We all say that we’re going to do it and guess what we don’t.

And because we don’t we fail to learn from our lessons, why? 

Is it that we don’t want to, don’t have the time to or that we genuinely just don’t know how to…

If you fall into the latter category and you ‘just don’t know how to,’ well this entry could be for you. In this post I am going to cover 3 ways to learn from your past experiences and how to implement these lessons going forward.

1 – Reflection

Sounds simple enough, and it’s not difficult but how many of us truly take the time to reflect on what went well and what didn’t?
 
Do you look at both positive and negative lessons from a current project or situation which you can use going forward for future projects; personal or professional?

Do you consciously identify any key lessons learned, making sure any and all reflections are noted down?

If you answered yes to the above, do you then do the work to ensure those reflections are actually learned from in the next project to prevent the same issues and risks from reoccurring?

I mean, if you work professionally in project delivery then yes. To some degree I’d hope and expect the above messages to resonate with you. I ‘d even expect that above is carried out in some form (albeit not every project or organisation does it well).

However this entry is talking to you and about you – specifically.

When you’re handling an event a situation or in fact any part of your daily life do you reflect? 

If not, then why not give it a try. 

However reflecting without doing anything further, is like knowledge without any action.

Which is why the next lesson is … 

2 – Analysis

Did you succeed or did you fail? Was it a bit of both?

Regardless, you want to analyse the sequence of events to see if you can notice a pattern or any themes towards your triumph or downfall so you know what to do or what not to do next time. 

Most people don’t really analyse or if they do it’s the successes. You learn more from your failures than your successes. Identifying what not to repeat is usually more beneficial than gathering your gold stars ⭐️. 

It could help you identify that; it’s your early morning starts that helped you maintain an active gym membership, or that you don’t finish your to do tasks when you come home from work and sit down to relax, because you struggle to get back up. 

Whatever it is, sitting down and analysing your sequence of events is definitely helpful in situations where you either; 

a. Would have liked a different outcome
b. Want to identify why something went as well as it did or,
c. You just want to understand a bit more about analysis.

Reflection and analysis are complementary and go hand in hand. Once you decide to look at the ‘whys,’ and the impacts the ‘why’s’ have on your outcomes it should hopefully inspire you to not only continue with the above but to give you some motivation, consistency and discipline to want to do the above.

3.Actionable goals

What good is any of the above if you don’t know how to or can’t implement it.

Which leads us on nicely to how to implement and create an actionable lessons learned. 

Now this can be tricky because it ultimately depends on what your objective was with the analysis ‘step 2’. 

If you were conducting the analysis to figure out how you achieved your dream goal. It may seem slightly more straight forward because, you just need to produce a list of how you did it by; identifying the key pivotal actions that you believe and ‘maybe’ others (if you want to loop them in) landed you that desired outcome. 

That list would then naturally become your playbook moving forward for whenever you have a goal and naturally you’ll soon identity whether it’s the playbook or if it requires amendments to be made depending upon the situation. 

However if this lessons learned is to identity failure you should now have your list of failures ‘what you don’t want to repeat’ and your analysis which should detail how and why those failures occurred. For your actionable goals you want to now develop a list of what you’d like to try instead.

Of course you want to keep your don’t list – it’s very important. Otherwise you could find yourself repeating the same mistake again and sadly you may not even realise it until you complete this exercise again, if you don’t capture and keep to hand your don’t list identifying what you’d now like to try instead.

This exercise will work with consistency carrying it out and completing it the first or even second time around might not get you to the desired outcomes but the more you can identify what’s not working the more accurately you will be able to identify what it is that’s preventing you from achieving your desired outcome. 

Just keep remembering there’s always a lesson to be learnt in every experience, good and bad and all you need to do is identify them to take forward.