Archive for category Reflective practice
Six Griefs of Good Leadership – (1) FEAR
Posted by David Winter in Career success, Development, Reflective practice on 19 March 2016
For decades in the field of leadership development, human emotions were just inconveniences that you had to avoid in yourself and ‘deal with’ in other people so that you could get on with the rational business of leading. However, developments in neuroscience, behavioural economics and evolutionary psychology are explaining why human beings just aren’t very good at being purely rational. Emotions are an essential to being a fully functioning human being, especially in a role that involves working with other human beings. If you couldn’t experience emotions, you would be incapable of making even the simplest decision.
If you are a fully functioning leader, you will experience a wide range of emotions as you develop your leadership identity. Whether you seek to embrace or avoid these emotions will determine how quickly you develop and how effective you can become. This is especially true of the negative emotions.
In this series I will discuss six important negative emotions that you are likey to experience as a developing leader, what they mean and how to work with the emotion successfully in order to grow into your full leadership potential.
Narrative techniques in reflective practice
Posted by David Winter in Reflective practice on 23 April 2012
Below is an article I wrote for the Journal of the National Institute for Careers Education and Counselling. In it I try to bring together a whole range of narrative approaches to the task of reviewing your practice as a career practitioner. Some of the theories and models here are ones I have already blogged about, but I in this paper I talk about how you apply them to yourself.
(You have to scroll down to page 5 of the document to get to my article.)
I would welcome any comments or questions about the article.
Which techniques appeal to you?
What other techniques do you use in your reflective practice?
Existentialist CPD: professional development in turbulent times
Posted by David Winter in Effectiveness, Reflective practice on 6 September 2011

OK, I'm struggling to make a clever link between this picture and the article. The artist made a handprint using photographic developer fluid. I just thought it was pretty cool.
A few months ago I delivered a keynote address on continuing professional development as part of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Seminar Series entitled Re-framing Service Delivery, Professional Practices and Professional Identities in UK Careers Work. At heart, these seminars bring people together (across professional disciplines) to share ideas about aspects of career work. There are two more still to come, the next is scheduled for November 2011 in Glasgow at the University of the West of Scotland.
The costs of reframing
Posted by David Winter in Decision making, Reflective practice on 20 December 2010
I have just returned once again from being a tutor on the AGCAS Guidance Skills (Advanced) course in Warwick. We had an intensive four days in which we encouraged a group of higher education careers advisers to deconstruct and rebuild their guidance practices and attitudes.
Reframing is a crucial element of the course. We explore how to help clients reframe their career dilemmas in more constructive ways. However, we also do a lot of reframing with the participants. Through workshop discussions, models, theories, observation and feedback, we encouraged everyone to explore different perspectives on the skills and processes of the guidance discussion as well as their role, assumptions and motivations within it.
It’s rewarding but exhausting!
One thing I noticed was that our ability to resist break-time pastries and dinner-time desserts diminished considerably as the course progressed.
And now I think I know why…
What a mess
Posted by David Winter in Reflective practice, Skills and methods on 24 November 2010
I have just finished reading A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freeman. I have a feeling that this is a marmite book. Some people (like me) will love it and others will hate it. I can even predict who will hate it; the people whom the book refers to as the ‘neat police’ — the people who insist on clean desk policies and colour-coded filing systems.
This book pleads the case for the potential benefits of disorder. It also highlights the hidden costs of an over-emphasis on neatness, from the expense of maintaining rigid categorisation systems to the dangers to health of obsessive cleanliness. It provides much needed support for those of us who are ‘differently-organised’ as we attempt to fend off those who seem intent on decluttering our lives.
The topics range (in a predictably messy way) from office desks to transport systems, from business to science, from education to politics.
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