This is the third extract from my upcoming book, Mentor Coaching: A Practical Guide. If this piques your interest, you can pre-order here
If you are not a coach, I hope you might still be taking this journey with us as you might still learn something about leadership in roundabout ways.
It is important to know ourselves, know our best selves and be self-aware about our impact on others. This is where reflective practice plays a vital role, through self-reflection, retreats, being coached, supervision and mentor coaching.
This is important work – if we don’t do the work ourselves, we are unwittingly suggesting that it is not important, so how can we expect others to pay us to support them to get to know themselves, their best selves and their impact on others?
Peter Welch wrote in his article “What is Reflective Practice?” (2019) that “it makes meaning from experience and transforms insights into practical strategies for personal growth and organisational impact.”
[If you prefer to listen to an audio version of this and the other 3 extracts from the book, you can listen here: https://www.spreaker.com/show/extracts-mentor-coaching-a-practical-gui]
Self-reflection is not enough
Grant, Franklin and Langford (2002) found that “journal keepers were in some way stuck in a process of self-reflection and were primarily engaged in a process of understanding their personal behavioural, cognitive and emotional reactions, rather than moving towards goal attainment.” Lyubomirsky, Tucker, Caldwell and Berg (1999) found that self-reflection led people to consider their problems to be unsolvable.
Reflective practice
Reflective practice has been shown to be more effective when conducted with a skilled reflective practitioner of some kind – a coach, a mentor coach or a coach supervisor. Bachkirova (2015) found that coaches tend to be good at self-deception, not able to shine a light on their own blind spots without someone else to notice them. Coaching, mentor coaching and coaching supervision help us to get over our delusions about our own efficacy.
There are elements which are known to us, known to others, unknown to us and unknown to others – and combinations thereof – that we need to uncover (JoHari Window, Luft and Ingham, NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science www.ntl.org) 1961).
Mentor coaching enables us to become aware of our blind spots, deaf spots and dumb spots (Eckstein, 1969), where others see things in us that we do not see in ourselves:
- Blind spots are those things we do not see in ourselves.
- Deaf spots are those things we don’t hear ourselves or our thinkers saying.
- Dumb spots are the things we don’t share out loud, whether that is our intuition, a challenge or direct feedback to the thinker.
Supervision on the other hand, can help us to unmask ourselves, to be authentic and true to ourselves, to explore who we are and what is important to us.
So as I have written before and I will say again, mentor coaching and supervision are THE most high-impact, individualised continuous professional development that we can invest in – with a reflective practitioner who can help us to be more self-aware of our strengths and stretches.
What are your experiences of working with a reflective practitioner, and what extra value do you get that you aren’t able to uncover alone?
If this piques your interest, please pre-order the book here.
