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Seven Tips For Designing A Leadership Self-Reflection Practice

Forbes Coaches Council

Executive and Leadership Coach, Lecturer, Founder of unabridged – engaging your power and potential for greater personal and social impact.

Self-reflection, at its simplest, means taking time to slow down and think about you and your experiences, as part of increasing your self-awareness, learning and growth. Self-reflection in leadership means devoting time to think about yourself as a leader and is critical for your leadership development. It involves contemplating your current level of skills, strengths, weaknesses, behavioral patterns and how you seek to influence others. It is also about exploring and getting clarity on your values, goals and ambitions. All this serves to increase your self-awareness, alignment, authenticity, learning and growth. Self-reflection also accelerates improvement in your leadership skills and practice — including your emotional intelligence — and enables you to better understand others.

So how can you prioritize this essential development activity and build a regular reflection practice? Here are seven tips to get you started.

1. (Re)commit to continuous learning.

You may already identify as having a growth mindset or being a continuous learner. Go one step further by making it explicit and add self-reflection to your existing repertoire.

Professor Peter Miller says, "Reflective learning is a well-grounded theory based on the capacity of an individual to reflect on their own words and actions and to undertake a learning process through such reflection. This can be done every day at work while you are on the job."

2. Set an intention to reflect consistently.

Schedule 10 or 30 minutes a day (or week) into your diary to protect the time for reflection. Ideally, you'll set time aside to write every day. However, just making time each week is a great start. Try to find a quiet time and place without distractions. 

3. Start with one prompt or theme and see where it goes.

You might start by reflecting on a meeting you led, a difficult conversation or your week in review. You may want to choose a specific area for self-reflection, such as your goals and ambitions, values or even your emotional intelligence.

• A meeting: What went well? What would you like to do differently in the future? What did you learn?

• The week in review: What went well this week? What did you learn? If you had the chance to do something over, what would it be and why?

• Highlights: What was your best leadership moment this week? How could you do more of this next week?

• Your leadership: What kind of leader do you want to be? How do you think your team sees you as a leader? How does this compare to how you see yourself? What do you want to be remembered for?

• Values: If you were to lead with your most important value, what would that look like? How do your values align with your organization’s values?

 4. Give yourself permission to narrate your experiences.

Focus on getting all your thoughts, feelings and ideas down. Be as descriptive as possible in your writing. For example, when you’re describing your feelings, write about the thoughts connected to them and how those emotions felt in your body. For instance, “My heart was racing when I was confronting my boss and telling him that I did not appreciate him going directly to my team, asking them for help and bypassing me,” or “I felt completely disengaged and my mind was wondering why when my colleague monopolized the discussion again, and no one challenged this — including me.” This will help to increase your awareness and give clarity to your emotions and thoughts. Use the prompts to reflect on your experiences — the good, the bad and the ugly.

Don’t self-censor and don’t worry about spelling or grammar — nobody’s checking! This is for you and your development alone. This is a great learning, processing and development strategy to add to your healthy leading repertoire.

5. Be honest.

It’s important to be realistic and acknowledge weaknesses. This also means checking our negativity bias and mining for the positive, which may be disguised as a learning opportunity.

• Challenge yourself to identify what went well and/or one strength you exercised or something learned.

• Be solution-focused. Take the learning from any "failures" and plan actions to improve. 

• Consider your responsibility (How am I contributing to this difficult relationship with X?) and the consequences for your (in)action (What are the effects of what I did or didn't do?).

6. Switch things up.

There are many ways to develop your own reflection practice to suit your preferences and style. Experiment until you find a practice that works for you.

• Change up the time. If you normally reflect at the end of the week, try the beginning. Or start a morning ritual of writing down three things that make you a good leader.

• Reflect with others. While reflection is often about being alone with your thoughts, it can help to talk things through with others, too. Reach out to a colleague, trusted mentor or coach. 

• Try different journal formats. Simple pen and paper work well, but you can also try reflection apps, dictating your thoughts into a recorder or filming a video of your thoughts and feelings. 

• In addition to the prompts above, search online for reflective questions or keep a running list of ideas for your next session.

7. Think of self-reflection as part of your self-care.

Taking time to slow down and reflect on your experiences is vital for improving your self-awareness and creating space for intention and choice. We learn and grow from all our experiences, and taking the time to consider these lessons is an act of self-care. Reflective practice accelerates improvement in your leadership skills and enables you to better understand yourself and others. So, invest in yourself!

Set an intention to reflect every day, even if you start small. You and your leadership deserve it!


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