Reflection
High Growth Coaches encourage clients to reflect on their experiences
High growth Enterprise Coaches:
- Help clients to progress through each stage of the learning cycle
- Use a range of tools and techniques to engage clients in reflection
- Help clients to discover for themselves new insights and levels of understanding
- Enable clients to make connections between feelings, behaviours and performance
- Support clients to capture and act on new insight and understanding
Reflective practice is associated with learning from experience and is viewed as an important strategy for coaching and life-long learning per se. The act of reflection is seen as a way of promoting self development and learning.
Coaching is inherently a reflective practice and involves coaches asking clients reflective style questions. Through the use of reflective style questions, coaches encourage clients to think critically about their experiences, behaviours and actions and to identify modifications and improvements that can be implemented in the future.
Reflective Practice Tools
There are numerous approaches and models to support reflective practice. This section explores two models: Gibbs Reflective Cycle; and Rolfe’s Framework for Reflective Practice.
Rolfe’s Framework for Reflective Practice
Rolfe uses three simple questions to reflect on a situation: ‘What? So what? and Now what?’. It is a simple tool that can be used with little or no preparation.
Rolfe’s Framework for Reflective Practice
The model provides the basis of a simple, but structured discussion exploring what happened, with a focus on the next steps or actions.
Gibb’s Reflective Cycle
Gibb’s model is slightly more sophisticated. The model encourages clients to provide a clear description of the situation and an analysis of their feelings. Clients are also encouraged to evaluate their experience, and to make sense of the experience therefore informing them about their options should a similar situation arise again.
Gibb’s Reflective Cycle
There are key coaching questions which can be asked at each stage of the cycle.
Reflective Stage | Key Coaching Questions |
Context | · What has happened?
· Briefly describe the event as objectively, accurately and concisely as possible · Who was involved? · Where did it happen? |
Thoughts | · What were your thoughts at the time?
· What were your thoughts immediately afterwards? · What were your thoughts now? |
Feelings | · What were your feelings or emotions, both positive and negative at the time?
· What were your feelings or emotions, both positive and negative afterwards? · What were your feelings or emotions, both positive and negative now? |
Evaluation | · How well did things go?
· What specifically went well? · Were things satisfactorily resolved? |
Reflective Stage | Key Coaching Questions |
Analyse | · What were the factors that affected the outcome?
· What helped and what hindered? · Can you explain the event? · Why did it happen? · How did it happen? |
Reframe | · What might have been some alternative actions or approaches?
· What might you have done differently (even when things went well)? · Could negative events have been avoided? · Could positive events be made more effective? |
Future Action | · What will you do if you encounter this kind of situation again?
· What will you do in the future to increase the likelihood of similar positive outcomes and minimise the likelihood of similar negative outcomes? · What do you need to learn? · How might you learn this? |
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