Reflection
Reflection is a powerful personal and leadership tool. It can take many forms, some written (eg. journaling) and others more meditative (eg. reflection while walking). What is important is the time devoted to pausing, making sense of events, and building an opportunity for learning and growth through this.
In this section you will find the following tools:
Journaling
Personal Journey
Personal Visioning
Journaling
Journaling can help you to tune into what you are thinking and making sense of it. It can be a useful way to delve more deeply into wgar you believe in and why you believe it. It can also often help to clarify how you feeling and why. The process can help you to better understand your relationships with these things better. As you journal, you sort through the mental clutter and find increasing clarity about why you do what you do and feel what you feel. It is about understanding the “now” - the present - as a foundation for your path forward.
Journaling can increase your mental clarity and improve your understanding and insight. You can also use it as a way to track your own development and change: your own journey of learning and change.
There are any number of possible ways to journal: freeform, morning pages, using prompts, writing letters to yourself or a mentor, recording your gratitudes each day etc. Most importantly your approach to journaling must fit what works for you. An excellent resource to explore possibilities and your own unique approach can be found here:
Personal Journey
This tool is grounded in the idea that no one comes to their work an empty vessel. We all bring our experiences, our passions, our dreams, our values and our assumptions. Bringing these into our own awareness in a clearer way provides us with a deeper understanding about our motivations. Sharing our personal journey with others, as far as we feel comfortable - helps to deepen the relationships that we need to do complex systems work - when we see and understand each other better we are more able to move into generative work together.
Instructions
This is a simple exercise: participants are asked to depict the answer to the following questions:
What key people, places and events have led to you to today?
What values and beliefs have underpinned your journey? Have they shifted over time?
Were there intersection points where you made important choices?
Did you ever double back or lose your way?
The depiction of the journey can be done in many ways. Some participants choose to simply write the answers, others to make small diagrams and others to produce large and colourful drawings. Any of these is appropriate. It can be done in the room together or at home as a reflective process.
Once each member of your network or group has completed their personal journey, there is real power in sharing personal journey’s with your larger group. In some cases, the content of each journey may be quite personal, so the encouragement is to share as much or as little as each person feels comfortable with. Sharing personal journeys can take a whole day and become an important foundation for being able to deeply engage with each other. The process can also be done in a much shorter period of time as part of a larger working session. Fit for your purpose!! The important thing is stay true to the intention which is to build relationship, connection and trust.
Personal Visioning
Having a clear personal vision for your life supports us to act in alignment with that vision. Too often, the role of personal aspiration in career choices is underestimated. There is a disconnect between personal and professional vision, negating the potential to wholly engage with work that is personally important. Unearthing a personal vision for all aspects of our lives and aligning that vision to the work that we do, enables us to more fully leverage the power of our passion and commitment and to monitor whether our actions remain aligned to our vision as we progress.
“I call the relationship between the vision and current reality structural tension. During the creative process, you have an eye on where you want to go, and you also have an eye on where you currently are.” — Robert Fritz
Steps to Facilitate a Personal Vision
Our visions are not something that needs to be created—they already exists within us. We just need to get in touch with them. Our vision is the big picture of our desired outcomes. It’s an internal representation of what is most important to us; it’s exciting, inspiring, compelling, and filled with positive emotions.
Often when we undertake visioning as an individual or group, we set our sights high. It is not uncommon to develop visions, like “live joyfully”, that have no possible path or structure that links the vision to the current reality. That is why so often personal aspirations or visions are not obtained. They are not grounded. Fritz proposes that the space between the reality and vision creates a tension that propels you to act. When we achieve our initial aims, setting further intentions recreates the tension for continual progress.
The personal visioning exercise is done in three stages:
STEP 1: Guided Visualization: we lead participants through a guided visualization during which they reflect on a variety of aspects of their life – career, personal development, relationships, environment and physical health. The visualization can be adapted to just focus on one or on any number of these areas.
Each participant gets into a calm and alert state using a breath focused meditation. Participants are asked to think, not about what they want to achieve, but rather what their life will be like in their vision. They are invited to use all of their senses in the visualization process (what will things smell, feel and sound like). We guide them through the visualization with specific questions in each area. Here is a sample script with questions for each area. This script can be modified to fit the context of any facilitated session. Typically visualizations require 15 – 20 minutes. When each of the areas has been considered, we prompt participants to return to the breath and then slowly return to the room.
Career:
I want you to think about your ideal job. Where are you working? What are you doing? Is it the same job you are doing now or something different? Is this your own business or do you work in an organization? Who are the people you work with? Are you spending time with children and families? Do you work mostly in an office? How long is your work day? How do you get to work – walk, ride your bike? What is your compensation?
Personal Development:
Now let’s think about your own development. Is there any specific education or training you are taking? Do you have a daily reflective or meditative practice? Do you have any personal goals like running a marathon, writing a book or playing a musical instrument? Do you see yourself traveling? Where are you going?
Relationships:
Now let’s turn to how you envision your relationships. What is your relationship like with your family – your partner – your children and grandchildren – your parents and siblings? Who are you friends? What do you spend time doing with your friends and family? How are you supported in these relationships? Are you in love?
Environment:
What kind of home or location do you live in? Be specific in picturing your home environment. Is it in the city or the country? A condo or a large home? What do you see when you go through your front door? What do you see when you look out the window? Try to picture each room in your home. What kind of car or vehicle do you drive? Do you have more than one vehicle? Maybe a boat or RV?
Physical Health:
Envision your ideal body. Do you exercise regularly? What sorts of exercise do you do? What is your diet like? How are you sleeping? Do you have any health challenges?
STEP 2: Writing Your Vision and Your Current Reality: Following the visualization, we ask participants to take out their journal and write down in as much detail as possible what they visualized in each aspect of their life.Following this we invite them to reflect, again in specific detail, on their current reality in respect to each part of their vision.At this stage in the training, time is not taken to begin to plan or develop the structures needed to progress towards vision.This is a simply a mechanism to create the state of structural tension that is returned to at a later stage of the training.
STEP 3: Dyad Sharing: The final stage of the personal visioning exercise is to share whatever seems appropriate with another member of the group. Each participant relates the work that they have done and more generally how they experienced the visioning exercise. The other member of the dyad listens without judgement or feedback. As always, participants share only as much as they are comfortable with.