Reflected Best Self Exercise
Ask twenty people for a story of you at your best, then find the pattern
Researchers at the University of Michigan built this one. You write to fifteen or twenty people who know you from different corners of your life. Each one gets the same request: a specific story about a time you were at your best. Then comes the work. Reading across the replies for themes tells you what you are genuinely good at and which conditions bring it out, including strengths you had never counted. Blind spots run in both directions. Repeat it every couple of years. The cast around you changes and so do the stories.
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Sorted by strength of stance
- Adam GrantDoes it
Organizational psychologist · Think Again
He first ran it in his first year of grad school, and learned that recognizing other people's strengths was one of his own. That would never have crossed his mind otherwise, he says. Every group he teaches now does it, and he suggests repeating it every couple of years.
Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #399 transcript
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