let’s dispel some myths:
Celebrations can be small, personal, and do not have to mark a “success”. Celebrations do not need to involve food, alcohol, and overindulgence. These might be our favorite of celebrations, but that is not quite what we mean here.
Celebration, when used as part of an SF reflective practice maintains motivation through giving your brain small dopamine hits that give you the energy and desire you need to keep going. Think of this kind of celebration as rewarding your brain for its brilliance by identifying what worked.
Often times, in the celebration phase, the next small step easily comes to us. Sometimes this comes because we are moving in the “positive” direction, meaning up the scale. But it doesn’t have to be.
In the time when there is not discernible movement on the scale or even moving in the “negative” direction, lower down the scale, we learned something important just by trying. Celebration in this form is where we reward our brains, bodies, and hearts by honoring all good-faith actions toward the preferred future. This allows our brains to being forming new patterns, and can begin to quell the voices of self-doubt that can rage in our heads.
Measuring success by inventorying what we learned over perceived positive progress, will keep you motivated toward your long-term goal and less likely to be halted or set back with challenge.
Celebration and Beyond
What happens after celebration? Back to 01 - Future Vision. This time it’s a bit different. The future vision is likely not new, you already know what it is. In the retun to step 1, we take a moment to reference the vision and ensure that it still fits as our “north star”. This can be just a moment or two, or you can spend a bit more time with it if the vision is continuing to take shape.
Let’s Get Started!
As you can see, reflective practice is a crucial component of Solution Focused practice and activating the future we wish to live in. As we hold space to intentionally plan, take small steps, and reflect on our progress we harness the power of being present in the moment, absorbing and assessing effectiveness in real-time, and are able to adapt our approach quickly when needed. This dramatically increases the likelihood that we’ll absorb the lessons of each step at a time and develop the natural motivations to continue toward our goals. And, as we consider the success of each step, we can adjust in real-time our next projected steps and take them in accordance with our future vision.
Reflective practice as we frame it here is an easy entry spot to begin your focus as you cultivate Solution Focused practice.
Looking for some help to get started? Looking for someone who can help you identify what this process looks like for you or get unstuck? Contact us or set up a Discovery Call.
It is free to talk with us, there is no sales pitch, no twist, no gimmick. We just want to join you on your lifelong journey of creating, co-creating, and negotiating YOUR best future.