Reflective Learning and Why it is Invaluable in Business and Coaching

What is reflective learning?

Reflective learning is the process of learning by reflecting on past experiences. Reflective learning can be used to increase knowledge, develop empathy, and foster self-understanding.

Reflective learning is not just about summarising an experience for someone else. More importantly it is about giving oneself time to really think about what has happened and what role you played in it.

To learn to understand why you played a particular role. Why do you do it that way. What what driving those decisions. The objective is not to judge the behaviour but to better understand. To be able to build a picture of one's environments or landscape that influences your motives, decisions and feelings. Reflective learning can also help us to develop empathy by understanding other people's stories, feelings, and attitudes better. It can also help us to better understand our own attitudes and feelings.

Why is reflective learning? In education reflective learning is necessary in order to help students learn in an appropriate way. A study done by the Association for Psychological Science found that reflective learning can help improve focus, memorisation, and creativity. Reflective learning is important in education in order to get the most out of every student. How reflective learning helps improve your business? Reflective learning is in fact a technique for self and individual improvement through reflection on past experiences. It is about reworking procedures, practices and processes in order to achieve the desired results. So reflective learning means review, analysis and evaluation of own actions and thoughts. On of the key challenges is the context, environment, the honesty as well as our own perceptions and confidence with vulnerability that is required for reflective learning to be effective. This is hard for an individual, let alone for an entire team in an open setting. Ironically enough, the more successful someone has been, the less failure one has faced, the harder it will be for them.

As a coach it is my role to facilitate this journey of exploration. It is about helping you discover more about yourself and those things that influence you to better understand yourself. That renewed insight will help you and makes it clearer to see where you want to go and why.

If you have any questions or comments, please shoot me a note or comment on here. I have added some additional insight below. The Harvard business Review published an interesting article about this concept: https://hbr.org/1991/05/teaching-smart-people-how-to-learn