Authentic Gravitas by Rebecca Newton

Author:Rebecca Newton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

And That’s a Wrap: Ending as You Mean to Go On

What about at the end of Emma’s day? Researchers from HEC Paris, Harvard University, and the University of North Carolina conducted studies looking at the role of reflection in learning.15 Their research suggests that once a person has acquired a certain amount of experience with a task, the benefit of getting more experience is less than the benefit of reflection—deliberately articulating and codifying (organizing into categories) their experience accumulated in the past. And the effects aren’t a one-off, but appear to endure over time. Individuals who spent fifteen minutes at the end of the day reflecting on lessons learned performed 23 percent better after ten days than those who didn’t reflect. Looking at this “deliberate learning” (as opposed to “experiential learning”), the researchers questioned whether this reflection that fuels learning is common wisdom or if it’s contrary to most people’s intuition. When given the choice between deliberate and experiential learning, the overwhelming majority chose to gain more experience rather than use the time for reflection, expecting it would enable them to perform better in the future. Except it didn’t. Participants scored higher in the following round of the experiment when they decided to reflect upon the experiences they’d already had, instead of collecting more experience.

Emma decided that she would make an effort to finish work earlier and build in reflection time, instead of working as late as possible and then being too tired to think about anything. Rather than succumb to the call of social media on her commute home, Emma would use the time to reflect on the day gone by. She would then consciously switch from work-related thinking to reading more broadly on general business, economic, and social issues. On Fridays, if she’d been disciplined throughout the week you’d find Emma on the way home still reading, except it would be Vogue or Grazia! It’s like the diet where one day a week you get to eat whatever you want, so long as you’ve eaten healthily the rest of the week.

I asked Emma to think about the difference between what she’d be like as a professional in four or five years if she built these simple practices into her life, compared to if she didn’t. Her look said it all. Emma believed these practices would significantly increase her ability to contribute powerful insights. And we hadn’t even begun to look at the time she actually spent at work. Work-related prospection, reflection, and “brain food” are not urgent needs, and rarely is anyone asking you to do them, but they are important. Emma was surprised to learn that the seemingly intangible, inaccessible quality of gravitas could be strengthened by being intentional and disciplined in just a few small, practical ways.

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