K Shel Blogs

How challenge reveals — and reshapes — who we are and the systems we inhabit

In 2017, I wrote a short blog post called Time for reflection (the test is a mirror). At the time, I was writing for an audience of small business owners, startup leaders, and entrepreneurs — people trying to find their footing in uncertain conditions, often with no safety net. The idea was simple: challenges don’t just test what we know or what we can do. They test who we are. And in that sense, every challenge is a kind of mirror — one that reflects something back to us about our values, our resilience, our instincts.

That metaphor still resonates with me. Maybe more now than it did then. But seven years on, my thinking has shifted. I still believe that adversity reveals us. But I also now see that it shapes us. And more than that — it shapes the systems we’re part of.

Because in complex systems — whether we’re talking about organisations, teams, or even personal relationships — our response to the test is part of the test. The mirror doesn’t just reflect. It participates. It stares back.

What the mirror shows now

At the time I wrote the original post, I saw the mirror as something still and external. The test would happen, and the challenge was to look clearly, take stock, and respond with integrity. That still feels important. But now I understand that the mirror is never still. Because we’re never outside the system we’re reacting to.

When something goes wrong — an unwelcome change, a missed opportunity, a moment of conflict — what gets revealed isn’t just personal character. It’s structure. Culture. History. Patterns of attention. The parts of the system we’ve learned to prioritise, and the parts we’ve learned to ignore.

We like to think that how we respond to a challenge is entirely our own — our values in action. But often what we call instinct is just well-rehearsed system behaviour. Learned responses. Embedded assumptions. Unseen boundaries. When stress hits, we tend to fall back not on what we believe, but on what the system has taught us to do.

And when we act — when we push back, go quiet, speak up, move on — we’re not just responding to the test. We’re reshaping it. Feeding something back into the system that wasn’t there before. The mirror, it turns out, is a feedback loop.

Reflexivity and redesign

If the test is a mirror, and the mirror is a system, then reflection is not a passive act. It’s a design act.

What we choose to notice, how we interpret what we see, the stories we tell ourselves about our actions — all of this feeds forward. It affects how others respond, what gets reinforced, and what changes next time. And when we become aware of that loop, something shifts. We stop asking only “What does this say about me?” and start asking “What does my response do to the system I’m in?”

This is the heart of reflexivity — a key idea in systems thinking. It’s the discipline of noticing not just what happens, but how our own role, perspective, and framing contribute to what happens. It’s an acknowledgment that we’re never truly outside the mirror, holding it up for examination. We’re always inside it — shaping what’s reflected back, and being shaped in turn.

In practice, that means building space for intentional pause. Instead of instinctively reacting, we ask different questions:

• What patterns am I part of here?
• How might my response ripple outward?
• What assumptions am I acting on — and are they still valid?
• What feedback am I creating for others to respond to?

This doesn’t make the test easier. But it makes the reflection more useful. And it opens the door to redesign — of habits, relationships, teams, even whole systems.

The mirror, revisited

The test is still a mirror. But I no longer see it as something that simply reveals who we are under pressure. Now I see it as something we’re co-creating — with every choice, every interpretation, every habit we bring to the surface.

The challenges we face don’t just show us our reflection. They reveal the shape of the systems we’re embedded in — and offer us the rare opportunity to reshape both.

The mirror isn’t neutral. It’s curved by power. It’s fogged by habit. But it can also be polished by attention. By reflection. By care.

So when the next test comes — and it will — maybe the question isn’t “What will this reveal about me?”

Maybe it’s “What am I revealing — and reinforcing — in return?”