Taking the Time to Reflect
How often do you take the time to reflect on how far you’ve come?....
….I’m guessing it’s not that often!
The TV & Film industry is so fast paced that when we are working on productions we don’t have the capacity to be thinking about anything else and when we come to the end of our productions we are just looking for our next role.
After my initial first year of trying to break into the industry I worked 5 years non-stop, finishing at one company on a Friday and starting at the next on a Monday. Now don’t get me wrong, from a freelance perspective that’s great to have such consistent work with no breaks, but from a wellbeing perspective it was incredibly exhausting. It didn’t allow me time to have a proper rest and reset before starting in a new position and becoming incredibly busy again. It also didn’t allow me to reflect and gain perspective on where I was heading in my career and life in general.
This reflection time is essential to build confidence, digest what went well in your previous role, what do you need to improve on or gain more experience in and to assess what you actually want going forward. Maybe you’ve worked on natural history programmes for a few years and they don’t present a challenge or spark your interest as much as they used to, so you’d now like to try a different genre which will ignite that spark again and present a new challenge. Without taking that time to reflect you just push forward looking for your next job without really thinking about what you want to get out of it.
There’s a great Gandhi quote which says “Speed is irrelevant if you are going in the wrong direction.” We can so easily get swept along with looking for our next role just to get that next role rather than reflecting how far we’ve come and what we want going forwards.
It’s important as well to not just reflect on our careers but our life as a whole. I’m going to crack out another great Gandhi quote here as “There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.” One of the good things about COVID-19 (we have to try and find some positives from it!) was that it forced most of us to stop, as work disappeared. We spent more time with our families, whether in person or virtually, and it made us appreciate the small things and realise what was important to us in life. I hope during that time it made you stop and reflect where you have got to in your career and life and it helped to re-focus your ambitions and goals going forward.
Now, as humans we are hardwired to having a negative bias. It’s a result of our evolution, as early humans who were more attuned to danger (anything presenting itself as negative) were more likely to survive. It may be that on your last production despite the challenging circumstances you kept everything running as smoothly as you could, but maybe there was one thing that went wrong. Instead of reflecting positively on everything you did well on that production you will focus on the instance where something went wrong and quite often we’ll beat ourselves up over it. It’s why if we do something wrong we will make sure we learn from that mistake and try to avoid making the mistake again in the future.
Learning from mistakes is obviously a useful tool to improving the way we work, but we should also be bringing positive reflections to the forefront as well. Did you learn something new on that production, was there a particularly difficult challenge you overcame, was there something that you weren’t initially confident about that you managed to do well. Even if it was something small, reward yourself for that progress you have made. Combine it with any negative elements from that production, maybe you’ve now confirmed that you don’t enjoy working on scripted productions, so going forwards you can aim to move into unscripted productions. Without that time for reflection we are just speeding forwards potentially in the wrong direction.
If you haven’t had any, then ask for feedback about how you performed on that production. We worry about asking for this because we don’t want to hear any negative feedback. However that negative feedback is constructive as it will help us to improve in our next roles. We can reflect on the feedback and see if we can improve on it in future positions, thus improving our employability.
So after you finish your next production do take the time to look back on what you achieved, what went well, what didn’t go so well, what can you improve on, as well as looking at your career as a whole. This time for reflection allows you to stay on the right track and will improve your wellbeing by rewarding yourself for your achievements whether they were big or small. Just make sure you don’t dwell on the negatives!