Strengthening Your Reflective Practice
10 months of 2024 have passed and soon another year draws to a close. I invite you to pause for a moment and reflect.
What kind of year has it been for you as a coach? What stands out on your journey? Perhaps there’s a client's success that fills you with pride, or a moment where you’ve noticed real growth in yourself.
Taking just a minute or two to reflect is a powerful act in itself—this is an aspect of what we call reflective practice. It’s about pausing to notice, to observe, to learn and understand. In the coaching competency framework from the ICF, it relates to Core Competency 2, that the coach ‘Embodies a Coaching Mindset.’ One aspect it states is ‘establishing a reflective practice.’
As you sit with reflective questions, you may be typing or journaling with a pen, or you may be visualizing a specific client interaction. Maybe a challenge with a client comes to mind, one where you navigated complexity, made a tough ethical decision, or simply handled the situation with grace.
This kind of reflection is often cognitive—thinking things through. But when we only engage from the neck up, we can miss out on other valuable ways of knowing. Our reflective practice grows deeper when we expand beyond just thinking and supports us to be more grounded.
Let’s explore some other ways I have found helpful.
Reflecting with someone else adds richness, allowing us to hear our own voice echoed back or to receive a fresh perspective. This is why I regularly work with a coaching supervisor or participate in group supervision—it deepens my learning and noticing what occurs below the neck.
Personally, I’ve always been a ‘head-focused’ person. But over the past two years, I’ve made a conscious effort to connect more with my intuition, my gut, and my body in a non-judgmental way. I’ve found that this practice of tuning into my body provides rich, often untapped data, helping me become more present with both myself and my clients.
Movement also plays a part. While I typically sit when reflecting, I’ve learned that walking or moving helps me connect more deeply with my body and environment, freeing up new insights or generating new ideas when I feel stuck.
Creativity can also ignite deeper reflection. Working with images, objects, or role-play lets us explore our experiences in new, playful ways, revealing fresh perspectives that can transform how we approach challenges in our practice.
At the core of this is the understanding that our work flows from who we are. Therefore, strengthening our reflective practice must be focused on both: who we are and the work we do, regularly. What are your own rhythms of reflection? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? What values and questions guide you? What needs adjustment? If I am not regularly engaging in reflective practice, I won’t be able to invite my clients to reflect deeply.… How about you?
On November 11th at 3pm CET/9am EST, I’ll be offering a free workshop on the FOCOS platform. Together, we’ll dive deeper into reflective practice and prepare ourselves to embrace even more learning and growth in 2025—for both us and our clients.
I hope to see you there!
Warmly,
Wolfgang
