This week I’ve been working with two people I’m lucky to call colleagues and friends, Janet Harvey and Suzi Pomerantz, on the upcoming Reflection issue of choice Magazine. We ran into a sticky situation with the panel, the kind that doesn’t resolve on a first pass. Suzi sits on that panel too, so she got to weigh in on whether the thinking held up, whether it resonated for the others.
I came away from those conversations sitting with two of my own values: collaboration and reflection. I tend to hold them as separate things. This week reminded me they aren’t.
We usually talk about reflection as a solo act. You finish a session, you sit with it, you ask what you noticed and what you missed. That part matters. But the reflection that actually changes how I work rarely happens inside my own head. It happens when someone I trust looks at the same thing I’m looking at and sees it differently.
That’s what the panel did. I had a read on the sticky situation. I thought I’d worked it through. Then Susie weighed in, and the question shifted from “is this right?” to “does this land for the people who’ll read it?” Different question. Better one.
To coach well, you have to reflect. I don’t think that’s controversial. Reflection is how you catch your own patterns, the assumptions you carry into the room, the moments your own stuff gets in the way of the client’s work. But here’s what I keep relearning: my blind spots are, by definition, the things I can’t see on my own. Naming them takes another set of eyes.
So collaboration isn’t the opposite of reflection, and it isn’t a break from it. It’s part of how reflection works. The people who push back, who ask the question I didn’t think to ask, who tell me honestly when something doesn’t resonate, are doing reflective work with me, not instead of me. That’s the difference between thinking about your practice and actually testing it.
It’s also what we’re building toward in the Reflection issue. Writers digging into the work, readers getting a real sense of the depth we can reach when we slow down and look closely. The issue is, in a way, the practice itself put on the page.
If you have people like that around your own work, the ones who’ll tell you the truth about it, the ones who make your reflection sharper than it would be alone, hold onto them. They’re worth more than any framework.
