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In my last article, I started to look at why folks behave the way they do. Very simply put, every event that we experience is filtered through the rocks that we carry around with us (our values, assumptions, beliefs, and expectations).
After adding our perception and judgment to what we’ve observed, we make a conclusion that is again filtered by our current emotions and feelings and then we react. Most times we go through this process in milliseconds, so that it seems that we have an “immediate” reaction.
Reflection Leadership, and in particular Self Reflection, allows us to have better reactions to events when they happen, but it means having to pay attention to this reaction process.
How to Monitor Our Behavior
The first thing we need to do is to practice Self Reflection on a regular basis. When we understand what rocks we are carrying around in our bag, even the ones that are hiding way down deep, we are able to better choose which rocks we filter our experiences through.
The second thing we need to do is slow down our reaction time. Instead of instantly reacting to everything that we experience, there are times when we need to take the time to really understand what is going on. Most times we don’t have all the facts and we end up filtering our experience based on the wrong rocks.
Seeing the Whole Picture
I remember a story from Stephen R. Covey about him riding on a subway train with a man and his two young, unruly children. He was trying to read the newspaper, but the kids were acting out and being a complete distraction while their father seemed to be completely oblivious to the whole thing.
After not being able to endure it anymore, Covey gruffly asked the man if he could please control his children. The man, coming out of his preoccupation, replied that he was sorry, that they had just come from the hospital where his wife had just died and he was struggling with how to explain to his kids that their mother had died.
This is a great example of how having additional information leads us to use different rocks to filter our experiences. Instead of acting angrily to this situation, the reaction called for would be one of deep sympathy. So being able to slow down our reaction to make sure we have enough facts to appropriately understand the situation is important.
Emotions Can Get in the Way
Even if our understanding of the situation is complete and we come to an appropriate conclusion about the event, we need to recognize that how we are feeling and our current emotional state can still determine how we react.
For instance, I may accurately understand the request from a coworker and draw an appropriate conclusion based on the right rocks I have. But if I’m feeling rushed or overwhelmed from having too much work to do, my reaction to the request still might not be what I really want because of feeling harried.
Putting it All Together
Understanding this process of how we get from an event we observe to our reaction to that event allows us to make adjustments throughout the process. We need to make sure that we have an accurate information about the event we’ve observed.
With a regular and consistent Self Reflection practice we know what rocks we are carrying around with us so that when we filter our experiences, we do so with our appropriate rocks. Recognizing our current emotional state and our feelings gives us the opportunity to stop and modify our reaction when our emotions have the better of us.
As leaders, we need to act in a way that inspires others. Effective leaders tend to magically react to everything the “right” way. In reality it isn’t magic at all. Effective leaders understand this process and take steps to slow it down so that their reactions, in total, tend to be more appropriate especially in difficult situations.
Leader’s Reflection: Effective leaders understand the process that describes why we behave the way we do. They take steps, through Self Reflection to make sure they have an accurate understanding of the what they’ve observed, they recognize the rocks they are carrying around with them, and they take care to make sure that their emotions don’t hijack their behavior.
