Developing the Reflective Attitude
To engage reflection, the reflective practitioner will benefit from developing a ‘reflective attitude’ to enhance its learning potential. Fay (1987) identified certain qualities of mind that are pre‐requisite to reflection: curiosity, commitment, and intelligence. These are significant to counter more negative qualities of mind associated with defensiveness, habit, resistance, and ignorance.
Commitment
Commitment is energy that sparks life. Yet, for many practitioners, commitment to their practice has become numb or blunted through working in non‐challenging, non‐supportive, and generally stressful environments, where work satisfaction is making it through work with minimal hassle. These practitioners do not enjoy reflection. They turn their heads away from the reflective mirror because the reflected images are not positive. They do not want to face themselves and accept responsibility for their practice. Things wither and die if not cared for. When those things are people, then the significance of commitment is only too apparent. Commitment is the energy that helps practitioners face up to difficult situations. The small child is ambivalent about learning to walk; it stumbles and falls, it hurts itself. It is a painful process. Yet, the satisfaction of developing its potential far outweighs the bumps and bruises (Rogers 1969).
Curiosity
Curiosity is self‐inquiry, questioning who I am and what I do. It is the opening up of possibility. Gadamer (1975, p. 266) writes:
The opening up and keeping open of possibilities is only possible because we find ourselves deeply interested in that which makes the question possible in the first place. To truly question something is to interrogate something from the threat of our existence, from the centre of our being.
Curiosity is fundamental to the creative life and yet many practitioners are locked into habitual patterns of practice. Often, when things get overly familiar, we take them for granted and get into a habitual groove. Curiosity is turning over pebbles, wondering what lies on the other side, while open to the possibilities of viewing the same thing from different perspectives. Curiosity helps us pay attention as if the experience is new.
Loori (2005, p. 74) writes:
when we truly pay attention, we see each object or situation for the first time‐ and it always seems fresh and new, no matter how many times we’ve encountered it before. We break free of our habitual ways of seeing.
Intelligence
Being intelligent, the practitioner is open to new ideas, keen to explore their value for practice rather than be defensive in viewing new ideas as a threat. Intelligence moves beyond abstract knowledge into a deeper awareness of self that Krishnamurti terms as intuition. He writes (1996, p. 89):
There is an intelligent revolt [against environment] which is not reaction but comes with self‐knowledge through the awareness of one’s own thought and feeling. It is only when we face experience that we keep intelligence highly awakened; and intelligence highly awakened is intuition, which is the only true guide in life.
Put another way, reflection nurtures intelligence and intelligence nurtures intuition, the very essence of professional artistry.
Bringing the Mind Home
To commence reflection, the practitioner will find it helpful to find a quiet eddy out of the fast current of life, to pause, muse, to clear, and let go of the mind and open the body to recall the experience, to create a space where they can return to the experience with all their senses alert. Bringing the mind home cultivates the practitioner’s reflective attitude. It enables the practitioner to pay attention to the particular experience with the attitude that something can be learnt by paying attention to it and reflecting on it. The easiest way to bring the mind home is using our breath. Before you write your journal, sit quietly and take your attention to your breath. Close your eyes and follow your breath in and follow your breath out. Breathe in a sense of light and breathe out your thoughts.1 Count your breath in and breath out. Count to ten and repeat. Notice the thoughts creep in. Just notice them and start counting again from one. Taking time out to reflect sounds easy, but when our lives are addicted to being busy, it may be hard to focus one’s thoughts within rather than be scattered outside. Gradually, with practice, bringing the mind home becomes natural, achieved in seconds. Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? (Lao Tzu 571 BC 1999).
However, this may not be easy. Our minds are often full of stuff that distract us. Like a juggler trying to keep eight plates spinning. Generally, people do not take time to slow down and press the pause button. Having a mind full of stuff also offers an excuse not to look at self in any deep way. Rinpoche (1992, p. 31) writes:
How hard it can be to turn our attention within! How easily we allow our old habits and set patterns to dominate us! Even though they bring us suffering, we accept them with almost fatalistic resignation, for we are so used to giving into them.
Thus to bring the mind home requires effort. It is a liberating structure to free the practitioner to pay attention to experience. Yet, habits are hard to break, especially when the crowded mind is a defensive mechanism to not paying attention.
The idea of breaking free from our habitual ways of seeing and responding is at the core of reflective practice.
Susan Brooks recognises the value of bringing the mind home (2004):
One of the most priceless skills learnt over the last two years of study on the MSc leadership programme2 is ‘bringing home my mind’ – slipping out of the noose of anxiety, releasing all grasping and relaxing into my true nature. By relaxing in this uncontrived, open and natural state we obtain the blessing of aimless self‐liberation of whatever arises (Rinpoche 1992). This has certainly been my experience and the joy of feeling able to distance myself from the daily pressures of work by bringing my mind home is immense and a practice that, I believe, will stay with me indefinitely. Hatha yoga has become an element of my daily practice as a means to ‘bring my mind home’ and to promote my own physical and mental well being in a meditative context. Such practice has revealed to me that I do matter as a person and am not simply a faceless cog in the healthcare organisation. How many times have I said or heard the comment, “I am just a nurse”? Nurses generally have not trusted their own sense of self‐importance enough and yet the fact that nurses do matter is a fundamental truth (Tschudin 1993). Bringing my mind home focuses me on me, underpins my own sense of self‐importance but also emphasises my crucial need, as a transformative leader, to recognise and encourage the development of the personhood and thoughts of others. Reflective thought has become a pleasure rather than a threat and as I sit to review the period of this study and my journey so far, I am contentedly aware that my mind is unshackled by the contradictory voices, dictates and feelings that usually fight for control over our inner lives (Rinpoche 1992). Being available to self in this way has implications for my leadership, support and development of others since I would argue that unless I am truly available and knowing to self, transference of such availability would be problematic.
Susan suggests that ‘bringing the mind