Welcome to the December edition of The Inbox Coach. I’ve decided to dedicate the last month of the year to the topic of Reflection and to think about how you can use it to develop in your career.
For the whole of December, I’m going to be talking about Reflection and how to use it to create a career you love. These emails are all about creating a space for reflection and action in your week, so if you have been reading them for some time you should know how reflection works, but I thought it would be helpful to delve into the topic more, understand the benefits of reflection and look at how you can build it into a daily practice.
Reflecting every day
Before I did my coach training, I didn’t really know what reflection was and how to use it to develop in my career. Now I use reflection every day to continually make small, incremental improvements to my work. Sometimes I do very intentional reflection exercises, sitting down to write in my journal or evaluate a piece of work I have done. Other times I am just making a mental note of something that has gone well, something that didn’t work or what I might try next time. It has helped me to develop self-awareness, particularly thinking about how I impact those around me, and I feel much more confident that the work I choose, the projects I say yes to, the clients I work with are right for me because I really know what I want from my job.
Raising awareness
The purpose of reflection is to raise awareness of your situation; what you are doing, why you are doing it, how it makes you feel, the impact you have and how it is or isn’t helping you to create the career you want. When you are aware of what is going on you have the data you need to take a great next step that is going to move you towards your goals. So often at work we rush through the day not paying attention to what is going on. We miss vital little clues that would help us to refine our choices and if we continue like this for too long it is possible to end up with a career you don’t really want.
Reflection
*If you can’t do the exercises from this email now, then don’t forget to pick a time when you are going to do them and add this email to your calendar
This month I’m encouraging you to think about how you use reflection to support your career development and what other ways you could be paying attention to your work to understand what is going on for you.
How often do you reflect on your career?
What is your preferred way to reflect on the actions you have taken at work?
How do you feel when you make time for reflection?
Where else could you be creating a space to think about your career?
What is getting in the way of you making time for reflection?
Action
There isn’t an action task this month, but there are two ways I can further support you in developing your reflection practice.
I’ve created a free worksheet which outlines how to use reflection to support your career and 12 prompt questions to help you get started. You can download it here.
I’m hosting two Reflections Workshops this month, on Tuesday 7th and Tuesday 14th December at 7:30pm GMT, to help you to create the time and space to think about what your career has been like in 2021 and what you want it to be like in 2022.
In Workshop 1 I’ll be asking questions to help you to celebrate your successes from 2021, think about what hasn’t worked out the way you wanted it to and what lessons you have learnt. You’ll have a chance to share your reflections with the group and find out what 2021 has been like for other people.
In Workshop 2 I’ll be using guided exercises to help you to think about what you want from your career next year. Whether you know what your career vision is or you want to define your career goals for 2022, I’ll be there to support you to get started on creating your development plan for next year. This is a great session to get you thinking about what you want in the next 12 months, and you can let the ideas develop over the Christmas break.
The workshops are designed to follow on from each other, but if you can only make 1 they work well as a stand-alone session too. As we are entering the festive season, I’ll be encouraging you to bring a drink, a mince pie and spend an hour enjoying putting your career development first.
“Pleasing everyone should never be anyone’s goal” - Zeba Talkhani
One of my favourite Unconventional Mentors is the publishers 404 Ink. I featured some of the authors they have published on the Unconventional Mentors project, and this was one of my favourite quotes. Their book Nasty Women, the first book they published in 2017, is a book that shares the stories and perspectives of lots of different women in the wake of Donald Trump being elected as president of the United States.
In her essay, The Difficulty in Being Good, Zeba Talkhani talks about how other people’s expectations of how she should behave, as a Muslim woman from Saudi Arabi living in Germany, impact her and how she never feels good enough. Zeba talks about how for her the idea of being a “nasty woman” changed from being something to avoid to being something to be embraced. That doing what feels right for her, rather than trying to meet the unrealistic expectations of other people is what will allow her to find happiness.
When we are focused on pleasing other people, we aren’t thinking about what we want or need from our work. When you make time for reflection you can more easily notice when you are trying to please other people rather than doing what is right for you.
You can find out more about 404 Ink and the Nasty Women book here.
I’m excited to be talking about reflection throughout December. It is going to be a chance to celebrate our successes (something I don’t always remember to do) to make time to think about what we have learnt this year and how we want to use what we have learnt about ourselves to make plans for 2022. I hope to see you at one or both of my workshops and I’ll be back next week with more thoughts on reflection.
