What Is Self-Awareness And Why Improving It Will Make You A Better Leader
What is self-awareness? What are you feeling right now and more importantly what is making you feel that way? How is what you are feeling influencing your decisions and your interactions with the people around you? How are you making the other people around you feel?
Most of us know when we are happy, sad, angry, frustrated. How many of us really know what is causing those feelings? For example – What causes us to snap or have anger explode out of us over the smallest of annoyances? A totally disproportionate reaction. What makes us feel lonely or down in the dumps or unfulfilled at work or even with our lives?
What is Self Awareness and why improving it will make you a better leader
- What is self-awareness in a leadership context
- Why improving self-awareness will make you a better leader
Finding our own answers to these types of difficult questions is why self-awareness becomes an incredibly valuable skill for anyone looking to be better, to be happier and to be more confidence about themselves.
In a leadership context, self-awareness enables you to change and manage how you react and how you put your emotions on display with the team you lead. Gaining better self-awareness changes how you and how other people experience you. Better self-awareness and self-management in turn makes you a better leader – a person others will find a lot easier to follow.
Throughout, I will be posing questions that will help you improve your own self-awareness, get you thinking and take another step to being a better leader.
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What is self-awareness in a leadership context
Leading others is not really about a position. You become a leader when others want or choose to follow you. Leadership, at its heart, is about relationships. You follow those you like, trust and that can help you and the group be better.
Great leaders are great at leading themselves first and foremost, which makes them very effective and good at leading others.
Know Yourself
To be good at leading and managing yourself, you have to know yourself. Self-awareness is a skill and process to learn and understand more about yourself.
How good is your awareness of your own emotions, your state of mind and how you think? Are you continually tuned into your mood and feelings? Do you make the time to explore the causes of strong emotions or reactions and understand what caused you to feel this way?
Hot Buttons
How aware are you of your own hot buttons – what makes you angry, annoyed, excited, impatient? How good are you at managing your reactions when others push your hot buttons?
Strengths & Weaknesses
Do you know what your strengths and weaknesses are? What do you excel at and should make time to do more of? What do you struggle with and should feel confident asking others to help in these areas? Knowing your strengths and weaknesses as a leader is a massive advantage. Playing to your strengths will take you a lot further than trying to improve weaknesses. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses and those of the team around you will help you recruit and develop more intelligently so the team overall is a lot stronger.
How do your preferences, your values and your life experiences influence your decision making and the actions you take? How will you improve your awareness of these influences enough to choose to override them or ignore them at the right times?
What Do You Need from Those Around You
What do you want and need from others around you? What expectations and demands do you make of them? Are you conscious enough of the reasons for your needs and wants and the expectations you set to curtail any unreasonable demands you place on others. Are you asking from others what you lack from inside yourself.
How realistic a view do you hold of yourself? When you ask others to describe you, your strengths, your failings, your ambitions, your influence – how close is their description to yours?
Self-awareness is the ability to see oneself honestly and realistically as well as be aware of all the different aspects that makes the person you are you – and accept and be happy with each of these. A strong feeling of self-worth is common in those with good self-awareness.
What is self-awareness in the context of leadership is now hopefully a lot clearer for you.
Why improving self-awareness will make you a better leader
Improving your own self-awareness is not easy, it can be uncomfortable and even painful. It does feel safer to not confront the parts of ourselves we don’t like. Accepting the good and the bad about ourselves is a journey. Becoming a good leader and manager is a personal journey as much as a professional journey. Improving your self-awareness is giving yourself a map for your personal journey. A map helps you travel faster and further.
Why improving self-awareness will make you a better leader:
Self-Management
Self-awareness helps us keep disruptive emotions, impulses and reactions under control. Our emotions, impulses and reactions influence the energy, mood and performance of the team we lead. Displaying our positive side keeps the team positive, motivated and performing.
Improved Self-Confidence
Improving self-awareness leads to increased confidence and acceptance of ourselves. We are more comfortable being transparent and displaying honesty and integrity to ourselves, which leads to greater trustworthiness.
Flexibility
Better self-awareness enables us to be more flexible. We can sidestep our own beliefs, assumptions and life experiences to better adapt to the person and situation in front of us. This helps us get more from them.
Positivity
The more we know ourselves and like ourselves, the more positive we are likely to be about the world around us. Positivity is infectious and helps teams be more positive and energetic, in turn helping teams deliver more.
More Empathetic
Self-awareness and the process of learning about yourself enables us to be a lot more empathetic to other people’s emotions, their issues and their failings. We are also in a much better position to help others overcome their own struggles having already made this journey ourselves.
Grounds Us
I think having good self-awareness grounds us and helps us stay true to ourselves, our values and our beliefs. This makes us more dependable, more consistent and more trustworthy, which in turn helps teams understand and deliver against what we expect from them. Being more grounded and being comfortable saying no also helps us keep the team on a more consistent course, which again increases team performance.
Saying No
In any leadership position, learning how to say no without offending is a crucial skill to develop. Saying no takes self-confidence and a being okay with potential conflict. Self-awareness helps your confidence and getting comfortable with conflict.
Self-Learning
Another huge reason to work at improving self-awareness as a leader is that being good at learning about yourself helps you self-learn all the other skills and knowledge needed to be a good leader of others. The higher you rise, the less feedback and help you get to improve, which makes the ability to self-learn invaluable.
Much Happier
There are many more benefits to improving your self-awareness – for your professional life as well as your personal life such as being happier, more fulfilled, more openminded, more accepting of others and their differences.
Improving self-awareness is a vital foundation to become a good and effective leader and manager of others. There is a lot to learn and every person’s journey through improving their self awareness and getting to know themselves better is different.
Coaching to Lead Better, Faster
One on one coaching is a very good route for leaders to improve their self-awareness faster and overcome roadblocks that are holding you back. To explore if our coaching programmes are the right fit for you to become a stronger more effective leader, give me a call to discuss
in summary
Self-awareness is our ability to monitor and understand our own emotions and their impact on us and those around us. Good self-awareness is knowing our strengths and our limits, where we will do well and where we should step aside and ask for help. Self-awareness is incredibly important in developing your own self-confidence and self-worth.
Improving your self-awareness is incredibly important when you are being asked to lead others. How can you lead with credibility if you are not good at managing and leading yourself. Improve your self-awareness and make yourself a lot easier to follow.
If you have any questions on “What is self-awareness and why improving it will make you a better leader”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
I think any time spent working on your own self awareness and self management is a great investment as a leader or manager. Think about all the managers and leaders that made you feel amazing and helped you become better as a person and a team member – I bet they where all good at managing themselves.
Learning about yourself is much quicker when you get a lot of feedback – with a coach for example or with a lot of very honest friends. Do put the time in if you want a successful career in team management.
Jess
