WBL: Using Reflection to Accelerate Growth

Hello. My name is Garrett Westroll. I specialize in sport and performance psychology, as a lot of you already know. But you don't have to be an expert in that field to consider this. If you were a pitcher in baseball or softball, and it is pitch black, you can't see anything and you threw a pitch, how would you know if you threw a strike or a ball? In other words, how would you know if you were successful or not? Well, that pitcher is missing something that a lot of us in the general population also miss, and that is feedback.

Why is that important? Because we learn from feedback, not just experience alone. Maybe you've heard the phrase get 1% better every day. How do we do that? We got to practice and gain feedback from that practice. Feedback not only aids our self awareness, but it overall enhances our growth, development and learning. The next question is, where do we get feedback? It can be a coach, a supervisor, a manager, a family member, a significant other, someone we trust, maybe a friend who gives you positive and negative feedback, which you'll see in a second.

Both are important, but have you ever considered a crazy source of feedback and that is yourself? One of the ways we can give ourselves feedback is a simple tool, and that is reflection. Do you ever pause and stop to reflect? Or do you sometimes just go through the motions and take it day by day in life? Maybe you're saying to yourself, well, I do reflect sometimes. But how do we usually reflect? For one, we only look at it in binary terms, good or bad. In sports, athletes often just look at the scoreboard.

Hey, I either won or I lost. And that dictates how they perceive the quality of their performance. We also sometimes judge the person as a whole rather than the actions themselves that lead to the outcome. And my question to that for you is, if beating yourself up were a good way to change behavior, wouldn't you be perfect by now? See, not always the best way to reflect. We've all been guilty of this or seen someone else do it where either one, they're overly confident and nothing they can do is wrong.

They're all 100% the best person in the world, or someone's overly critical and negative, and nothing they do is right. Again, very simplistic, black and white and binary. Overall, these forms of feedback are overly focused on the outcome rather than the underlying processes and context, and they leave us with no sense of direction and no nuance to it. Move forward with so let me propose to you a better way to reflect and give yourself feedback. And that is a simple tool, a simple framework called WBL, which stands for well, better learn.

For that w. You want to identify at least one thing that you did well. This increases your confidence and provides a little bit of balance to that negative mind because for the majority of people, myself included, we automatically jump to the negative pieces when we're reflecting. For the b you want to identify something you can do better. In other words, something you can improve on. This provides a roadmap for improvement, and in this one, the more specific the better. And last but not least, that l you want to identify something you learned from your experience.

Again, we don't learn from the experience alone, we learn from reflecting upon that experience. Overall, this WBL framework is really simple and it doesn't take that long to practice to practice it. You can do it by journaling, writing it down, just like goal setting. It's really helpful to enhance that memorization and reflection in that process. You can do it by saying it aloud or internally, and you can also have it be done at the macro level, maybe reflecting on 2023 or a certain year, things you did well, things you could do better at, and things you learned.

You can also do it at the monthly level as well as the micro level, at the weekly or daily level, even smaller than that. For example, for me, I do a lot of sessions with athletes at the individual level and groups and teams, so I'll often do this, maybe on the drive home or if I have time where I'm writing session notes, I'll talk and think about what I did well at, what I could do better, and things I learned from that time. As you can see, the Wbill framework is a much more effective way to reflect and give yourself a chance to give yourself feedback.

Go out and try it and see as your self growth and development skyrocket. And also follow along for part two of this video where I'll do a more deep, in depth dive into the grand scheme of things and how self reflection and feedback are important for growth and development.