How Gibbs Reflective Cycle Helps You Grow from Every Experience
Key Takeaways
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Understanding Your Emotions: Recognize and manage feelings like frustration or excitement during tough situations, using these emotions as a chance for growth and learning from the experience.
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Evaluating What Happened: Assess both the positives and negatives to learn from your experiences.
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Applying What You’ve Learned: Use your reflections to improve future decisions, ensuring better outcomes next time.
Have you ever found yourself in a tough situation and thought, “What can I learn from this?”
Whether it’s a challenge at work, in your personal life, or during a creative project, how you process those experiences can make all the difference.
This is where Gibbs Reflective Cycle comes into play.
Gibbs Reflective Cycle, introduced by Professor Graham Gibbs in his 1988 book Learning by Doing, breaks down the process of reflection into clear phases, helping us learn from both the highs and the lows.
It allows you to step back, assess what happened, and apply those lessons to make better decisions in the future.
Think back to the last time you launched a marketing campaign and it didn’t perform as expected.
Instead of just moving on, imagine using Gibbs’ model to dive into your feelings (frustration, confusion), evaluate what worked and what didn’t (perhaps the messaging or target audience wasn’t right), and use those insights for your next project.
In this way, every challenge turns into an opportunity for growth.
✅Real-Life Example:
Let’s say you own a coffee shop in a busy area.
You try a new marketing tactic, like offering discounts to first-time visitors, but it doesn’t bring in the crowd you expected.
Reflecting on this using Gibbs’ cycle helps you evaluate the strategy’s impact—Was the discount appealing enough?
‼️Was your target audience responding to the promotion as expected?
This reflection allows you to tweak future campaigns, improving your business and avoiding similar mistakes.
Everyday Challenges You Might Face
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Imagine you’re an entrepreneur running a coffee shop. You’ve just rolled out a new loyalty program that you thought would be a hit, but it didn’t bring in the customers like you’d hoped. Reflecting on what happened could help you understand whether your offer was compelling enough or if your marketing was reaching the right people. Maybe the program wasn’t communicated clearly, or maybe your target market wasn’t ready for the offer.
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Or picture yourself as an online marketer selling eco-friendly products. You launch an ad campaign targeting environmentally conscious consumers, but sales don’t increase. By reflecting with Gibbs’ cycle, you might realize that your messaging didn’t resonate deeply enough with your audience or that the call to action wasn’t clear. Understanding this lets you refine your strategy and better connect with your target customers.
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Let’s say you’re a leader managing a small team. The project you’ve been overseeing didn’t hit its deadline. Instead of getting frustrated, you can use Gibbs’ reflective process to look at your role in the outcome—Was there miscommunication among team members? Was there a lack of motivation or support? Reflecting on these factors will guide you in making better decisions for the future and help you lead more effectively.
Marketing leaders like Seth Godin emphasize the importance of learning from failures:
The most important thing you can do is to learn from your mistakes, fast.
And Richard Branson highlights the value of reflection, saying,
Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.
These quotes reinforce the idea that learning from our experiences—good and bad—can lead to better decisions in the future.
If you’re curious about other reflective models, stay tuned for insights on the Driscoll Model of Reflection.
It simplifies reflection with three straightforward questions: What? So What? Now What?
This model helps you evaluate your experiences and apply the lessons in practical ways.
By regularly reflecting on your experiences and learning from the experience, you’ll continue to grow in both your business and personal life, making smarter decisions and achieving better results.
Phases In Gibbs Reflective Cycle
Gibbs reflective cycle works best for both standalone situations and situations you encounter frequently.
This cycle, as discussed earlier, has six stages, which will help you think about an event, experience, or activity and make better decisions.
Let us walk through each phase with a Gibbs Reflective Cycle example.
Description
Stage one in Gibbs reflective cycle is the description. During this stage, you start by describing the situation or event before directly jumping to conclusions. So how can you achieve this? By asking yourself the below questions to understand the situation.
- What happened?
- Where did it happen?
- Who was involved?
- What was the outcome?
For example, let’s say you’re working on an important project. You divide the work among yourselves and assign it to each other. As the deadline approaches, you sit down to collate the work to have the final product. Now, it turns out not everything meets the client’s requirement, and there’s no time left out for reworks.
Feelings
This second phase of the cycle focuses on the feelings triggered in the event’s context or situation.
The entire purpose of this is not to judge or evaluate the feelings but to be aware of the experience. Now, this can be understood better with the following questions.
- What or how did you feel when the event took place?
- What did not go well?
- Were the contributions worth it?
- What do you at present think about the situation?
Now, coming back to the example, you realize you got many reworks to do in a brief span of time.
You’re very frustrated as this was not the outcome you were expecting. And finally, decide to work hard and complete the work and present it before the deadline.
You’re now content to have put in all the last-minute efforts.
Evaluation
This phase emphasizes judging the experience of the situation, whether it was good or bad. It also helps you analyze the approach that worked and the ones that did not work.
- Was the approach taken well?
- What was it that didn’t go well?
- Why did it not go well?
- What were your and other people’s contributions to the situation?
In our Gibbs reflective cycle example, teamwork was the approach that went well.
Each member of the team was available for the rework, which made the eventual target achievable. The approach that did not work was the lack of regular meet-ups to discuss the updates.
Learning From the Experience: Analysis
This phase focuses on the lessons learned from the event. With this, you can figure out how to deal with similar situations in the future.
- What can be inferred from the situation?
- What are the lessons learned from the event?
- Was the response to the situation apt?
As in the Gibbs reflective cycle example, the lack of rational planning and understanding of the requirement beforehand were the ones that lead to the disaster.
Conclusion
This is the phase where you can collate all the information from the previous phases and conclude how you would have acted in a better way. The following questions can help you in the same.
- What was the positive experience gained out of the event?
- What was the negative experience?
- How could you have done it differently?
We can figure out how proper planning before execution would’ve led to a fruitful outcome at a quicker pace from our example.
Action Plan
This is the phase where the entire purpose of the Gibbs Reflective Cycle is served.
Here is where you figure out how you will act upon any similar situation in the future. This is where you carefully plan the action points for the next similar situation.
In our example, the next time you get to work as a team on any requirement, it is imperative that you catch up with the teammates at regular intervals and get a glimpse of the final product.
Learning From the Experience: Final Thoughts
As we have seen, the Gibbs Reflective Cycle, with an example, is now your turn to draw the best lessons from all the experiences and work on them.
