Reflective Thinking · Lesson 3 of 3

What would I do differently, and what did I learn?

A lesson you could not hand to another person is not specific enough to use yourself.

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The useful version of this is specific and repeatable: not "be more careful" but "check the contract length before agreeing the price". A lesson you could not hand to someone else is not yet a lesson.

Separate the decision from the outcome once more here. Sometimes the answer is that you would do exactly the same again and it would go badly again — that is a legitimate conclusion and a valuable one.

Then write the lesson somewhere you will meet it again. A reflection stored where you will never re-read it has done the pleasant half of the work.

See it happen

A workshop you ran went flat. You write: "Prepare better next time."

The read that arrives on its own

Lesson recorded, and it is a fair one. Move on to the next thing.

The same situation, with this idea

Could someone else act on that sentence? No. Specifically: I had no question for the first ten minutes, so the room stayed passive. Next time the first thing that happens is a question they answer in pairs.

What changed

A lesson you could not hand to another person is not specific enough to use yourself — it will read, in six months, as advice you had already taken.

The takeaway

A lesson you could not hand to another person is not specific enough to use yourself.

Easy to take the wrong way

"Communicate better", "plan more", "be more disciplined". These feel like lessons and contain no instruction. Name the moment and the different action.

Try this

Write one lesson from this month as an instruction someone else could follow.