Reflection is a key tool to continue to develop yourself and your self-awareness.

John Dewey famously said: “We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.”

There are many different ways to incorporate reflection as a way of developing your coaching practice and harnessing the power of coaching. It can be completed on your own, with a supervisor or in a group (either a reflection group or an action learning group). You may want to reflect on a specific client relationship or session; how you use a specific tool, technique or model; or a pattern that you have noticed emerging in your practice. What is important is to find and develop an approach that suits your personal preferences, the time that you have available and when it best works for you to reflect. As with a lot of things, it becomes easier with practice!

Questions to consider in building your reflection practice:

• Do you prefer to reflect on your own, or do you need some else to support your reflection?
• What style of reflection do you find most useful: Structured questions? Creative writing? Using metaphor?
• When do you prefer to reflect: Immediately after a session? Part way through a programme? At a specific time each week/month?

It can be helpful to consider Hawkins and Smith’s Seven-Eyed Model of Supervision:

Focus on the client

• What is the client’s experience?
• What are their expectations of you as a coach?
• How do you think they perceive you as a coach? 

However, it is important that where they are able to, the client leads the conversation – for example, they may have prepared a list of questions in advance that they want to ask of each coach that they meet.

Focus on the interventions you use as a coach

• Do you use some types of intervention more or less than others?
• Why do you choose (or not choose) the interventions you do?

Focus on the relationship between you and the client

• It can be useful to consider the relationship using metaphors, for example ‘If you were shipwrecked on a desert island with your client, how would you each behave?’ or ‘If you were both animals, which animals would you be, and how do you interact with each other?’
• How does this relationship compare with other coaching relationships you’ve experienced?

Focus on you as a coach and your process

• How do you feel emotionally in response to your client?
• What do you notice about your body language when you’re with your client?
• How are you affected by the work that you’re doing with this client?
• Focus on the wider system that the client is operating in
• Which other stakeholders are important for the client?
• How do those stakeholders make their presence felt during sessions?
• What else is happening for the client?

Focus on the wider system that the client is operating in

• Which other stakeholders are important for the client?
• How do those stakeholders make their presence felt during sessions?
• What else is happening for the client?

• Using a reflective journal/diary with recurring questions (see below for some examples)
• Free writing - a technique in which you write your thoughts quickly and continuously, without worrying about form, style, or even grammar
• Drawing images
• Using metaphor
• Using mind maps - writing down a central theme and thinking of new and related ideas which radiate out from the centre. By focusing on key ideas written down in your own words and looking for connections between them, you can map knowledge in a way that will help you to better understand and retain information.

• What went especially well? (and how do I know?)
• What could have been better? (and how do I know?)
• What was missing? (and how do I know?)
• What else am I noticing?
• What did this client/session teach me?
• How much work was I doing during the session? Could I have done more/less?
• What did I notice about my energy during the session?
• What assumptions did I notice (either for yourself or those made by the client)?
• How well did I listen?
• What would help me to listen more?
• Could I have been better prepared for this session?
• What was the balance of support/challenge during this session?
• Where did I feel the strongest sense of connection/disconnection? (and how did I know?)
• What do I want to celebrate?