The Reflected Best Self Exercise™ (RBSE) is a personal development tool that helps you see who you are at your best, engaging you to live and work from this powerful place daily. Created from research at the Center for Positive Organizations (Ross School of Business, University of Michigan), the RBSE has helped thousands of executives, managers, employees, and students discover new potential. Unlike most other feedback tools, the RBSE isn’t limited to self-assessment. It invites people from your life and work to share stories of moments they feel they’ve seen you at your best, surfacing what few of us become aware of otherwise. The RBSE enables you to gain insight into how your unique talents have positively impacted others and gives you the opportunity to further leverage your strengths at work and in life.
Via our online platform, you’ll identify the storytellers you want to invite to share stories of when they’ve seen you at your best. We’ll collect these stories on your behalf, compiling them in a Best Self Report that you’ll review for the first time during your RBSE workshop or coaching program. The workshop or coaching you receive will prompt you to go deep. Based on the insights shared, you’ll create your Best Self Portrait and chart a plan for putting more of your Best Self into action as you live and work. Further, teams will examine their collective Best Self, discussing how it can help them flourish.
BeginResearch shows that the portrait of who we are at our best is compiled over time based on how we understand the strengths, contributions, and enduring talents that we bring to the situations in our lives, based largely on our perceptions of how others, including family members, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, see us.
The experience of seeing oneself at one’s best through the eyes of others unleashes powerful positive emotions such as hope, joy, and gratitude, that are demonstrated to broaden people’s mindsets and shift their actions, creating openness to new ideas, new projects or endeavors, and new possibilities for the future.
The RBSE links us with valued others in our lives. Research documents the powerful need human beings have for enduring, affirmative personal connections that provide a sense of belonging and serve as sources of support.
Seeing who we are at our best unlocks a belief that we can make things happen through our own efforts, fostering our initiative and drive and fueling our sense of efficacy to persevere in the face of difficulty.
The RBSE helps us see the kinds of tasks, relationships, and places that bring out who we are at our best, making us more likely to proactively seek out and create the situations that sustain us living and working from our best daily.
The opportunity to see ourselves at our best through the eyes of others taps into vitality, energy, and engagement that fuels optimal performance, creativity, healthy functioning, and sustained well-being.
The Reflected Best Self Exercise™ (RBSE) has been used by over 26,000 people at world-leading universities and Fortune 500 companies. It was developed by Robert E. Quinn, Jane E. Dutton, and Gretchen M. Spreitzer of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, and Laura Morgan Roberts of Harvard Business School.
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