I recently used a structured self-reflection exercise on a dream I had. This form of leadership self-reflection was not about finding hidden meaning, but about slowing down my thinking and observing how I show up as a leader.
Whether the interpretation was accurate turned out to be irrelevant. Instead, what mattered was that it forced me to pause.
In my work as a facilitator and strategist, I spend most of my time guiding processes, holding space, and helping teams move forward. As a result, I am expected to ask good questions, provide clarity, and maintain momentum. Progress is visible. Structure is valued. Efficiency is rewarded.
Yet when I look back at recent projects, a familiar pattern keeps emerging. Not a single mistake or a specific failure, but something subtler. After sessions, workshops, or key conversations, I often find myself considering what could have been different. Importantly, this reflection is not about decisions made, but about how I was thinking while leading.
For example, what if I had waited longer before intervening? What if a question had been framed more openly? Or what if I had removed myself more deliberately from the process instead of shaping it too early?
These reflections are not about insecurity or second-guessing outcomes. Rather, they point to awareness of process.
Leadership self-reflection as a professional practice
Leadership self-reflection is rarely treated as a discipline. More often, it happens informally and usually after the fact. However, for leaders working in complex environments, reflection is not a luxury. It is part of the work.
As facilitators and leaders gain experience, they develop pattern recognition. While this ability is valuable, it also accelerates decision-making. Over time, speed becomes the default response to uncertainty. Consequently, reflection gets postponed until there is time, which often means until it is too late to influence the process meaningfully.
For this reason, treating reflection as a professional practice means deliberately creating moments where thinking slows down. Not to delay action, but to improve the quality of it.
How experience shapes leadership bias
Experience is usually framed as an advantage, and rightly so. At the same time, experience comes with a quiet side effect. With experience comes pattern recognition, and with pattern recognition comes speed. Eventually, that speed can turn into a filter.
As a result, questions begin to sound open while subtly pointing in a direction. They feel helpful while narrowing the field of exploration. They move the group forward, but sometimes at the cost of emergence.
This is not poor leadership. Instead, it is competent leadership operating on autopilot.
I have explored similar dynamics when reflecting on how leaders respond when pressure rises and mistakes surface, particularly in moments where urgency overrides learning and responsibility becomes centralized.
Emotional intelligence in leadership requires restraint
Emotional intelligence in leadership is often described as empathy, listening, or care. Those qualities matter. However, in practice, emotional intelligence also shows up as restraint.
Specifically, restraint to not rescue the process too early. Restraint to not fill silence with structure. And restraint to let uncertainty do its work before moving toward clarity.
This perspective closely aligns with Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety, which shows that learning and performance improve when leaders resist the urge to control outcomes and instead create conditions for reflection and dialogue. (Link)
What I recognised in my own practice is not emotional detachment, but emotional over-functioning. In other words, the instinct to protect the group, guide the outcome, and maintain momentum can override quieter signals that something still needs space. That is often where objectivity begins to slip. Not because emotions are absent, but because they are unexamined.
Using self-reflection to interrupt leadership momentum
The reflection exercise itself did not provide insight, wisdom, or answers. Instead, it provided distance. Distance between me and my assumptions. Distance between my role and my reflexes. Crucially, enough distance to notice how quickly I move from sensing what is happening to steering what comes next.
Used this way, self-reflection is not about conclusions. Rather, it is about interruption. And interruption is often what leadership lacks most, especially when responsibility feels heavy and expectations are high.
The leadership work that happens before action
Leadership rarely fails loudly. Instead, it erodes quietly through premature clarity and questions asked too soon. The real work is not about asking better questions, but about noticing which questions never get asked because we move too fast to be useful.
In this sense, leadership self-reflection becomes critical when teams need psychological safety to slow down thinking, reduce defensiveness, and allow collective intelligence to surface.
That is what this reflection offered me. Not answers, but awareness. And for now, that is enough.
