Reflective Templates
I look at reflection as a key part of coaching and wider than that of learning and of growth. As a coach we create a thinking environment to enable people to explore and discover things through a new lens. Anything that can be done to help people to do this, especially on their own is magic.
When I trained as a coach I had the privilege of spending a day with the wonderful Cathy Lasher and she is big on reflection. We can reflect on something (after the fact) or we can reflect in something (during the fact). The more we practice reflecting on a moment the better we become at reflecting in a moment where we might really need it.
Reflective practice is what we need to do to exercise this reflecting muscle.
A rigorous process of contemplating in order to generate learning, for the purpose of improvement. — Cathy Lasher
I often refer to Sharon Bowman and my belief that writing (and drawing) trump pretty much anything else. Writing is a whole brain activity that requires all of our attention. When we consider a question, in order to commit it to writing, we have to create our own interpretation and answer in a way that we wouldn’t have to otherwise.
Journaling is a common practice where people will regularly reflect in writing. When I hear the word I think of something very freeform, just like a diary and maybe writing in the space for each day. I think for some people, for some situations this works wonderfully. Some people and contexts need a little help in making the practice more rigorous. This can be where templates come in.
Templates
I run a lot of workshops or training courses these days and am forever trying to inject coaching, often in the form of opportunities to reflect.
I provide stickers or printed post-its to attendees to build their own learning and early on in doing this I started to include some for people to write on.
It can be as simple as a very basic set of questions with space for answers or a sentence missing words.
After an exercise or a portion of a workshop I’ll give people some time in silence to reflect and fill in a template. Sometimes it might be appropriate to ask people to share what they’ve written, sometimes not.
The next one is a specific question around skills that are going to be practiced and learned in a workshop. I often use a 0 to 10 scale in coaching conversations and ask people how they feel. This is giving people a template to reflect on these same questions.
I use two of these — one at the start of a workshop and one at the end to help people to measure progress.
Earlier I used the example of Gary Rolfe’s “What?, So What? Now What?” model of reflective practice.
This is one of my absolute favourites and started a little evolution in some of my templates. Adding a little extra fodder for thought to the questions.
- What happened? What did you learn?
- What does that mean? What is the nugget of insight behind it?
- What are you going to do now? What will be different?
I use this one a lot now and see it as a general all purpose template for reflecting on something that has happened, may have some meaning and I could choose to use to positively affect my behaviour.
Another example in the same style is a one for reflection after a coaching session.
This isn’t about taking notes about what has been discussed with a client but more akin to trying to bring a little of the value of coaching supervision to my day and to think about my impact as a coach, and how I am working with this particular client.
The last example here is something that I tried to create as a tool for parents to hold conversations with their children and encourage them to build their reflective practice at an early age. I think it’s beautifully simple and because of that why would you just use it with kids! I’ve been using this one myself for a little while daily.
There are PDFs of all of these at the end of the article you can download. I did however recently take it just a little bit further and got some notepads printed up with the template on each page. I adore these and the possibilities for this seem endless!
Reflective practice can be a very personal thing and sometimes templates made by others just won’t feel right. I often encourage my coaching clients to design their own templates for whatever they feel the need to reflect on regularly.
A great starting point for this is to look for questions. I’m a big fan of Barefoot Coaching’s question cards of various kinds. Pick something relevant, look for some questions and craft something personal to you.
My personal favourite is their Coaching Cards for Children. They’re so much simpler and in some ways more expressive than ones aimed at grown ups!
There are lots of other sources of coaching questions. I encourage you to seek the ones that really resonate with you!
A few more ideas to leave you to consider that I’ve used in the past for myself or with various other folk:
- Post run/jog reflection
- Template for a team meeting
- Template for conference/networking event
- Post training course reflection
Remote & digital options
In 2020 it’s somewhat harder to do things in person than in previous years and many of us have learned a whole new set of digital tools! I still love writing, pen on paper, and often send printed materials, templates, etc to clients. There are plenty of times this isn’t possible or even the right thing to do.
Anything we can do to help people to reflect is beneficial and I’ve used things like Google Forms with set questions for people to answer at a pinch. I’ve asked people to just write on a blank piece of paper for me many times.
Sending people PDFs to print themselves has been one for me but another option is editable PDFs, putting form fields over the top of images (thanks to Steve Sweales for this idea). PDF escape seems to be a good free tool for doing this.
I often do this in a more collaborative/live way using Miro (an online whiteboard). This can be done with any template/image and text boxes or even little post-it notes!
These are great options for occasional or guided use of templates but what about more regular reflection. I tend to prefer a nice quality notebook but I’ve recommended the likes of Evernote to people in the past for synchronising content across devices, perhaps keeping a page for every day.
I’ve tried using Paper on my iPad, writing on top of images of templates, copying pages, and this has given me the closest experience to having a real life notebook.
Give it a try and see how powerful reflecting can be. However you can try to find a way to build your own reflective practice perhaps enable others to do so!
Please do let me know in the comments if you’ve found any of this useful and share any ideas you have for other templates. We’re all richer when we share 😊
You can download printable PDFs of some of the examples here
You can buy some of my colourful printed notepads here
