4 steps to help you uncover your best self
One of the most impactful activities I completed during my coaching training was the Reflected Best Self Exercise. As part of the exercise, you’re asked to reflect on your strengths and gather stories from more than 10 individuals from different times and facets of your life about when they saw you at your best. At the end of the exercise, you receive a report that includes the stories, as well as prompts to help you identify themes and strengths that you can leverage in your current professional role.
My report helped me understand that one of my strengths was building relationships. It was something I instinctively knew but had never considered a strength in a professional context. As a result of my report, I refocused how I spent my time and reconsidered how I brought value to my work. I also happened to complete the exercise during a time of career transition. Reading stories from others about my strengths was not only moving, but also re-energizing in a moment when I needed assurance that I had made the right decision.
Completing the Reflected Best Self Exercise can help you uncover strengths you may have overlooked and boost your confidence as you move forward with a new personal or professional identity, whether you’re switching career focus, just got promoted, or recently became a new parent. Research supports this approach, too: it shows that individuals respond positively to praise, as it instills confidence and inspires people to perform better.
How it works
The Reflective Best Self Exercise was developed by experts at Harvard Business School and the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. It stems from an area of organizational behavior research called “positive organizational scholarship,” which is showing that companies that focus on positive characteristics, such as strength, resilience, vitality, and trust, can increase productivity and performance for both individuals and the organization itself.
The exercise includes four steps:
Identifying respondents who will provide feedback
Recognizing patterns
Creating your best-self portrait
Applying what you learn to your career
To turn the stories you gather into actionable insights, one key step is to identify themes and determine what they mean for you and your career. As an example, below I’ve included a table that I created to help me interpret my own results based on the one offered by the exercise's creators.
This tool can have benefits for many individuals, but I find it to be most useful for those who are in a time of transition and need to identify how they can use their strengths to either facilitate or solidify a change. While discussing your strengths can be confidence-boosting, it’s also important to recognize that leveraging them in your day-to-day routine takes thoughtfulness, commitment, and continuous reflection. As a coach, I can partner with you to interpret your results, develop a plan of action, and create accountability mechanisms to ensure that you are making progress toward your goals.
Source
Roberts, L. M., Spreitzer, G., Dutton, J., Quinn, R., Heaphy, E., & Barker, B. (2005). How to Play to Your Strengths. Harvard Business Review.