The Power of Reflection
Reflection…. It always feels like such a loaded word: demanding, tedious, predictable. Something that takes so much time, requires so much attention, and creates more work in the form of actions to take. I’ve used it in nursing, as a teaching tool, as a coach and coachee. I’ve rolled my eyes in response to a facilitator, manager, or coach suggesting it, and for sure, many eyes have rolled in my direction when I’ve recommended it.
But, of course, it does take work: effective, transformative reflection, the kind of reflection that can really change the course of something, takes time, energy, and focus, and more often than not it comes with action – an act that will hopefully go some way to resolving the error that was made, to learning from experiences in an attempt to improve, but also, it has a great role to play in how we step forward into the future.
If I think about times where reflection hasn’t been a requirement, but a necessity, in my professional life, I can pick out plenty of occasions: the medication complication I had spent hours teaching junior colleagues how to avoid, and yet it happened to one of my patients, on my watch, when I administered the medication; the coaching session in which a client disclosed a safeguarding issue that I wasn’t sure I handled correctly; the member of staff who belittled me in front of the entire team and I didn’t call her out on it. I needed to look into those events and understand why they happened, and what I could have done to better-control the outcome; but more importantly I also needed to understand what I couldn’t control.
I couldn’t control the patient’s vein collapsing, nor could I control the outcome of any action taken by my client. I couldn’t control what was going on in my colleague’s personal life which she carried into her work with her, nor the opinions formed about me by the team who watched the interaction. But reflection allowed me to realise this and therefore form a more holistic picture of the situation and increased self-awareness.
While reflection is essential for professional growth, it can play an even deeper role in our personal lives, especially through our experiences of grief and loss. And here, reflection isn’t for solving a problem, or improving a process, it’s about finding direction, allowing self-compassion, and acknowledging pain, confusion, and emptiness. In coaching, reflection is encouraged not solely to focus on what has happened, but to gain further insight into the impact of the loss on your present and future life.
Reflection allows us not only to see the sadness, but also the joy: the positive experiences throughout the pain that have brought us strength and shaped our current selves. Through identifying these strengths comes empowerment and a positivity of how we can shape our lives moving forward. Remembering with purpose the person or thing we lost becomes an intentional driving force to a better future.