Four techniques for reflection to gather feedback

Reflection and feedback gathering methods

Reflection is the necessary companion to repetition. Without reflection and deliberation, the time you spend repeating to practice is mostly wasted. But you must not just ponder, your reflection should aim to examine the feedback you got from the result of your performance.

You should be reflecting on how your practice contributes to your performance and how it could improve further. You are practicing to improve, not to practice. Here are some techniques you can use:

1. Introspection
2. Diary or log
3. Comparison
4. Discussion

1 Introspection

The easiest method is introspection. Simply examine your performance in your mind. You can do systematically or randomly. You will find that the people who are good at something are thinking about it much of their time. The people at the top of their game probably think of little else. They think about their progress, what they could do to improve, reflect on what they did, etc.

If you find yourself thinking a lot about writing or language or whatever you are doing, this may be all the introspection you need. But most people need to be more systematic. Schedule time during each practice to think about how it went. Do think you have finished until you have reflected on the quality of what you did and what to do next.

And if you remember during odd moments, think about how you are progressing and how your practice is doing overall. But do not think in general terms, try to be as specific as possible. Try to plan what you are going to practice next time.

But introspection has the same limits of working memory as everything. There’s only so much you can keep in your head. That’s when you need to introduce record keeping.

2 Diary or log

Keeping a log is essential for tracking progress but it is also useful to keep a diary with more detailed thoughts or plans.

This could be very simple - write down what you did, how it went and what you will do next time. This may take some effort but it is worth it. Just like with writing itself, you will discover things you did not know about yourself by having to formulate them in writing - even if it is just bullet points.

During the process you will discover how easy it is to forget what you did even just a short time ago. You can use this opportunity to slow down, replay your practice in your mind and take note of what it was like. This will be an incredibly useful method of improving your ability to perceive how well you are doing. The process of writing it out explicitly will show you how many things you left unexamined.

3 Comparison or benchmarking

No matter what you are doing, there’s a good chance others are doing it, as well. You can use what they are doing as a benchmark - both practically and emotionally. It is almost certain that almost anything someone you know or know about can do, you can do also. Maybe not exactly the same way or to the same degree but at least a little bit.

The trick is to find someone who is just a little bit better than you and compare what you are doing to them. They are your benchmark of what is possible. Your aim is not to beat them or show them up. Your aim is to calibrate your expectation. Your mantra should be:

If many people can do something well that I struggle with, I can probably practice to get better at it. It is much more likely that I just haven’t figured out how to practice it than “I am not good at it”.

This applies to everything. Running, driving, drawing, playing a musical instrument, doing math, speaking a foreign language, and of course, academic writing.

In many fields, you cannot compare yourself to the top performers - runners, chess players, musicians. At that level you need to combine enormous amounts of practice with some natural predisposition (or at least a specific life story that enabled them to start early enough). But there are always enough people who are just above you, whose level you can reach.

But with other fields, there is no easy notion of ‘the best’. This is most true of language in general and writing in particular. There is no reason why should not be able to compose any sentence or paragraph that anyone else can. And that you should not be able to do it quickly enough to compose just as good a paper or essay as them. You may vary in speed and total volume of output but that does not matter, the basic stuff of performance is well within your reach.

So the trick is to look at what those people are doing and think about what they did and then practicing to get to a point where you can replicate it. This is very easy with writing, because it is there in front of you and does not change.

A really good way to do benchmarking is to review the work of others in a group. This is something you can do with other people on the learning journey or, if you don’t know anybody, you can read reviews or watch videos assessing other people’s performance. This is available for music, photography, writing, many sports.

4 Discussion: Coaching and the limits to reflection

There are limits to the amount of reflection you can do on your own. At the earliest stages, you don’t yet have enough ability to perceive all aspects of what you are doing. This is when it helps to work with a coach.

When we say the word “coach” we imagine someone who tells you what to do. But that is wrong. If that was all coaches did, we could learn from a step by step guide. In fact, the reason Couch to 5K works so reliably is because anybody following those steps can get those gains.

No, the reason to have a coach is to have someone to help you with reflection. Everything else a coach does such as setting out a programme or motivating you is just a bonus. You can mostly get those things for yourself with the help of textbooks of instructional videos. What you cannot get is that external perception of what you are doing. Even when you record yourself, you are not quite at the level where you can perceive all the problems. You can bootstrap your way to this level but a coach is a great shortcut.

You don’t always have somebody called ‘coach’ in your field. For example, there are writing coaches but they are few and far between. But you can always use a ‘teacher’ as a coach, too. Even in a class situation. Don’t go to class waiting for the teacher to tell you what to do and what to learn. Go there to get feedback on your performance. Do all the exercises and more and listen carefully to what the teacher tells you. They may not even realise that they are coaching you.

Or you can always find somebody who is just a little better than you or even at the same level as you to give you feedback as an input into your reflection. The feedback can even be wrong and still be useful for reflection. Remember, you are using a coach as a source of improved self-reflection to help you achieve more productive repetition. They cannot do the repetition for you and they cannot do the reflection for you, either. But they can be a great catalyst or accelerator.

And finally, a coach, a teacher or even a class can give structure to your practice. People often complain about their teachers or classes. They say things like - ‘the teacher didn’t teach me what I need’ or ‘I never learn anything in class’. You can turn any class into a personal coaching session just by changing your perspective. This is a time to help you reflect on your practice and performance.