Where did you shine?

One of my favorite webcomics is Heart and Brain. I identify with the battles between passion and rationality or impulse and anxiety that take place in the stories. I even bought a print that sums up my life philosophy pretty well.

The artist posted a comic on Instagram this week that hit home and caused me to reflect on my learning process.

It's easy to fixate on improvements

During my coach training, we spent half of each weekend seminar coaching, being coached, and observing coaching sessions. After each session, we would debrief as a group. The mentor observing us would always start by asking the coach, “Where did you shine?”

The thing is, when you’re fresh off a coaching session and know that you’re being evaluated, it’s much easier to think about all the things you stumbled over. Ooops - I asked too many stacked questions. I’m not sure I spent enough time exploring the topic with the coachee before we jumped into planning. Did I manage time effectively?

Taking time to provide a thoughtful answer to the Where did I shine? question helped me to really think about where I was showing growth and mastery. When learning something new, it’s easy to take for granted the positives to focus on the next area for improvement.

Reflecting on opportunities for growth is important. But spending time to reflect on growth that has already taken place is important, too.

In the case of my coaching program, I put in the work to learn the theory and integrate that learning into how I show up in my coaching sessions. And reflecting on that progress helped to reinforce my efforts, helped to make it stick. Letting my affirming Heart win out over my critical Brain was important for my growth.

Listen to all the Hearts in the room

Fortunately, there were a lot of Hearts in the room, too. If we breezed past our shining moments and launched into our struggles or uncertainties, the mentor would stop us and reiterate the question: Where did you shine? They wouldn’t let us get away with denying our successes or taking them for granted. Our coachees would also be asked to talk about what worked well for them in the session. In this way, we’d get to hear about the impact that our work had on our coachee’s experience - which was especially delightful when it was something we did naturally without realizing that we’d internalized our learning. Hearing from our coachee was another way to slow down and take in the fullness of our impact, not allowing ourselves to only fixate on the areas for improvement.

Of course, in our coaching debriefs we also got critical feedback on how to apply the theory more fully and how to more effectively respond to what our coachee was bringing into the session. But I personally found it much easier to integrate that critical feedback when I could also reflect on my strengths and make connections with how I could leverage those strengths to address my weaknesses.

Bringing the process home

This formal approach to reflection and feedback isn’t usually available in daily life. But we can take a queue from my coaching mentors and from Heart and Brain. We can pause to ask Where did I shine? And we can shush the critical voice for a bit while we spend time thinking about our strengths and growth and the learning we’ve done to get to this point.

Do you take time to reflect on your progress? Do you make an effort to reflect on the positives and not just the improvements? My challenge to you (and to myself) is to be explicit about asking Where did I shine?