Reflections – Nicholas D Skelton

Using or having an eportfolio can have numerous benefits. One of those is the openness of your career and goals you want to share with your audience. You can also share your any sort of setbacks and what you have learned from them. It took a while for me to embrace humility, yet when I did, I started growing as a person. They I could do that is reflect on experience by writing them down in journal.

The biggest contribution to reflection is learning from what we have done on particular days or events. When we record our experiences, we can look back on them and reflect on whether or not we handled the situations in the correct way or if we need to change our approach and handled it differently for the future. John Dewey said, “We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.” This past week I needed to reflect on some issues that were brought to my attention. While some people would shrug these issues off, I reflected big time and looked at how I could have handled it better.

For those who don’t know me, I am a 41 year old what I would consider a successful person who teaches and coaches. I’ve had careers and experiences not many people have heard of. With all these experiences I believe that they have allowed me to be a better person and a more rounded person. With that said, I am no where near being perfect, but I like to think my experiences have allowed me to be a better person. I am not a perfect person by any means and just like everyone else have my faults. But its not what we do before our experiences that counts. It is what happens after. In my personal coaching experiences, I have one that stands out to me. I have made many faults with coaching, and most I am pretty ashamed about. Like getting mad when I didn’t need to or handling a bad situation that ruined friendships. However, there is one experience that sticks in my mind and that is of a particular player I had by the name of Trevor. I’m not going to say his last name, but he knows who he is. He’s never heard this but a few words he said to me have stuck in my mind since and cause me to reflect after everyday of coaching and teaching. Those words were, “You only see our negatives. Why don’t you see our positives?” In the moment I was mad and didn’t really pay attention to it. It was later when I was writing in my journal about him saying that when I realized how powerful those words were. Those 10 words that a 15 year old said to me brought me back down to Earth and changed my entire coaching philosophy. Since that day I have changed everything of my coaching. He might not know how big of an impact that it has had. Trevor thank you for saying that. In reflection, if you (Trevor) don’t say those words, I continue to go down the path of what I might consider a detrimental coaching style. Even though it wasn’t negative, it just wasn’t very encouraging. Now days when I write my plans I think of those 10 words. Thank you Trevor for saying that. You have no idea how much that has impacted the lives of all the players I’ve coached since then, and me. I would have never paid attention to those words if I had not documented them and reflected on the actions.