Practicing what I call Reflection Leadership helps us, as leaders, to be able take the time to reflect on what’s going on around us. By taking this time to reflect, we are able to rise above the clatter of everyday issues to recognize those things that are most important. This reflection also allows us see with greater clarity what needs to be done in any give situation.

But where do we start? Reflection Leadership isn’t about locking our office door so that we can contemplate our navel lint. The whole purpose of the reflection is to do help us to better understand what is going on so that we can lead more effectively. What we discover through our reflection needs to be useful in our leadership practice or we won’t do it. The time we spend reflecting needs to be productive.

Below I’ve listed the four steps needed to make Reflection Leadership a productive part of your current leadership practice.

4 Steps to Practicing Reflection Leadership

1. Stop. This is the step that is most crucial. If you can’t find the time to stop running from issue to issue, you will never be able to reflect in a meaningful way about what is going on. You know that you haven’t been taking the time to stop when you constantly feel harried and overwhelmed because there is too much to do.

2. Develop a Reflection Practice. Reflection Leadership is not something you do once or twice, or only when you have time, or only when the going gets tough (or when things are easiest). It needs to be practiced regularly in order help you be an effective leader. You need to create a practice that is done on a regular basis. The more you do it on a regular basis, the sooner it will become habit and the sooner it will be engrained into your everyday work.

3. Act upon your reflections. A reflection practice cannot be about sitting around and contemplating your navel lint. In fact, taking the time to stop and reflect really does become a waste of time if you don’t do anything with what you discover through your reflection. Your reflection should lead to some sort of action; a change in your perspective, a change in how you relate to others or a change in how you relate to the world around you.

4. Go back and reflect again. Just like any typical feedback system, Reflection Leadership requires ongoing reflection. Many times the changes that we make create unforeseen results and additional reflection is needed to determine if the changes we have made were beneficial and sufficient.

Just like anything new, the first hard part is getting started. So commit today to finding a way to practice Reflection Leadership. But more important is getting past the second hard part and that is sustaining the practice. Your results will not be immediate, so you’ll need to have patience and continue working at it. But if you follow these steps and continue to make Reflection Leadership an ongoing part everyday experience overtime it will help you to become a more effective leader.

How do you incorporate reflection time into your daily leadership practice? What results have you seen?

You also might be interested in:

1. What is Reflection Leadership?
2. Creating a Reflection Practice
3. What is Systems Reflection?

Reflection Leadership is all about being able to take the time to stop and reflect on those things that are most important in our leadership practice. The kinds of things that we need to reflect on include the individuals that follow us, the vision that we have for where we want to go, the systems we have in place in our organization, and the environment in which our organization operates. Perhaps most importantly, we need to be able to reflect on who we are, both as individuals and as leaders.

For many folks, the hardest part of Reflection Leadership is being able to stop, look and listen so that we can begin to understand what is going on around us. Since we tend to work at such a breakneck speed, it is hard to justify to ourselves being able to stop and do nothing. But stopping to reflect is hardly doing nothing. Stopping and napping would be doing nothing, but reflection is an action activity. It is true that we need to stop in order to do it, but it is an activity nonetheless.

Getting Started

Like most new habits that we want to create, the first step needs to be the decision to get started. Once we have made the decision that we need to be more reflective in our leadership, we need to create a Reflection Practice. I’m not going to spend time here talking about how to be successful at creating a new positive behavior. Others do a much better job of explaining how to do it. Instead I want to focus on what a Reflection Practice is so that it can be incorporated in daily activities.

Reflection Practice is the activity of quieting the mind and body to allow for reflection to happen. It is something the reflective leader needs to work at daily in order to be able to focus on the all of the areas of Reflection Leadership.

The reflection practice can be called by many names: meditation, prayer, getting in tune with the Universal mind. While it certainly can take on mystical or spiritual qualities it doesn’t really need to. A reflection practice will be as unique as the individual involved. The important thing is that it requires the reflective leader to stop and take the time to reflect.

