Reflective Practice - The Mirror That Builds Resilience
When I first began studying self-care, I thought it was mostly about actions such as rest, nutrition, exercise, boundaries. But the more I listened to leaders across sport, medicine, and business, the more I realised: true self-care starts with awareness.
You can’t care for what you don’t notice.
And reflection is how we notice.
The Role of Reflection in Sustainable Leadership
In coaching and leadership literature, reflective practice is often described as the process of examining our experiences to gain understanding and improve future action. Donald Schön called it “reflection-in-action” thinking while doing, and “reflection-on-action”, learning after the fact.
But beyond performance improvement, reflection has another, quieter purpose: it protects our humanity in high-performance worlds.
In healthcare, reflective writing has been shown to increase empathy and reduce emotional detachment among physicians. In sports coaching, reflective conversations help practitioners process pressure and make sense of complex emotional dynamics with athletes. In leadership development, reflection underpins self-awareness, the capacity to see oneself clearly and adaptively in relation to others.
Across all three domains, the pattern is consistent: reflection is not just a learning tool; it’s a recovery practice.
Reflection as Recovery
Burnout research often focuses on rest and time away. But reflection offers a more immediate form of restoration, a mental reset that can happen within the work itself.
When leaders pause to reflect even for a few minutes they slow the cognitive rush that keeps stress cycling. They make meaning out of experience instead of just accumulating it.
I recently spoke to a medical consultant who said, “If I don’t stop to reflect, the day just becomes noise.” She described how a five-minute debrief after a difficult case helped her release emotional residue, regain focus, and reconnect with purpose.
Similarly, in coaching, reflection after a loss helps to metabolise disappointment and transform it into learning rather than frustration. It creates psychological distance, which in turn fosters resilience.
In other words, reflection is the pause that turns exhaustion into insight.
From Reflection to Self-Awareness
In leadership research, self-awareness consistently emerges as one of the strongest predictors of effectiveness. But self-awareness isn’t something we’re born with, it’s cultivated through reflection.
The most grounded leaders I’ve met are not those who have all the answers, but those who are willing to ask better questions of themselves:
What emotions am I carrying into this room?
What patterns am I repeating under stress?
Where did I show up well today and where did I withdraw?
These are not management questions; they’re self-care questions disguised as leadership development.
Self-awareness allows leaders to notice early signs of depletion, irritability, detachment, cynicism, before they spiral into burnout. It also sharpens empathy: when we’re attuned to our own emotions, we can better sense the emotional climate around us.
In coaching psychology, this is known as reflexivity, the ongoing awareness of how our inner state shapes our interactions. Reflexive leaders are more adaptive, more connected, and, ultimately, more sustainable.
The Practice of Reflection
In my own research and conversations, I’ve noticed that reflection doesn’t happen by accident, it requires structure and permission. Here are some of the ways leaders across domains are integrating it:
Micro-reflection: Two minutes after a meeting or session to ask, What just happened here, and what does it tell me?
Reflective journaling: Used widely in medical and coaching education, this written reflection externalises thought and emotion, helping to clarify learning.
Peer reflection circles: Small groups of professionals sharing real experiences, not just success stories. In one sport organisation I studied, these sessions became a cornerstone of well-being culture.
Walking reflection: Moving while thinking. Coaches often say clarity arrives during physical activity, reflection need not be sedentary.
What all these methods share is intentional pause, the conscious creation of space to think, feel, and integrate.
The Cultural Challenge
If reflection is so valuable, why is it so rare in leadership practice?
Partly because reflection looks like stillness and stillness is easily mistaken for inaction. In performance-driven cultures, doing is often valued over thinking. The paradox is that the most productive leaders are those who regularly step back to reflect.
In sport, a pause to analyse performance is seen as tactical intelligence. In leadership, we might call it wisdom.
As I’ve observed in both fields, reflective leaders don’t slow progress, they refine it. They make fewer reactive decisions and recover faster from mistakes because they’ve learned to extract meaning from experience rather than escape it.
What I’m Learning
The more I study reflection, the more I see it as a form of internal recovery. It’s the space where learning, emotion, and purpose reconnect, where the leader reclaims authorship of their own narrative instead of being swept along by circumstance.
And perhaps this is the quiet secret of sustainable leadership:
we don’t become resilient by toughening up, we become resilient by making sense.
Reflection is the mirror that allows that sense-making to happen.
Closing Thought
In sport, in medicine, and in leadership, we are constantly called to give, to perform, to serve, to decide. Reflection gives something back. It transforms the act of doing into the art of becoming.
So the next time you feel pulled in ten directions, don’t just ask, What do I need to do next? Ask instead, What is this moment teaching me?
That question, simple but profound might be the most powerful self-care tool of all.
Next in the series: “Self-Awareness and the Physiology of Leadership.” We’ll explore how tuning into our physical and emotional signals helps us lead with presence and endurance.