Reflect

Please Note: This page is still under construction

The objective here is to acquire relevant lessons from your experience moving through the visual thinking process.

The questions, exercises and techniques you will work-through here are directly related to what you have just accomplished and the process you have just worked your way through. Be sure to acknowledge mistakes and growth-points. Also reflect deeply about the process you underwent, compare it to previous performances, and look for uses in other contexts.

This is a critical sub-step, because it lays down the groundwork and foundations that will help you to improve your ability as a visual thinker.

Let’s now explore this sub-step in a little more detail.

Your first task is to reflect on the events and circumstances that transpired as you moved through the visual thinking process. Ask yourself:

• What have I done?
• How well did I do it?
• How could I have done it better?
• Did I solve the problem effectively? (check against criteria set)
• Why did this happen and not that?
• Why did this happen over and over again, or not at all?

The clearer you are about these events, the more information you will have to work-with and subsequently improve-upon the next time you move through the visual thinking process.

Your next task is to identify what you have learned and the knowledge you have acquired while moving through the visual thinking process. Ask yourself:

• What have I learned?
• How have I changed?
• How has my business changed?
• What skills have I improved upon?
• What do I think and feel now?

The lessons you learn are pivotal towards helping you lay down the path for future growth and development.

It’s important to also reflect upon the sequence of events that led to the problem you were working through and consequently the specific actions you took to resolve the problem. Ask yourself:

• What was the sequence of events that led to this problem?
• Why did I do things the way I did things?
• Should I have done something different?
• How effective were my actions?
• How efficient were my actions?

The answers to these questions will help you to better understand the process you must work through to resolve problems in the future.

Making mistakes is natural and it’s actually a critical part of the evolutionary process of humankind. If we didn’t make mistakes, than we would never really think outside-the-box, or do things differently.

Mistakes will help you to learn about yourself, your strategy and the steps you took to achieve your desired outcome. Ask yourself:

• What mistakes did I make throughout this process?
• Why did I make these mistakes?
• How did I make these mistakes?
• What can I learn from these mistakes?

Hidden within every mistake is the seed of opportunity that will help you to find the answers you need to make improvements in the future.

Everything you have managed to achieve while moving through this visual thinking process could in-effect be used and reused in a variety of ways to help you solve problems in other areas of your life.

Take time to reflect for a moment how you could take these techniques and strategies and apply them to other areas of your life successfully. Ask yourself:

• How can I use what I have learned in the future — maybe even in another context?
• How would I use this again?
• How could I apply this to other areas of my life?

Each time you apply a visual thinking technique into another area of your life, the more proficient you will become, and the more likely you are to find the answers you are searching for.

Integrated into this stage is a set of visual thinking techniques, strategies, tools and processes that you can utilize to help you visualize your thoughts on paper or in physical form. These techniques will be revealed and integrated into each stage along The Path over time.