If we think about self-reflective practice we need to consider, that reflective practice contains three key principles. According to Cropley et al. (2010) these principles are:

1. Reflective practice is about learning from experience.
2. Reflection can improve practice.
3. Reflection involves respecting and working with evidence.

Obviously, the empirical evidence around effective reflective practice evolved since 2010 – nonetheless, the research conducted by Brendan and his colleagues back then is still important if you are staring out on your journey of reflective practice, and if you wish to reflect on your self reflective skills.

In order to deliver effective practice to clients, interviewed applied sport psychology professionals said, that learning how to reflect has helped them understand why they do what they do and how their behaviors can be improved along the way. Here, also the aspect of supervision and its quality was highlighted, and although most interviewees received supervision it became clear that not only participating in supervision but especially honestly reflecting on behaviors and actions is the key to learning from individual experiences. Honesty with oneself and ones’ actions is one important key to effective practice.

Another aspect for effective reflective practice was reflecting together with others. As one participant shared:

“When you‟re an applied consultant normally you‟re quite isolated so I‟ve found that using other people in my reflection has forced me to seek advice from people. I‟ve found that useful because otherwise I‟d be sitting there with only my own thoughts and ideas about an experience and I don‟t feel as though that‟s effective reflection because you don‟t know what you could have done differently.”

Although many practitioners know reflective methods it appears that if one has a structured and formalized process – especially together with others – applied sport psychology professionals benefit even more from this practice. One important reasons for this finding might be that sitting down together with others leads to a much deeper and more critical examination of behaviors and practices than “only” sitting down alone with a pen and a book and reflecting alone.

Identified benefits of reflective practice were:

1. Reflective practice improves the self-awareness of the sport psychology professional.
2. Reflective practice develops knowledge that informs future decisions and practices.
3. Reflective practice helps in the development of a professional consulting philosophy.

I hope that the summary of some of the findings Brendan and his colleagues identified might show you how important reflective practice can also be for you and for the work that we are all doing with clients.

Now your call to action could be to send out a message to some colleagues and invite them for dinner where you spend two hours also sharing experiences from your last season with this team or that athletes. Or maybe you call your supervisor again and make that next appointment you wanted to make for a while already. Or maybe you sit down and write down what went well and what didn’t go well during that last tournament you attended with the team.

Reflective practice is a beneficial and obviously necessary tool to deliver high quality services to our clients. How do you learn from what you do?