“Practice self-awareness, self-evaluation, and self-improvement. If we are aware that our manners – language, behaviour, and actions – are measured against our values and principles, we are able to more easily embody the philosophy: leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do”
– Frances Hesselbein
Self awareness is the study of you – on the inside.
It is how you lead your life – setting your path, evaluating and correcting.
Self-awareness is a conscious effort to understand who we are, who others are, our rules about life and our commitment to what we are creating for our future.
By focusing your attention on you, you can start the process of understanding your current behaviour, standards, values, beliefs and attitudes, your feelings, your physiology, and your unconscious or intuitive reactions.
You can identify the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. This is your chance to grow and challenge yourself.
You can then identify your strengths, challenges, habits, and your purpose.
Once you understand your thinking and decision making styles, you can see how they impact your outcomes. This includes your emotions, your behaviour, your language, your goals, your biases, and your focus.
All of these factors combine to create your reality – your experience of the world . This is different to everyone else’s.
So, by understanding yourself and your natural behaviour, you can start to understand why you get and don’t get the results you want.
And then the question is – who do you need to be to achieve the success you want?
Awareness and Leadership
Life and business intertwine. They are inter-related. How you are in life is reflected in how you are as a leader in your professional life.
When considering self-awareness in the context of leadership, you must understand who you are, what drives you, what are your natural behaviour, responses and thinking patterns, in order to determine if they are getting you the outcomes you want for you and your teams.
Are you getting the results? Are you connecting and leading your teams? Are you making great decisions? Are you inspiring others and consistently performing at your benchmarks of excellence? How are you showing up? And is this in a way that enables others to show up?
Only then you can lead with purpose, authenticity, trust, understanding and wisdom, which are critical in creating success.
The power of self-awareness is that, once you understand yourself, you can change your behaviour in a moment to optimise your effectiveness and results, and impact others to achieve success.
In this module, you are going to learn some of the fundamental thinking models used in the study of human behaviour, as well as starting the process of understanding you – your thinking and behaviour, your goals, and who you need to be to achieve your success.
Up Next
Leading Yourself Before
Leading Others