By Deana Gelinas, coach and military family member
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been involved in sports. When I finished playing ice hockey in college, the natural transition for me was from athlete to coach. As a young coach, I studied the ins and outs of the game, took coaching clinics, watched how other coaches conducted themselves, and tried to learn from as many people as I could.
A few years into my coaching career, I felt confident in my abilities and several of my teams had won championships. But something was missing. I was always running on empty, trying to keep my head above water. And I was doing the same things over and over again with my teams.One day, I was having coffee with a more experienced coach, who I considered a mentor. He asked me how often I took time to self-reflect on my team, my practices and games, my players, and most importantly, myself as a leader. The conversation we had changed not only my coaching career but my life.
He told me there’s one thing that separates good leaders from great leaders: the ability to use self-reflection to increase awareness, understanding, and knowledge of events and experiences.
What is self-reflection?
Self-reflection is taking an honest look at your actions, decisions, and words—and recognizing their affects. It’s thinking about how you handled specific experiences and whether you could’ve improved the way you acted, spoke, or showed your understanding and feelings. In my case as a coach, that includes reflecting on the team, the staff, the game, and myself.
Self-reflection has 2 main forms: reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action.
Reflection-in-action is a matter of thinking on your feet during an event or drill.
Reflection-on-action involves looking back after an event to make sense of your decisions, words, and conduct to improve future actions.
As a leader, reflecting with purpose in both ways has allowed me to grow in several areas:
- I now examine situations more completely, which helps me understand what took place and shift my perspective to the entire event.
- I can remove my emotions from the situation and look at the events and situations from multiple points of view.
- I respond more thoughtfully to the needs of my team and those I lead, during and after events.
- I can now quickly make adjustments during the game and on the fly—and trust my decisions because of my reflective abilities.
- I plan better and look at why things went well or why they didn’t. Then I address those things accordingly.
- Most importantly, I’ve shifted my focus from the details of a game to leading my team. Self-reflection helps me focus on getting the best out of each team member rather than focusing on just the wins and losses.
You can practice purposeful reflection in many ways. The most important way to reflect is the one that works best for you.
“We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.” –John Dewey
To learn more about the power of reflection, visit HPRC’s article on how to be a great Master Resilience Trainer.
