Reflection is essential to growth. If we don't think into our lives, experiences, relationships, choices, and results, we'll be at the mercy of chaos and entropy. Reflection is the fulcrum for seizing opportunity and influencing the path of our own lives. 

But there's a sneaky, counterfeit form of reflection that can kill growth. It's on my list of Growth Traps. Let's call it RUMINATION. 

If you want to read an awesome book on the topic, check out Ethan Kross's book Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It.

As a writer (and someone who often writes for other people for a living), I'm keenly aware that there are many voices inside our heads. The voice of our hopes, our fears, our nostalgia. The voice of others giving us advice, telling us who we are, cautioning our choices. When authors like Kross talk about "harnessing the inner voice," they remind us that we are at the mercy of those voices...until we cultivate them, address them, and employ them in useful ways.

Today though, we won't dive deep on that. We just want to focus on one of the Growth Traps that haunt us all.

We're trying to change, looking to grow, and we start thinking.

Thinking about what we feel...

What happened...

What seems to always happen...

Aaaand, we're ruminating.

How to Know You're Ruminating, not Reflecting:

Rumination puts you back in a circumstance to relive it. We end up bathing in the memory, feeling the feelings all over again. Our brain can often extend the fantasy to tell us what will happen next ("I'll be stuck here, life is never going to change, this thing I was working toward is ruined." etc.)

An easy way to see if you're ruminating is to notice how you tell the story to others...do you have to set the scene, give a play-by-play and narrate the experience to get your point across about "what happened"? If you're doing this, it's a major sign that you aren't doing reflection about the circumstance, you're still caught in reliving it...needing others to grasp what it felt like to live it so they can join you in your rumination.

What you've probably noticed about this collaborative rumination is that it provides an opportunity to sample - and re-sample - the disappointment, anger, embarrassment, and anxiety inside the experience. Each time you expose yourself to the feelings, your brain treats it a lot like experiencing it all over again. When we do this, we are amplifying the emotional drain of the experience, without seeing progress or resolution...because what we're dealing with is already in the past. We get a repeat dose of the negative emotions, without any new potential outcome.

Reflection by contrast steps up beside a memory to think about what happened from a different vantage point. Some teachers talk about getting "a few inches of psychological distance" from the memory by watching yourself from the outside. One way we can do this is by using the third person. This small amount of distance changes the mood and energy of asking what the situation means, what influenced it, and how "that person" experiencing it might have engaged the factors involved in the situation differently.

If I was to explode with frustration at a colleague when they pointed out a flaw in my work, I might use third person to reflect by saying "Morgan did not like hearing she messed up today. She kinda attacked the person who pointed it out. Morgan seems to be feeling the pressure to get everything right, and saw that going up in smoke when someone pointed out an error."

If you're talking with others, reflection sounds more like saying to a friend "I lost my cool at work today. I think I'm feeling the pressure to not mess up so much that I'm exploding at people. I guess it's making me scared of criticism." See how instead of explaining how much work I did to get things right, or how nitpicky the coworker's error detection was (the activities associated with rumination), I could think about the real meaning of what happened. Doing that doesn't drag me back through the emotions the same way. It also has the potential to adjust my approach, rather that increasing my exposure to my disappointment at "failing to be perfect."

Reflect on Purpose

Let's do a dangerous experiment. Call to mind a recent, painful memory. Something that happened, that you disliked, regret, or feel caused you harm.

Before you let the video replay start in your head, take a breath. Don't climb into the front row of your brain's 3D theater. Instead, try to lay the experience in front of you like a crossword puzzle. We're going to search-and-find some information by probing the memory. We're not going to bathe in it.

Say out loud (or write it as a journaling exercise) the thing that happened, and do it in third person:

"[ your name ] ________."

"Morgan missed an important detail in Monday's report and felt deeply embarrassed."

"Morgan failed to send a birthday card to a dear friend and Morgan's friend's feelings were hurt."

I could keep going, but you get the idea. Your turn.

Once you've set the tone for reflection by describing what happened to "that person," you can ask questions about the experience.

Reflection Questions:

1. What was surprising or unexpected?
2. What choices or actions triggered this situation?
3. What fear or hope did this experience tap into?
4. Which emotions did I feel (list 3-10 different, specific emotions. Looking for more than 2 emotions helps us balance our emotional perspective.)

We can ruminate on experiences, possibilities, fantasy, or the words of others. But we can also ruminate on our emotions. On the surface, rumination can masquerade as emotional reflection, strategic planning, or embracing the law of Attraction. But when we ruminate we aren’t curiously unpacking the emotions we’ve felt for action; rumination probes the emotion to an elevated pitch, without prompting for alleviating action. We aren't really planning how and what we'll do to engage or build the ideal state; we're dropping ourselves into a false world, causing our sense of dissonance between the life we have and the life we want to grow. This can boost feelings of loneliness, depression, and demoralization.

Rumination bathes in a feeling without looking for causes, implications, meaning, and application. When we do this, our internal weather can take a nasty turn, spiraling and deepening without bringing any energy for change, growth, or triumph. 

I started developing this blog during Thanksgiving Week. This year I've added a Guided Gratitude Reflection to the Wild + Brave Blog. It's a journaling and reflection practice designed to help you escape the growth trap of rumination and do the real work of reflecting on your life.

At the end of the day, avoiding this growth trap requires building skills at real reflection. It also means interrupting ourselves when our mental train tracks take a detour to Chatterville. In the beginning, it can be hard to stop the train. Try using your whole body by throwing your hands in the air, taking a huge breath and saying "how fascinating - my brain has started ruminating! Let's make a different choice!" As dorky as that sounds, it does wonders to help your brain exit the mental quagmire of rumination and make room for something new.

See you for more Growth Traps and how to avoid them in the next few weeks!