The Reflected Best Self Exercise (RBSE) is a feedback-seeking exercise that helps individuals identify and understand their unique strengths and talents. In this exercise, you will reach out to significant others who can provide feedback stories about you. You will analyze the stories, develop a portrait of who you are, and create an action plan to understand how you can be your best in the future. For the purposes of this class, the entire RBSE process has been broken out into six separate steps (each with an associated assignment).

This exercise will ultimately help you on your journey to becoming a better leader in a few key ways. First, it will help to develop your self-awareness, which is critical to effective leadership. Second, you (through the feedback of others) will identify the areas that you excel at, which you can then capitalize on it in the future. Third, it will allow you to apply the materials that we will talk about this semester to develop ways to enhance your leadership skills. In sum, this exercise offers you a unique opportunity to use your social network as a data source to understand where your strengths and talents lie so you can use them to your advantage as you lead others.

Please navigate the tabs above to learn more about the assignment, including a video that walks you through the process and resources that you might find helpful.

Sample Email Request for Stories

Dear [name],

I hope this message finds you well! I am writing to request your help with a class assignment. I am taking a course on leadership development as part of my MBA program. I would be grateful for your help with one of the required exercises for the course, the Reflected Best Self Exercise(RBSE). The Center for Positive Organizations at University of Michigan created the RBSE to help individuals expand their understanding of who they are and what they do when they are at their best. The RBSE is a unique story-, strength-, and contribution-based approach to feedback-seeking and analysis. A former RBSE participant said of the process, "Besides feeling closer to my friends and peers for their positive views of me, it was very interesting to note the different impact that I seem to have made on each of them. The specifics mentioned by them allowed me to see some of the mechanisms by which I influence and have had an impact on people."

I am asking people who know me well to provide me with three stories of when I was at my best in their eyes. What was my positive contribution in each story?

Additional instructions and examples can be found below. Please e-mail your responses to me by [insert date]. Thank you very much for your cooperation. I will keep all responses anonymous and will be sure to tell you what I learn after the exercise.

Kind Regards,

Name

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ADDITIONAL INSTRUCTIONS

This will require you to think about your interactions with me and to identify those times when I was at my best in your eyes. In writing, please be sure to provide details so I can understand the context, what happened, and what my positive contribution was. Best-self stories often capture things that people say or do in critical times or everyday routines that make a difference. These stories are often unacknowledged publicly. Best-self stories may describe someone's approach to people, challenges, tasks, or even a work environment.

This assignment will start you on your Reflected Best-Self Exercise (RBSE) journey. The RBSE is a feedback seeking exercise that relies on the benefits of positive thinking. For more information on the overall goal of this assignment, please see the RBSE Overview page.

Instructions

Step	Explanation	Deliverable
STEP 1: Identify potential participants	Identify around 15-20 people whom you will ask to provide stories about you at your best. Those people can be a mix of colleagues (former or current), superiors or subordinates, friends (old or recent), family members, customers, and anyone who has had extended contact with you. You will want to choose people who have seen you at your best and people who will give you their honest opinion.	Compile the potential participants into Table 1 (see the Samples tab for a sample Table 1)
STEP 2: Send potential participants a request for stories	Send each person you identified in Step 1 an email requesting they write short stories about when they witnessed you at your best. The request is usually for 3 stories per person (see the FAQs below for tips). A sample email is included in the Samples Tab. If you are curious what the stories look like, samples are included in the manual included in the RBSE Overview page.	N/A - no submission for this step You will compile and submit the stories you've gathered in 2 weeks (Module 3)