Walking the Talk: Reflective Practice for Coaches

Embodying presence and self-care through ICF Competency 2.

This article explores how practices such as pausing, self-reflection, and self-care help coaches cultivate ICF Competency 2: Embodies a Coaching Mindset. It invites us to be more present not only in coaching sessions, but in our lives — through reflection, personal practices, and sustainable self-care.

Living the Questions We Ask

Coaches are trained to invite reflection. It’s foundational to our role — whether through artful questioning, active listening, or staying fully present. ICF encourages coaches to “Encourage Client Reflection: Artfully ask powerful, open-ended questions to prompt clients to think deeply and reflect. Then, use your active listening skills to understand their underlying concerns and emotions.”

We ask our clients questions like these every day. But how often do we pause and ask ourselves the same?

Do we create space to reflect on our own lives — not just our coaching work? Are we present in our lives, or are we just performing presence in our sessions? What matters to us? What helps us feel steady or connected?

These questions lie at the heart of ICF Competency 2: Embodies a Coaching Mindset, which calls us to maintain a mindset that is open, curious, flexible, and client centered. It encourages us to:

• Engage in ongoing learning and development.
• Establish reflective practices to enhance our coaching.
• Regulate our emotions and prepare ourselves mentally and emotionally for sessions.
• Use awareness of self and intuition in service of the client.

These aspects may not always be visible or fully measured in performance evaluations — and yet there’s a reason why they are placed in the foundation section of the ICF Core Competency model, right alongside ethics. They reflect something larger than credentialing or collecting Continuing Coach Education credits. They speak to our personal evolution as practitioners — how we grow, how we relate to complexity, and how we continue searching for meaning and alignment in our work.

What Is Reflective Practice?

In Reflective Practice for Coaches (2023), McCormick describes reflective practice as “a proven learning and development approach that involves consciously and deliberately thinking about experiences to develop insights and apply these within coaching practice.” He emphasizes that it is vital for coaches to reflect regularly in order to grow and develop professionally. Another perspective comes from Bassot (2016), who defines reflective practice as “an iterative, open-ended, creative process” that involves taking deliberate, conscious time to explore and interrogate our coaching in a systematic way. This invites not just insight, but transformation.

Thompson and Thompson (2018) add another layer, suggesting that reflection “enables us to play with concepts and theory to establish our own framework for practice.” In this sense, reflection supports both personal insight and professional identity.

If you explore the work of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council’s Center for Excellence for Continuous Personal and Professional Development highlights, you will find out that reflective practice brings more value when we consider how we learn from it — and who we are becoming through it, which explains introducing the “other P” for personal, besides professional development.

What Happens Between Sessions Matters

As coaches, we often move from session to session, call to call. But part of caring for ourselves — and for our clients — is allowing for space in between.

This is where reflection and preparation live. Taking time before a session helps us tune in to the person we are about to meet. Taking time afterward gives us a chance to process what happened, sense who we were in that space, and consider what’s calling our attention.

Some studies show that allowing space between conversations can help us recover attention and respond with greater presence. According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index (2021), brain scans show that back-to-back meetings increase stress and reduce focus, while even short breaks between conversations reset neural activity and help the brain recover its ability to engage and respond. Pauses restore cognitive clarity and reduce the cumulative mental strain caused by nonstop interaction. For coaches, this means that pausing between sessions is not a luxury — it’s part of delivering thoughtful, present-centered coaching. It keeps us able to sense, not just react.

Practicing Reflective Pause

Pausing is only the beginning. What follows matters just as much. Reflective practice is not just about taking time — it’s about knowing what to bring into that time. As Michelle Lucas reminds us, “Once we have created the space in which to reflect, we then consider what to place our reflective attention upon.” The focus we choose shapes the insights that emerge.

From there, reflective practice becomes more meaningful when it’s part of how we live — not only something we do after a session. Whether in short moments or longer dedicated time, reflection becomes a space to reset, reconnect, and reorient.

