Seven Simple Steps to Build Your Reflective Practice in 2024

It's the time for reflecting on the past year and looking forward to the next. Many of us would like to reflect more and reflect more deeply for personal growth. But it's sometimes difficult just to find the time or energy to step back and to discover real insights through intentional reflection. Generally I’m not a fan of quick fixes (“five things”, “ten habits” and so on!) but for those wanting to start or reboot their reflective practice for the coming year here are my “top tips” for 2024.

But first,?why should we reflect regularly in the first place? Well, because reflection is vital for:

·?????? Developing and growing as a leader: its how we learn from experience and make sense of ourselves and our context

·?????? Wellbeing and mental health including resilience, happiness and sleep

·?????? Career progress: it how we create a career narrative about our goals, skills and achievements and helps make better career choices

Step 1: Make time. Be intentional and schedule time for reflection. It doesn’t have to be long hours of hard graft! Start small; do something manageable – five minutes focused reflection between meetings, or at the end of the day. Thirty minutes each week to review and understand. An hour each month to learn and plan. Use prompts and reminders. Create a rhythm that suits your life.

Step 2 : Design your reflective environment to overcome distractions and make it an enjoyable experience. Reflection time should be a pleasure, so find somewhere enjoyable away from the things that distract you - your phone, the kids, interruptions, emails, TV.

Step 3: Set constraints and create focus. The biggest mistake to make is lack of focus. If you set a goal to "reflect" this leads to an overwhelming number options which sets the scene for failing! Create a focus by setting a topic.….an event or experience, a project, your career or job, your feelings, hopes for the future, fitness, health, a relationship, whatever.

Step 4: Write! Writing by hand is proven to be the most effective way of reflecting. Don’t worry about style. Mix it up and practice. Demolish your perfectionism. Get comfortable creating junk! And don’t fetishise the stationary – make a mess in your journal. Bullet points, stories, and drawings all work well. And write about your feelings too. If there are issues that are too difficult to write about, maybe because they’re too raw, just note them and move on.

Step 5: Find questions. Questions are at the core of reflection. Ask: What (happened)? So what (did it mean)? Now what (shall I do)? But also go “question hunting” and look out for surprising or “different” questions that help you see things from a new perspective. And take a question for a walk. Prime yourself by bringing an issue to mind. During your walk it will keep coming into your thoughts and you’ll gain different perspectives about it. When you get back take a few minutes to write down your insights.

Step 6:? Find a reflection partner, a mentor, friend, colleague or a community that keeps you accountable and offers support and challenge. They can be a source of surprising questions. They are catalysts for deeper insight and for action. Changing your habits requires changing who you surround yourself with. The goal is to find a group of people where your desired behaviour – reflection - is expected and rewarded.

Step 7: And finally…experiment: be action oriented in your reflective practice – do something with the insights it offers. Although pausing to reflect is an antidote to a thoughtless bias for action it can also become an excuse for inaction and make us oversensitive to risks and competing commitments. So conduct small scale experiments to try out new behaviours or solutions and then reflect again.

The key is to building regular reflective practice is to try different things and find out what works for you. Find a mix of approaches – they’ll evolve over time anyway. Don’t aim for an impossible ideal. Just aim for good enough. Above all: stop procrastinating! There will never be a perfect time to start reflecting. Get started!

Many thanks for your continued interest and support for my work on reflective practice for leaders and I look forward to sharing more ideas and getting your feedback in 2024.