Blair Singer describes a debriefing technique that turns wins and mistakes into lessons. Ask what happened, why it happened, what worked, what didn't, and what you learned. The method silences self-doubt and helps you repeat successes or avoid the same mistakes twice.
Hi, this is Blair Singer, author of Little Voice how to Win the War between youn ears in 30 seconds or less. You know, a lot of times, whether it's at work or at play or at home, in our personal experiences, we make mistakes and we have wins. Wins and mistakes. The problem is a lot of times we don't know how to debrief what took place in order to capture the learning experience so we can leverage on it again or prevent that mistake from happening again. Typically, what happens is the little voice.
Goes, oh, screwed up again, failed again.
And what happens is the lesson never gets learned. One of my mentors taught me once that every mistake is a learning experience. It's an opportunity for you to grow if you pay attention and get the learning out of it. So you got to learn how to stop the little voice from taking it as shame or taking it as a tragedy and stuffing it like a cat.
Stuffs its stuff under the cat litter.
You don't want to do that. What you want to do is you want to be able to debrief. That's called debrief the situation. Much like a basketball team or a football team would call a timeout to be able to be able to maximize what's going on in the game at that moment. So basically all it is is a series of questions.
What happened?
Why? And the most important, there's some other questions in there, like what worked? What didn't work? But the most important question is, what did you learn? And whether you're debriefing yourself on a sales call or whether you're debriefing your team on a project or whatever the case might be. The key words, what did you learn?
Forces you to go internal, forces your.
Little voice out of the way, forces you to find a lesson, even if.
You couldn't think of one to begin with.
Very, very powerful technique. And if you notice, almost every sporting team, at least in American sports, uses the timeout to their advantage to be.
Able to debrief so they can win the game now. Not later, not now. This is not what, like some people call a post mortem, where we analyze.
What happened after the fact.
This is in the middle of the game. You want to be able to win the game that you're in, right? Whatever that game is, whether it's a discussion, whether it's a sales call, whether it's a financial situation or. Or even with your health. So how do you do this? You got to know how to ask the questions, because if not, your little voice will start chewing on the mistake, it will start chewing on what did not work. In the case of a win, you want to do the same thing. Ask those right questions. Or you just stay in a state of euphoria and say, I was lucky. That was great. But you don't capture the essence of what you learned from that. To be able to repeat the win again and again and again. Again the technique of debriefing, and again we talk about in the book. The specific questions to ask will force the little voice out of the way and force you down a line of internal dialogue that will force you to get to the win. So a either don't make the mistake again, or you're able to leverage the win. Try it.
