At Q4 we have a monthly retrospective at the end of each month, and we ask our selves these 3 questions:
1) What went well this month?
2) What didn’t go well this month?
3) What can we try next month?
This is an agile philosophy that we use on the month and week level at work depending on the situation. You can learn a lot from these meetings and I find that there is a lot of valuable input and insight that comes from them.
Last week after a particularly bad day at work, I asked myself those same 3 questions during the drive home, I answered myself in my head sort of like an interview. After I was done not only did I feel a lot better about a day that started poorly and got worse, but there were some things I realized I could have done better and those were the “What can I try next time” items.
I think this is a valuable process one can conduct with themselves, on a bad day like me, after a bad meeting perhaps, maybe something went well that you want to learn from. I don’t think the situation much matters but it seems like the exercise in itself can provide you with more information about yourself and you ability to handle situations and your ability to learn from them.
Do you have any special tricks or routines you use for dealing with situations where you feel you could have done something better?
One Comment
This is an excellent approach. I would put the biggest emphasis on “what went well’ (which borrows from positive psychology) and go so far as to write down your answers each time you ask yourself these questions. It is also great to note what you do when things don’t go well to get yourself back to feeling good. This way, the next time things aren’t going well and you are feeling down/ less resilient (yes, there is always a next time) you can refer to what you did in previous times to help yourself get back on track. The idea is that over time, you will naturally be more resilient because you will know what do.
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[...] the vein of the last post (what went well, what didn’t go well, what can i try next time?), I decided to apply this exercise to a particularly bad customer service experience I had at the [...]