Coaches Might Consider Practices Such As:

• Scheduled pauses: Before or after sessions, between tasks, or at week’s end. Ask: “What is this moment asking of me?” Or reserving a day each month for a deeper pause and personal reflection.
• Time in nature: Go for a walk, sit quietly outdoors, garden — natural spaces offer grounding and perspective.
• Creative reflection: Doodling, metaphor, journaling, free writing — whatever helps you see differently.
• Keeping a presence log: Brief notes about how you were in your work and life, what shifted, what stayed.
• Supervision: A structured space with a professional supervisor to explore not just techniques, but how you are.
• Peer sessions: Conversations with a trusted colleague where the exchange itself brings value and insight.
• Your own list of self-check questions: What lifted my energy this week? What drained it? What do I want to restore?

To support this kind of reflective habit over time, Michelle Lucas offers a helpful framework with seven components: space, content, process, structure, purpose, reinforcement, and review. These provide a lens to assess where your reflection practice may be strong — and where it may need more attention.

For those who prefer a more structured rhythm, Julie Hay offers a clear, repeatable cycle:

• Capturing events as they occur.
• Reviewing specific experiences.
• Recognizing patterns.
• Planning with new awareness.
• Implementing the learning.

This process helps transform experience into insight and insight into action.

Whether your reflection is intuitive, process-based, or somewhere in between, the key is consistency. These reflective pauses could support our ongoing embodiment of ICF Competency 2.

Sustaining Ourselves in the Work

As mentioned above, reflective practice isn’t only about improving our coaching — it’s also personal, about caring for ourselves as whole people. Several authors remind us that reflection is not just a learning method, but a way of restoring perspective, reconnecting with values, and recognizing when we’re nearing our limits. It helps us notice what we’re carrying, how we’re responding, and where we need to step back or slow down. In that sense, reflective practice becomes an act of self-care — one that protects our presence, our energy, and our ability to show up well.

We could also say that coaching today isn’t only about coaching. Many of us are running businesses — holding multiple roles at once, including marketing, writing, and managing admin tasks. The pace can be relentless.

In this context, self-care isn’t just personal wellness — it’s professional sustainability. It allows us to keep offering presence, creativity, and grounding without becoming overwhelmed. This includes practical choices like:

• Not overbooking ourselves.
• Having regular breaks and days off (as already emphasized above).
• Designing a business rhythm that honors your energy and capacity.

Self-care is not something you do once you’re exhausted. It’s part of how you build a practice that supports your values, energy, and integrity — and it begins with paying attention to how we’re doing and feeling, not just what we’re doing.

Returning to Ourselves

To walk the talk in coaching is about our own pausing. Noticing. Making deliberate choices. Reflective practices help us stay present, and presence helps us stay in a relationship with ourselves, our clients, and our calling.

Returning to where we started with “living the questions we ask,” here’s a practice you might try:

Think of the coaching questions and observations that often open something meaningful for your clients. Now ask those questions of yourself, such as:

• What is emerging here right now?
• What does this say about me — not just as a coach, but as a person?
• What difference would I like to see in myself, my work, or my presence?

Let’s make time for what matters in the space between, take care of ourselves in service of the work, and walk the talk.

Literature & Suggested Reading

McCormick, Iain. Reflective Practice for Coaches: A Guidebook for Advanced Professional Development. Routledge, 2023.

Lucas, Michele. Creating Reflective Habit: A Practical Guide for Coaches, Mentors, and Leaders. Routledge, 2023.

Hay, Julie. Reflective Practice and Supervision for Coaches. Open University Press, 2007.

Love, D., and Nieuwerburgh, C. Effective Reflective Practice: Improving Practice Through Self-Reflection and Writing. Sage, 2025.

Beckett-McInroy, C., and Ali Baba, S. Creative Reflective Practice: Global Perspectives for Critical Reflection on Professional Experiences. Beckett McInroy Publishing, 2015.

Microsoft. Research Proves Your Brain Needs Breaks. Microsoft WorkLab, April 20, 2021. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/brain-research