4 steps to help you uncover your best self
Photo by Cagan Sevencan on Unsplash
Summary: The Reflected Best Self Exercise involves gathering stories about when others saw you at your best to identify key strengths. Completing it can uncover overlooked strengths, boost confidence during transitions, and provide insights to leverage your strengths in your leadership role. It stems from positive organizational scholarship that shows that focusing on strengths increases performance.
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 in your leadership journey. 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 organizations 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
You also could consider completing a simplified version of this exercise, depending on your availability and goals. The Conscious Leadership Group offers a resource called the “Genius Email Campaign” that gathers similar information and can be useful if you’re looking to gather feedback relatively quickly and affordably.
Turning stories into insights and action
Regardless of which approach you take to gathering your stories, the key is to turn your stories into actionable insights that you can use to support your leadership. To turn stories into insights, you can identify themes and determine what they mean for you and your role. 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 especially 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. Are you new to hospitality? Were you just promoted? Are you scaling your business or considering a new concept?
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. After gathering your stories and compiling your insights, continue to check in with yourself on a regular basis to make sure your choices and actions are aligning with your strengths. This might look like scheduling a regular check in with yourself at the beginning of every month or setting a calendar reminder every quarter.
While it’s not realistic to align every action as a leader with our strengths (let’s face it, that’s impossible and also impractical sometimes!), knowing your strengths as a leader can help you have an inner compass that can guide you toward your leadership goals, even when things seem stressful or you’re in the weeds.
Reference
Roberts, L. M., Spreitzer, G., Dutton, J., Quinn, R., Heaphy, E., & Barker, B. (2005). How to Play to Your Strengths. Harvard Business Review.
