Portrait and Best-self Stories

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Born from empirical research from University of Michigan’s Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship, the Reflected Best Self Exercise™ (RBSE™) uses stories collected from people in all contexts of your life to help you understand and articulate who you are and how you contribute when you are at your best. With this new insight, you will feel immediately strengthened and connected to others, experience clarity about who you are at your best, and refine personal development goals to more often.

The RBSE™ guides you step-by-step through the process of identifying potential respondents, making the request for feedback, creating your a priori best-self portrait, analyzing your reflected best-self stories, creating a new, reflected best-self portrait, and translating that portrait into proactive steps for living at your best.

OVERVIEW

All of us can recall our own extraordinary moments, those moments when we felt that our best self was brought to light, affirmed by others, and put into practice in the world.

These memories are seared into our minds as moments or situations in which we have felt alive, true to our deepest selves, and pursuing our full potential as human beings. Over time, we collect these experiences into a “portrait” of who we are and what we do when we are at our personal best. This “best-self portrait” is a resource we call on to build confidence, to help us make decisions, to be courageous, to prepare and see possibilities for the future, to face challenges, and so much more.

We can strengthen our own best-self portraits with insights reflected back to us from significant others in our lives. Our friends, colleagues, and family members have different perspectives, and can offer unique and valuable insights into the ways we add value and make positive contributions. Research shows that the difference between a weakness-based self portrait and a strong best-self portrait is closely correlated to the difference between normal and extraordinary leadership.

A popular assumption of personal development exercises and programs is that a person’s area of weakness is that person’s greatest area of opportunity (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Proponents of a strengths-based orientation argue that the deficit model may diminish people’s chances of making their greatest contributions, which is performing at their best, or achieving an integrated sense of who one is at one’s best.

A strengths-based approach to personal development assumes that progress towards excellence is not a function of improving on weaknesses, but is a function of building on strengths. As you’ll see in the last step of this exercise, the RBSE™ takes a nuanced approach to developing understanding of both your strengths and weaknesses. CHANGES TO THIS EDITION The 2011 version of the Reflected Best Self Exercise™ has been updated to reflect advancements in research and years of feedback from users and facilitators of the exercise. Some of the important updates were to: Highlight unique attributes of the RBSE™, such as the use of stories, an emphasis on strengths exclusively, and solicitation of respondents from all contexts of the participant’s life • Instruct participants to write personal best-self stories to consider with the reflected best-self stories • Provide more instruction on the analysis of best-self stories individually and in aggregate • Incorporate action-planning activities into the RBSE™ to help participants identify developmental goals that relate to the best self • Combine the best of the original Reflected Best Self Exercise: Assignment and Instructions to Participants and the Bringing My Reflected Best Self to Life booklet previously published separately