Many of our leadership activities go unseen by others. For example, the fierce conversation between you and a peer. Or the sales meeting with a client that didn’t go well. Or the email you wrote and the response it got. What about all those times when no one sees you in action, and nobody can give you feedback? How can we learn from those events and turn them into real experiences?

What can we learn from Agile? From the US Army?

Well, you were there, weren’t you? You were where the action was happening. You were, in fact, the protagonist, the leading character. What, then, about yourself making time to give feedback to yourself about what happened? How could you make it a habit that you spend time at the end of each day to reflect and learn from your experiences? How can you become the coach of you?

Well, easily! You can easily steal some best practices from learning organisations and use them for your personal development. For example, you can do an AAR (After Action Review) as the US Army does. Or you can do a Sprint Retrospective as agile software development companies do. All those excellent practices boil down to ourselves, asking ourselves four fundamental questions when looking back at our day:

• What went well?
• What didn’t go so well?
• What have I learned?
• What would I do differently next time?

It is great to be reflective, self-analysis can be useful, but only if it results in action.