I spend a lot of time thinking.
Sometimes it happens on my drive to work when I decide not to turn on an audiobook or even music. Sometimes it is while I am walking or taking a shower. A little quiet gives my brain room to wander back through what has been happening.
What is working?
What keeps creating friction?
What am I carrying that I do not need to be carrying?
What could be easier?
I did not always think of this as a leadership practice. Executive coaching helped me see it that way. Before a coaching session, I had to consider what was happening, what I was struggling with, and what would be most useful to talk about. The coaching was valuable, but so was the preparation. It required me to step outside the pace of the work long enough to notice what the work was teaching me.
That is Reflection. And I have come to believe it matters just as much in Mom Life.
Experience Is Not the Same as Learning
Motherhood gives us an extraordinary amount of experience.
We navigate schedules and relationships. We make decisions. We solve problems. We try something that works beautifully and something else that falls apart by Tuesday. Our kids change, circumstances change, and what worked six months ago may suddenly stop working.
But experience moves quickly in Mom Life.
We can finish one hard morning and immediately start the rest of the day. We get through a difficult interaction with one of our kids and move directly to whatever needs to happen next.
There is not necessarily a natural moment when someone asks:
What did you learn from that?
In professional leadership development, we create those moments intentionally through coaching, project reviews, leadership programs and planning processes.
Mom Life rarely comes with that structure.
But the learning is there.
Sometimes Reflection Leads to "Good Enough"
Meal planning is a simple example for me.
There was a time when it meant choosing recipes, figuring out ingredients and creating a plan for the week.
I do not do that anymore.
We have tacos on Tuesday. My girls each prepare a meal or two a week. Dinner might be a sheet-pan meal, pasta with meat sauce, or breakfast for dinner.
It is simpler. And it is good enough.
I have made a similar shift with our house. I like our main living spaces to feel straightened up. That matters to me. The girls are responsible for picking up their bedrooms each week and getting them ready before the cleaners come.
Otherwise, I can close the doors.
Those changes came from recognizing what was taking my time and energy, deciding what actually mattered to me, and changing my expectations accordingly.
Reflection can help us distinguish between something that genuinely needs our leadership and something we have continued doing because that is how we have always done it.
Sometimes Reflection Does Not Solve Anything
Right now, my girls are in a bickering phase.
I am not particularly optimistic that it is ending anytime soon.
Their bickering really irritates me. I get agitated. Adam does too.
I want my girls to be able to have emotions, disagree with each other, and learn how to work through conflict. I also know that I do not want to spend my time negotiating every disagreement or becoming the family referee.
So sometimes our response is pretty simple: Go upstairs. Go outside. Work it out together. Come back when you are ready to rejoin us.
The bickering has not disappeared. Reflection did not give me a clever System that eliminated the problem.
It helped me get clearer about my role in it.
Sometimes the question is not, How do I fix this?
It is, How do I want to lead through this?
What Keeps Happening?
Reflection is one of the five foundations of the Chief of Mom Life Mom Life Leadership System because our lives change. Our families change. We change.
We need opportunities to notice whether the way we are leading still fits the life we are actually living.
For me, Reflection often begins with quiet and a few questions:
What is working particularly well?
Where am I noticing friction?
What am I doing because it still matters, and what am I doing because I have always done it?
Where could responsibility shift?
What might be good enough?
And one question I keep coming back to:
What keeps happening, and what is it teaching me about the way I lead?
The point is not to scrutinize every decision or turn motherhood into an endless self-improvement project.
Reflection can help us recognize what is already working. It can help us stop putting energy toward something that no longer matters, see a pattern before we repeat it another ten times, or accept that something is hard without assuming we need to fix it.
Make a Little Room
I do not think Reflection needs to mean sitting down with a journal for an hour.
Maybe it is a quiet drive.
A walk without a podcast.
Five minutes in the shower when nobody is asking you a question.
Or a conversation with someone who helps you think.
The important part is creating enough distance from the doing to notice what the doing is teaching you.
Mom Life is giving us experience every day.
Every once in a while, it is worth giving ourselves enough space to learn from it.
This post is part of an ongoing exploration of the idea that motherhood is leadership. To read the essay that started this work, see Motherhood Is Leadership.
Read the essay →