Creating a Reflection Practice
There are some basic steps that we need to follow in order to create an effective reflection practice:

Set aside time every day

Once we recognize the need to stop and reflect, it has to become a habit. The only way to create and maintain this habit is to do it on a regular basis, after all that’s what makes it a habit. We need to find a time in the day that belongs only to us. Allow no interruptions; no phones, no computers, no screaming kids, no screaming coworkers. The best thing to do is to actually set aside this time in our daily planner and make it unchangeable. We shouldn’t let anything else replace it in our schedule if at all possible.

Find a place conducive to reflecting

The goal here is to find a place that will allow us to quiet our mind and body. It really can be anywhere, but for the duration of the reflecting period we should remain still. So we need to find a place that is quiet, with a minimum of distractions where we can sit comfortably. We want this space to comfortable in a non-painful sort of way, not in a “this is so comfy I want to fall asleep” sort of way. The temperature in the space should not be too hot or too cold. We want to minimize anything that can distract us from our purpose at hand.

Quiet the mind

Once we have found our quiet, comfortable place, we can begin to quiet our mind. At first this can be difficult for many folks. We spend our entire day running from place to place, dealing with issue after issue and it’s hard to just turn all of that off. But here is the good news: it really can be done. Start by sitting still. You can keep your eyes open or close them. Personally, I prefer to close my eyes because it helps me to focus on the task at hand.

In order to quiet the mind, we need to focus on something else. For centuries focus on breathing has been a choice for many and for good reason. It is something we have to do while we are sitting and something we usually don’t pay any attention to throughout our day. We just breath naturally, in and out, in and out. But as we do it as part of our reflection practice, we need to pay attention to each breath. Let everything else go and focus on each breath. If you need help staying focused on each breath, try counting breaths backwards from 50. Each inhale is 1/2, each exhale the next whole number. So as we start, inhaling the first breath, we think 1/2. On the exhale we think 50. The second inhale is 1/2, exhale is 49 and so on. This helps to keep the focus on our breathing.

Choose a reflection focus

As we get more adept at focusing on our breathing, we find that our mind begins to quiet down. It is at this point that we are able to begin seeing what is most important. With a quiet mind we can begin to bring to the front of our thoughts those things that we want to reflect on today. It is not possible to reflect on all of the aspects of Reflection Leadership at the same time, so this is the point where we need to decide what our reflection focus will be today. Maybe it is our personal values or understanding why certain systems in the organization are blocking us from success. Whatever it is we need to choose what today’s focus will be and put a clear statement in our mind of exactly what we want to reflect upon.

Accept what you find

The key here is not to force any particular thoughts or feelings to the surface. While continuing to focus on each breath, we need to pay attention to where our thoughts go. At this point we shouldn’t judge or try to influence the flow of thought, just let them happen and experience them. If we find that we are heading away from our reflection focus for the day, we need to calmly review the clear statement of exactly what we want to reflect upon.

Reflect on what it means

After we have allowed ourselves to generate what seem to be random thoughts about our reflection focus, it is time to reflect on what it all means and what we can do about it. While we are still in our quiet time and space we should start to reflect on what we have found. Sometimes there will be a clear picture that gives us the answer that we are seeking. Sometimes the picture isn’t so clear. It may be that we won’t get any answers from a particular reflection session and will need to come back to the same reflection focus again. We may need to take our reflection away with us to another place and time where we can be more creative in our reflection. But at this point we have accomplished the act of finding the issues that are most important for us to pay attention to.

When we are able to take these steps and follow them everyday, we will have a reflection practice that begins to yield results. We will be able to quiet our minds to cut through the daily noise so that we are able to focus on those things that are most important.

You also might be interested in:

1. 4 Steps to Practicing Reflection Leadership
2. Characteristics of Flow: Deepened Concentration
3. Reflection and Leadership Development