Gibbs' reflective cycle: a worked counselling example
Most explanations of Gibbs tell you what the six stages are called. Far fewer show you a finished one. Here is a complete reflection on a counselling session, stage by stage, with notes on where they usually fall down.
The six stages, briefly
Graham Gibbs published the cycle in 1988 as a way of turning an experience into something you actually learn from, rather than something you just had. The six stages are description, feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusion and action plan.
The order matters. The whole design is meant to stop you jumping from "that was hard" straight to "next time I'll do better", which is where most reflection dies.
The session
The example below is a composite, not a real client. Nothing here belongs to anyone.
A woman in her thirties, third session. She had come in about work stress. Twenty minutes in she mentioned, almost as an aside, that her mother had died the previous year. Then she moved straight back to talking about her manager.
Description: what happened
We were about twenty minutes into the third session and she was describing a difficult week at work. She said, in the middle of a longer sentence, that things had been harder since her mum died last year. She kept going without pausing and returned to her manager. I let it pass and stayed with the work material for the rest of the session. Near the end I said we were nearly out of time and asked whether there was anything else she wanted to raise. She said no.
Feelings: what I was thinking and feeling
When she said it I felt a jolt, then something closer to dread. I noticed I did not want to open it. I told myself she had moved on deliberately and that following it would be intrusive, but underneath that I think I was frightened of what would come out and unsure I could hold it. For the rest of the session I felt slightly absent, half of me still back at that sentence. Afterwards I felt flat, then irritated with myself.
Evaluation: what was good and bad
What worked: the session stayed steady and she talked freely about work. She left calm and booked again. Following her lead is not in itself a failure, and she may not have been ready.
What did not: I made the decision to leave it alone for my reasons, not hers, and then dressed it up as respecting her pace. Asking "anything else?" with two minutes left is not a real invitation. I gave myself credit for offering while making sure the offer could not be taken up.
Analysis: making sense of it
The thing she said in passing was probably not in passing. People often test whether something is safe to raise by mentioning it lightly and watching what happens. Nothing happened. She will have drawn a conclusion from that, and it will not have been the one I intended.
My avoidance was about competence. Work stress is territory I feel able to work in. Grief is not, or not yet, and rather than sit with not knowing I steered us back to the ground I could manage. That is my discomfort setting the agenda for her session.
The timing of my invitation is the clearest evidence. If I had genuinely wanted to open it I would have said something in the moment, not thirty minutes later when there was no room to answer.
Conclusion: what else could I have done
I could have reflected it back gently as it happened. Something like "you mentioned your mum" and then stopped talking, which leaves it entirely with her and is not a demand. If she had moved on again that would have been her answer, and it would have been a real answer rather than one I made for her.
I could have named my own uncertainty in supervision earlier. This is not the first time I have steered away from grief.
What I would not do differently: I do not think pushing would have helped. The problem was not that I failed to open it. The problem was that I never actually left the door open.
Action plan: what I will do next time
When something significant is said in passing I will reflect it back in the moment and then wait, rather than deciding on the client's behalf that they have moved on.
I will take this to supervision, specifically my avoidance of grief material rather than this session on its own.
I will notice when I offer something at a point where it cannot be accepted, because that pattern is probably not limited to this.
Where reflections usually fall down
Stopping at description
Stage one is the easiest to write and the least useful. If half your word count is a recap of what happened, the reflection is not doing its job. Description should be short enough that someone can follow the rest.
Naming feelings that are not feelings
"I felt that I should have said more" is a thought wearing a feeling's clothes. Dread, relief, irritation, shame, boredom: those are feelings. Boredom in particular is worth writing down when it happens, and almost nobody does.
Evaluating the client instead of yourself
Stage three is about your practice. If it reads as an assessment of how the client did, it has slipped.
An action plan nobody could check
"I will be more attuned to the client's emotional cues" cannot be observed, which means it cannot be done. "I will reflect it back and then wait" can. If you could not tell in a fortnight whether you had done it, rewrite it.
Being too kind to yourself
A reflection where you did nothing wrong is not a reflection, it is a record. Markers and supervisors are looking for whether you can see your own part in it. That is the whole skill.
The example above admits to avoidance, discomfort and a bit of self-deception. That is deliberate. Reflections written to look competent are obvious, and they are marked accordingly. The ones that land are the ones where the writer noticed something about themselves that they would rather not have.
Using Gibbs for CPD and placement logs
Gibbs is not only a student exercise. Both Australian peak bodies expect ongoing professional development, and for a lot of it a written reflection is part of the record rather than an optional extra.
ACA members accrue OPD points across a membership year. PACFA registrants log CPD hours, and passive learning activities are expected to be accompanied by a written reflective review. In both cases a completed Gibbs cycle is a defensible piece of evidence: it shows what the activity was, what you made of it, and what changed.
Requirements change. Check the current ACA OPD policy or PACFA CPD standard for what applies to your membership.
Writing these is the part nobody helps with
The Debrief walks you through all six stages, lets you speak it instead of typing if that is faster, and exports to Word or PDF for a placement log or CPD record. It also reads across your entries over time and shows you what keeps coming up. Free to start.
Try it free