Reflection Prompts for Leaders
Develop your leadership skills with reflective journaling.
Reflective journaling is one of the most effective tools you can use to develop your leadership skills.
The prospect of writing about your own thoughts and feelings can be daunting, especially if you are new to this practice of personal development. In this article you will learn why reflective writing is an important leadership skill to develop and get some ideas to make your journaling more effective.
Journaling has been described as the ‘paper mirror’ (Hubbs & Brand, 2005). It can be your gateway to understand your thought processes, your motivations, the blockers to your growth and your biases as well as strengths. The main goal of journaling is to capture and analyse your thoughts.
The average person has between 12000 and 60000 thoughts per day. Up to 80% of these can be negative.
Most of your thoughts come and go without you noticing them. However, they all impact how you feel and how you act.
Through writing some of these thoughts down, in a focused manner, you force your thought train to slow down. Journaling is a method to capture some of these thoughts to allow you to analyse and learn from them.
There is a lot of useful data in your thoughts that can inform the further trajectory of your leadership development. Writing can show you areas for improvement and growth. For yourself. And also for your team.
Before we look at how to journal effectively, let’s review some of the benefits associated with journaling (summarised from Fritson, 2008; Monk & Maisel, 2021):
journaling trains your ability as a leader to observe and notice
expressive writing opens new pathways to get to know yourself better
journaling is a form of learning for personal growth
it offers you a way to access your values and strengths
you can learn more about your inner biases and judgments
journaling improves your confidence and your sense of control
Learning to journal is a soft skill that I always encourage my leadership coaching clients to practice as part of personal development journey. Positive leadership always starts with yourself. The more you understand yourself, the easier it will be for you to understand others and become an effective leader.
“As a leader, the first person I need to lead is me. The first person that I should try to change is me.”
- John C. Maxwell
Your journal
Effective journaling works best with pen and paper. Ditch your laptop for a bit, get yourself a pen and invest in a bound journal or book that you can use for your journaling. Switch off all digital notifications for the time you dedicate for journaling to allow yourself to fully focus on your writing.
Your journaling
Journaling doesn’t have to take forever. It can be anything from 10 minutes to half an hour. You can either journal at a pre-scheduled time that allows you to go inwards, or you might want to journal after a difficult conversation or event that you want to analyse in more depth.
Try it at different times and see what works best for you.
10 reflective journaling prompts
Use some or all of these in your next journal entry:
What is happening for me now?
What is going well? What is creating that?
What is challenging? What is creating that?
What does all this mean for me?
What needs my attention?
What strengths do I notice in myself as a leader?
What am I learning?
How am I showing up?
If I were one of my team members that were led by my current self, how satisfied would I be?
What I need is…
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References:
Fritson, K. (2008). Impact of Journaling on Students' Self-Efficacy and Locus of Control. Insight: A Journal Of Scholarly Teaching, 3, 75-83. doi: 10.46504/03200809fr
Hubbs, D., & Brand, C. (2005). The Paper Mirror: Understanding Reflective Journaling. Journal Of Experiential Education, 28(1), 60-71. doi: 10.1177/105382590502800107
Monk, L., & Maisel, E. (2021). Transformational Journaling for Coaches, Therapists, and Clients. Milton: Taylor & Francis Group.