There are days when reflection arrives as a gentle invitation, and days when it shows up as a non‑negotiable need, like thirst. In both, my way back to myself starts with slowing down enough to notice that I have drifted. What a reflective practice looks like in my everyday life and work?
Walking as moving thought
Long before reflective practice had a name in my life, it had a rhythm: my walking pace. As a teenager, whenever something felt tangled, I would leave the house and walk until the inner noise loosened and the essential thread of the question appeared. Later I read in a book by Julia Cameron has a phrase about my experience – “solved through walking” – and it mirrors how my thinking settles when my body is in motion.
Today, walking is a deliberate practice rather than an intuitive escape. I schedule it. Sometimes it is a long, spacious two‑hour walk in city-close nature, more often, it is a 15–20 minute circle around the building where I live, or a park near our home in Brussels. What matters is not the distance, but the moment when my breath slows down and my thoughts stop chasing one another and begin to walk alongside me instead: I recognize the systemic approach here, which I use a lot in my coaching work, this time– self-applied.
On these walks, I don’t listen to anything, no podcast, no music. The steps themselves are the metronome of reflection, sometimes enriched by a word, or phrase coming from a conversation of passing by people, horn of a car, wings of a bird or flock. Questions that felt heavy behind the laptop screen become lighter when they are allowed to move with me: How did that coaching session / important conversation / {anything else that I need to reflect on} really land? Where was I truly present today, and where was I half a step ahead of my client / my child / my husband / myself?
Silence before serving
As a coach, I think of reflection as a professional hygiene. Before each coaching session, I take a brief pause – sometimes five minutes, sometimes only one or two – to become aware and possibly “release” the inner “leftovers” I am bringing into the room. It can be as simple as standing by the window, staring at a tree or a distant rooftop, and letting my gaze soften until my thoughts do the same.
These mini‑rituals are what I call “prophylaxis of presence”. They are not dramatic or mystical. I might lean on the balcony railing, look at a dear drawing on my living room wall, if at home or staring at an object in a favorite color when in the office, or simply close my eyes at my desk. The intention is always the same: to notice what is buzzing in me – an unfinished email, a family worry, excitement about a new project – and allow it to move to the “background” so that the coaching client can move to the “foreground”. In these short silences, I am not analyzing. I am practicing “being” after hours of “doing”, and this shift is the doorway to reflective practice in the session itself.
From long pauses to micro‑practices
In the earlier years of my career, reflection mostly happened in long, infrequent doses: one-day trip; retreat; half day with my journal or notebook in a café. These moments were islands in a sea of busyness. When I became a parent and started building my own practice while navigating other professional roles, it became clear that I could no longer wait for perfect conditions in order to reflect.
The shift came when I stopped imagining reflective practice – in my own vocabulary I have always called it something like “pause to move” (спри за да продължиш in Bulgarian, my mother tongue) – as a special event and started treating it as a series of smaller, sustainable habits. Instead of “I need a quiet afternoon to think about my work”, it became: “I have ten minutes between two calls – what can nurture my presence right now?”. Walking shortened. The pauses before sessions became more intentional one-minute rituals. I began using transitions as tiny bells that reminded me to check in before anything that matter – coaching session, conversation, starting and/or wrapping up the workday: How am I entering this next moment? What do I want to bring, and what do I need to leave behind for now? This made my “pause to move”, the reflective practice something I could carry with me, instead of something I needed to escape to.
Simple structures that hold reflection
Even though my reflective practice is deeply personal, certain structures help it stay alive. One of them is a light version of journaling. I do not write pages every day, but I often capture short notes after a coaching session or workshop: one sentence about what worked, one about what I would tweak next time, and one observation about myself. These micro‑notes are not for performance review; they are there to help me connect dots over time. When I reread them, I can see patterns: where I tend to overprepare, where I am tempted to solve instead of coach, where my energy is highest.
Another structure is questions. As a coach, questions are my tools, but in reflection they are also anchors. A few of the questions that often accompany my walks or my pauses are:
What am I proud of in how I showed up today?
Where did I abandon myself or my boundaries?
What am I avoiding looking at, and what small step could I take toward it?
Sometimes I also borrow from solution‑focused and strengths‑based approaches that I use with clients. I ask myself: If I imagined a “slightly better” version of this situation, what would be different in my behavior, my schedule, or my conversations? What is one resource I already have that I am not using fully? These questions gently steer my reflection away from rumination and toward agency.
When reflection becomes a need
There are moments when my body signals that reflection can no longer be postponed. It shows up as irritability, difficulty to focus, or an inner heaviness even when “objectively” things are going well. This is usually a sign that my “doing” has grown louder than my “being” for too long. When that happens, the walk is not optional. The pause is not a luxury. They are the way I reconnect the outer pace of my life with the inner pace of my nervous system – I call this “from pieces of mind to a peace of mind”.
In those times, my reflective practice becomes more spacious again: I might take a longer walk in nature or through the city and intentionally unplug for half a day, or I might sit quietly with a notebook and let a messy, unstructured page of thoughts spill out. Often, clarity does not come as a big answer but as a small, honest sentences like: “I am tired.” “I miss playful work.” “I need help here.”
Reflection as relationship
After all reflective practice, for me, is a way of staying in relationship with myself first, but also with the people I serve as coach, and with the systems I am part of. Walking, silence, questions, brief notes – these are simply the languages in which that conversation happens.
When reflection is woven into everyday life like this, it becomes a quiet form of loyalty to my own truth. It feels natural. I do not force myself to “be reflective”; I notice that I feel off when I am not, and I follow that signal back to the practices that help me return.
At the end of a walk, or after a short pause before a session, there is often a sense of arriving – not to a solution, but to me. From there, the next step, the next question, or the next conversation is clearer.
An invitation for you
- When was the last time you noticed that your “doing” was louder than your “being”?
- If you gave yourself just ten minutes today – a brief walk, a quiet look through a window, a few honest lines on paper – what might you hear (see, feel) more clearly about your own life and work?
- If you are about to establish a reflective practice, what would it look like?
