I spend more time with me than with anyone else on this planet - and yet, some days, even I'm not sure what I want or how I am seen. Sometimes, the best picture we can take of ourself is one taken by someone else.
Welcome back to I Wanna Be Me When I Grow Up. My name is Kara.
As I mentioned yesterday, this is the most challenging exercise I will share with you - probably in the entire 30 day series of these daily episodes. But sometimes, that which is incredibly challenging is also incredibly rewarding.
In October 2005, a group of researchers from Harvard Business School and University of Michigan published a journal article in the Academy of Management Review. This article introduced the idea of the Reflected Best Self Exercise. I'll link in the shown notes to a January 2005 article that walks you through a simplified version of the October article (https://hbr.org/2005/01/how-to-play-to-your-strengths) - and which walks you through the steps I'm going to walk you through today.
The researchers were looking for how to help work teams be more effective. Not surprisingly, they found that teams should celebrate their wins and maximize one another's strengths. Not stated in the article, but which becomes obvious when you think about it, if you are maximizing the strengths of your team then you need to have a lot of diversity in your team so that you've got all of your strengths covered.
I think the Reflected Best Self Exercise is not only a way to help you see what strengths others see in you but what values others see you applying on a regular basis. So, here is how to do a Reflected Best Self Exercise.
The first step is to identify a group of diverse people you can ask to give you feedback. To truly do this for your values, you need to ask a variety of people in all facets of your life: work, school, social organizations, church, family, friends, etc. It's also really valuable when these people are from your past and your present. You want to look at the broadest perspective of your life as you can.
Once you have your list of people - I think 10 - 20 people is ideal but even 1 - 5 people is excellent, you are going to ask each one to give you feedback on what your specific strengths are and at least one specific example of when they saw you using that strength. Email is a great way to do this or even voice mail or a handwritten note with a return envelope in it if you want to go old school. How you do it is entirely up to you but you want to get as diverse a set of feedback as you can. That is step 2 - asking for and the collecting feedback.
The third step is to look for themes. The specifics of the Reflected Best Self Exercise tell you to look for your strengths. That will naturally come out in this exercise but I also want you to think about what those strengths and what the examples that were shared with you say about your values. You may find it helpful to organize these in a table as soon as you feel like you have two or more examples that point to a common theme like ethical, courageous, encouraging, etc. List the word or phrase you think describes the values in one column. In the next column, enter the specific examples that were cited for this value, and then finally list the role or relationship in which you showed this value.
The final step in the Reflected Best Self Exercise is to write a brief narrative (about two to five paragraphs) that begins with the prompt, “When I am at my best, I…” In that narrative focus on identifying the values that have led to the actions you've taken and the examples that were shared. What belief, qualities, and traits have you consistently applied.
While, I am suggesting a use of the Reflected Best Self Exercise that has not been formally validated by research, I've done this in many workshops and courses and found that participants and students walked away with a much deeper sense of who they were AND what they valued in life.
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8 - The Reflected Best Self Exercise