When was the last time you took time to help develop, invest in or feedback to one of your employees or colleagues? Perhaps it has been a little while; perhaps it is always at the forefront of your mind, perhaps you do that daily.

Now ask yourself, when was the last time you took time to develop, invest in and feedback on yourself. Has it been a while? Does that ever really happen?

Leaders need to be 'reflective practitioners' - to intentionally evaluate events, experience and advice - committed to a process of ongoing development, not just of others, but also of themselves. Have you heard someone say that 'experience is life's greatest teacher'? Although well meaning, a much more truthful and precise statement would be that 'evaluated experience is life's greatest teacher.' Aldous Huxley cleverly establishes that "experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him." Experience is not about events or quantitative periods of time - it is about stopping, looking back, learning and becoming bigger and better.

All well and good. Perhaps you have heard this many times before, but how do you go about it in practice? There are many different ways to reflect:

• Meeting with a mentor on regular occasions to verbalise your reflection and be held accountable over time.
• Keeping a notebook or journal of thoughts, ideas and aims and then looking back at set points during the year.
• Simple isolating yourself from the office for time to be quiet, think and ponder.

Gerald McGinnis, President and CEO of Respironics Inc suggests, with a specificity to each of us that is perhaps unintentional, to "Value your listening and reading time at roughly ten times your talking time. This will assure you that you are on a course of continuous learning and self-improvement." This means taking time (and that may mean physically putting it in your diary) for thinking, listening to your thoughts and feelings, perhaps reading or reviewing goals and aspirations against your current position. Whether listening and reading is ten times more valuable than talking or not is not the issue, each of us should be challenged to quickly review how we spend our time. Many will find that we tend to spend more time talking 'outwards' than developing 'inwards'.

Why not schedule a half-day soon to spend time identifying, clarifying and writing down or sharing with a mentor some key goals with estimated time frames. Then, depending on who you are and how you work, use the best method possible to ensure that there are times to look back on those goals. Leaders need to be reflective practitioners - detecting daily, monitoring monthly, advancing annually - to keep themselves on the path that they need, and are needed, to tread.

Reflective Questions
How can I best ensure that reflection actually happens?
What might the consequences be if I don't take time to reflect?
Comparatively, how much time do I spend reading, listening, talking, working or idle?

Phil Wall
CEO