Reflections

I haven’t had a lot of time for reflection lately.

I was laid off from my full-time job (the one that provided health insurance!) back in December. I was told I would be losing my job a few months before, so I was working as much as I could to store up for the lean months. Once I was laid off, I worked as much as I could while looking for another job. I would basically shoot an assignment, send the pictures in to my editors, then get up and do it again the next day. All action, all the time.

But I should have known better.

You see, in my previous job, I was part of a team that did something akin to organizational leadership consulting. In helping these leaders come to grips with discontinuous change in a rapidly changing world, one of the things we stressed was that we don’t learn from experience.

“We learn from reflecting on our experiences.”

Instead, we would repeat, over and over: We learn from reflecting on our experiences. Additionally, we would add, we really learn when we articulate those reflections to others. We would drill this into these folks, and if I heard that saying once I heard it sixty-seven times.

And yet I forgot to exercise those disciplines in my own life. I would feel worse about this, but the other day I saw a doctor wolfing down a bacon-cheeseburger, so maybe there’s something inherent in the human condition that makes us ignore the advice we give others.

Action, Reflection, Articulation

This Action-Reflection-Articulation process is so important.

Imagine a neophyte photographer going around taking snaps with his new camera. He forgets to take his lens cap off. He goes home, dumps his compact flash card into Lightroom, and gets nothing but black frames. He goes out the next day, same result. It’s not until he sits down and reflects on his experience that things start to happen:

“Oh, look at that! I leave my lens cap on and all my images are way underexposed. I wonder why that is. What would happen if I took my lens cap off next time?”

Then, if he told his buddy about it, (“Dude! Guess what happens when you take your lens cap OFF!? It’s amazing! Light comes in and you can make pictures!”) that learning really sinks in.

So much has happened in the past year, and I have not taken the time to adequately process, to reflect on, what I’ve experienced. From losing a job to working on a documentary project with a major NGO in Rwanda to completely switching camera systems, there’s some rich material there just ripe for the harvesting. I hope to get some of those reflections down here (articulation, right?), before it’s too late to learn from those experiences, and I value your input and insights.

~Greg