Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes
This is Part 2 in a series of articles that introduce the main ideas about Reflection Leadership.
As one of the five main parts of Reflection Leadership, Self Reflection is the most important and for many folks the hardest to do. When you hear the phrase Self Reflection you may immediately think of self knowledge, self improvement or, as Peter Senge described Personal Mastery. While each of these are certainly a part of Self Reflection, I think of Self Reflection as more. Self Reflection is about taking the time to figure out who we are, both as individuals and as leaders. It requires us to stop and take a look at who we really are; what makes us tick. It includes looking at what we care about most, as well as how and why we feel and act the way the way that we do in given situations.
To me, Self Reflection helps us to gain an understanding of who we are as individuals first, above and beyond who we are as leaders. Because, to be truly effective at leading others, we need to be effective at ‘leading’ ourselves and if we are unable to really know ourselves, we are only being deluded into thinking that we can lead ourselves. Self reflection allows us to recognize our core values, not just by naming what we value, but why those things are most important to us. Along with our values, by taking the time to reflect on our own self, we can start to clarify our own personal vision of what it is that we want to be, do and have in our lives and most importantly how we want to feel as we go through life.
Self Reflection also allows us to identify and ‘own’ our traits, both our personality traits and our leadership traits. When we are able to recognize our traits, as we reflect we are able to monitor our interactions with others. Both from the standpoint of why we are feeling the way we do and our actions that result from those feelings.
We Only Have One Life To Live
When we are able to stop and self reflect on a regular basis we become able to articulate who we really are and what we really want from our lives. This is the point where our “personal/life” and our “work/life” begin to intersect. Many folks split their lives into these two parts, keeping them separate. But when you see them written out the way I have them it is easy to see that personal/life and work/life have a common denominator: life. We only have one life so who we are and what we want to be in our personal/life needs to be the same as it is in our work/life and vice versa. Exercising Self Reflection as part of the practice of Reflection Leadership allows us to keep our personal and work lives in congruence.
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that Self Reflection is something easy. In fact for many of us it can be the hardest thing we do. Reflecting about ones self can be scary at first. Sometimes getting to know ourselves this intimately shows us some things about ourselves that we don’t like. Or worse we end up not liking the person we are looking at. But the more we do it, the more comfortable we become with who we are and we can begin to use this knowledge to help us navigate through the daily grind. Not only will it help us to understand ourselves, but the more we understand about ourselves the better we can begin to understand those that we are trying to lead.
What’s stopping you from Self Reflection?
