Reflection

As a coach or mentor it is very important to reflect on your work with your clients, in order to improve the customer service that you provide to future clients. Reflection can take various forms and each individual will find an approach that suits them.

You can reflect on the past, present and the future in your coaching and mentoring:

Reflecting in the past. This involves reviewing your interaction with your client in your coaching or mentoring session after the session has ended. This will include thinking about what you and your client did and said in the session, what questions you asked, what the outcome of the session was, what interventions and skills you utilised and your relationship with your client. Your reflection will be enhanced by taking notes in your sessions, writing down what happened immediately after the session or even by reviewing a tape recording of the session if the client is happy with this.

Reflecting in the present. This involves thinking about your client interactions whilst you are in the coaching or mentoring session with the client. This is much harder to accomplish than reflecting in the past as you need to remain fully focussed on the client whilst reflecting on how the session is going. This type of reflection may not be appropriate for an inexperienced coach or mentor.

Reflecting in the future. This involves reviewing your reflection in the past and present and deciding how you will behave differently in the future. You may identify areas for learning or areas where you want to find out more information or read up on. You may consider different interventions that you could use or different ways of handling similar situations in the future.

The Seven Eyed Model of Supervision may help you in your reflection as it provides a framework for considering your coaching or mentoring in. The relevant areas from the model to use are to focus on the client and how they presented, to explore the strategies and interventions that you used, to explore the relationship between you and your client, to focus on yourself and on the wider context in which the work happens. This was discussed in the August edition of our newsletter - see Seven Eyed Model of Supervision.

Reflection can be enhanced by using the NLP technique of perceptual positions i.e. looking at what happened from your perspective (the 1st position), considering it from your client's perspective (the 2nd position) and reviewing it from an onlooker's perspective (the 3rd position). It will also be very relevant to reflect on the relationship between yourself and your client, as well as considering the background to the coaching or mentoring.

Another area for reflection is on your own reactions and thoughts during and after the coaching and mentoring sessions. This will highlight where you are being affected by your work with your clients and the importance of attending to your emotional and physical well-being.

Many coaches and mentors choose to use a learning log or journal to enhance their reflection. They will use this to note down individual learnings, as well as to identify patterns across different clients. You may find that you have issues at specific times within your client sessions, at particular stages in your coaching or mentoring relationships, when dealing with certain topics or with particular types of clients.

By reflecting you will identify things that work well for you and you want to do more of and other things that you want to work on in your coaching or mentoring. Reflection will also help you if you decide to undertake supervision as it will help you identify areas that you would like to discuss with your supervisor.

If you would like supervision for your coaching or mentoring please refer to the Makin It Happen – Supervision & Support for Coaches & Mentors website at http://coachmentorsupervision.co.uk or contact Liz Makin at Liz@makinithappen.co.uk.

This article first appeared in the September 2007 edition of the Makin It Happen – Supervision & Support for Coaches & Mentors newsletter. Please click here to Sign up for our email newsletter.