The Mirror (Three Questions for Power Blindness)
A three-question self-reflection that forces leaders to see the whole self, not the touch-up version.
The Mirror is the diagnostic companion to Power Blindness. Bell sets it up with a deliberately mundane image: most leaders, when asked if they self-reflect, hold up a 'compact mirror' — the kind for touch-ups. That is not self-reflection. What is required is a 'big old hallway mirror,' the Saturday-night, full-length, nothing-hidden kind, where you see your whole self before you walk out the door. The exercise has three sequenced questions and the order matters. Question one asks what armor you are wearing, what it gives you, and what it costs you — surfacing the protective posture (toughness, expertise, distance, credentials) that has become invisible because it is always on. Question two asks what people are afraid to tell you because of your position — flipping the lens from self to environment and forcing acknowledgement that silence is not consent. Question three, framed as the most important, asks what you will do differently — converting insight into a behavioural commitment so the reflection does not collapse into self-flagellation or performative humility. Woolf demonstrates the output in her own arc: after the sobbing-employee feedback, she eventually committed to attending her report's trainings, giving meaningful feedback, taking her to lunch as a person, and extending the same attention to the colleagues she had under-invested in. Trust and collaboration deepened across the whole team. The framework's strength is its compression — three questions, no app, no consultant, runnable in fifteen minutes — and its honesty about discomfort: 'there's lots to learn when you feel uncomfortable.'
- Real self-reflection requires a full-length mirror, not a compact — you must see the whole self in context, not touch up a single feature.
- Start with armor: name the protective posture that is so habitual you no longer notice it, and account for both what it gives you and what it costs.
- Move outward second: ask what people are afraid to tell you because of your position, treating their silence as data about you.
- End with a behavioural commitment, not an emotion: insight that does not change next week's calendar is theatre.
- Discomfort during the exercise is a signal you are doing it right, not a reason to stop — the comfortable version is the compact mirror.
Developed by Jamie Woolf and Dr. Christopher Bell as the practitioner-facing tool inside their broader anti-bad-boss work. Woolf's UC Berkeley experience supplied the failure case (defensive cubicle of self-justifications); Bell's reflection on his own armor supplied the question structure. Presented as the actionable centrepiece of their TED talk on Power Blindness.