What does it mean that reflection questions that work?

What went well what did not what will you do differently.

Example: You finish a difficult week at work. On Friday evening, you sit down with your journal and ask yourself: 'How was my week?' Your pen hovers. You write: 'Busy. Kind of stressful. Fine, I guess.' That is the entirety of your reflection. Contrast this with your colleague, who sits down and asks herself a different set of questions: 'What was the single decision this week that I am most uncertain about?' She writes for three minutes about a hiring call she made on Tuesday — the candidate she advanced despite a nagging concern about cultural fit. She asks: 'What specifically was the nagging feeling, and what evidence was it based on?' She identifies two concrete behavioral signals from the interview that contradicted the candidate's stated values. She asks: 'If I could rewind to Tuesday, what one additional question would I have asked?' She writes down the question and adds it to her interview template. In ten minutes with three targeted questions, she extracted a concrete process improvement. You, with one vague question, extracted nothing. The difference is not discipline or intelligence. It is question design.

Try this: Build a personal reflection question bank. Step 1: Write down the three questions you most commonly ask yourself during any kind of review — daily, weekly, or after an event. Be honest about what you actually ask, not what you think you should ask. Step 2: Evaluate each question against the four criteria from this lesson. Is it open-ended? Is it specific enough to constrain the search space? Does it target observable behavior rather than vague feelings? Does it orient toward future action? Score each question 0 to 4 on these criteria. Step 3: For any question scoring below 3, rewrite it using the principles from this lesson. Replace 'How did it go?' with 'What specific moment this week am I most proud of, and what behavior produced it?' Replace 'What went wrong?' with 'What is one thing I would do differently if I could replay this week, and what specifically would I change?' Step 4: Test your revised questions in your next review session. Write for at least five minutes per question. Afterward, compare: did the revised questions produce more specific, actionable, and surprising insights than your old questions? Keep the questions that worked. Iterate on the ones that did not.