For a long time, I thought I was quite good at cooking. I enjoyed it and people ate what I made. But if I'm honest, it was mostly bland. Not because I didn't care but because I didn't really understand how to cook.
Everything changed when I went on a Thai cookery course. It wasn't because of the recipes, but because I was introduced to the idea of the five tastes: salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Once I understood those principles, something shifted. I stopped relying so heavily on recipes.
I started adapting. I could substitute ingredients and still get the desired outcome. I hadn't become better because I memorised more steps. I'd become better because I understood the structure underneath.
I've realised how closely this mirrors how most of us approach reflection. We're encouraged to reflect but rarely taught how. So we do what I used to do with cooking. We rely on loose prompts, journal inconsistently, and think vaguely about what happened. And then we're surprised when nothing really changes.
The issue isn't motivation. It's that reflection, like cooking, is a skill and with all skills, people need structure before autonomy. Early on, structure matters. Recipes and frameworks matter. They give us something to lean on while we're learning what to pay attention to. Only later does autonomy emerge and we start to adapt the process to suit ourselves.
The mistake I see repeatedly is expecting people to be autonomous too soon. That's like asking someone to cook intuitively before they understand taste.
There's another parallel that took me longer to notice. When cooking goes wrong, it's often under pressure. We're short on time with too many distractions. In those moments, we revert to what feels familiar, not what's optimal. Reflection is exactly the same. Under pressure, our thinking narrows and defaults to habits.
We stop noticing patterns and start reacting to moments. This is where most reflective practices quietly break down. Not because people don't care, but because the structure isn't strong enough to hold them when things get busy.
Over time, this became a personal frustration for me. I could see the value of reflection. I could support others to do it. But I kept running into the same problem:
- Insight was fleeting.
- Patterns were hard to see.
- What mattered most got lost in the noise of the most recent experience.
The tension between structure and autonomy is what eventually led me to build something for myself to support reflective practice over time. Not to replace thinking or automate insight. But to provide just enough structure so learning could actually compound.
I still come back to that cookery course often. Not because it taught me recipes, but because it taught me how structure, used well, creates freedom. Most of us don't lack insight, we lack a way of holding onto it. What might become possible if we learned more reliably from what we already experienced?