You have a choice. You can accept the status quo or you can step up and become the leader you are looking for.

Stop waiting and start leading. Leadership is not bestowed. It is not a title. It is earned through action and example.

“Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.”

~ John C. Maxwell ~

This series of articles is not about what your leaders need to do to turn you into a leader. This series is about what you can do for yourself to become a leader in your own right. Wherever you sit within an organisation, you can lead.

Magic happens when everyone leads.

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is one of the most important capabilities for leaders to develop. Self-awareness is one of the core components of emotional intelligence.

According to Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves, authors of Emotional Intelligence 2.0, describe self-awareness as your ability to recognise and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behaviour and relationships.”

I will explore some of the other core components of emotional intelligence - self-management, social-awareness and relationship management - later in this ‘When Everyone Leads’ series.

The importance of self-awareness for leaders is summed up in this statement from Bradberry and Greaves over at TalentSmart.

“Of all the people we’ve studied at work, we’ve found that 90% of top performers are also high in emotional intelligence. On the flip side, just 20% of bottom performers are high in emotional intelligence. You can be a top performer without emotional intelligence, but the chances are slim.”

Why it is important

Self-awareness means you know who you are. Understanding yourself is foundational to other leadership competencies including self-control, empathy, collaboration, effective decision-making and building trust.

If you are self-aware, you understand your strengths and weaknesses. Therefore you can build on your strengths and work to overcome your weaknesses. When you know your weaknesses you can work with others who may have different strengths to you, and accept the idea that another person may have better ideas, skills or competencies than you do.

When you are not self-aware you can alienate others by not understanding your impact on them.

Developing self-awareness

Becoming self-aware is an ongoing process. It is a lifetime of reflection and checking in with yourself to see where you are at and how others perceive you.

It is a continual process of striving to become the best you can be.

There are 15 self-awareness strategies. Reproduced from getstoryshots.com

1. Quit treating your feelings as good or bad. Judging your emotions prevents you from understanding them, adds more emotions to the pile, and keeps you from being able to see the cause of the original feeling. Understand, don’t judge.

2. Observe the ripple effect from your emotions. Recognise that when you act out of your emotions, the effects can be long-term, and on more than the person at whom you directed the emotion.

3. Lean into your discomfort. We tend to try to ignore or minimise unpleasant emotions, but this prevents us from understanding those emotions.

4. Feel your emotions physically. Learn to spot the physical changes that come with your different emotions, and you’ll be able to better understand what you’re feeling.

5. Know who and what pushes your buttons. This needs to be specific – identify the exact people, situations, and environments that trigger your emotions by rubbing you the wrong way, and make a list. This will then allow you to determine the source of your reaction to these things.

6. Watch yourself like a hawk. Develop a more objective understanding of your behaviour by taking notice of your emotions and behaviours as a situation unfolds.

7. Keep a journal about your emotions. Because emotions are such an intangible subject, you’ll need to write things down in order to understand them better, identify patterns, and track progress. It will also later help you to remember your tendencies in the moment.

8. Don’t be fooled by a bad mood. A bad mood can overshadow all your emotions, so you need to recognise when it’s the emotional state that’s affecting you rather than an individual emotion, and go through the same process to identify what caused the mood.

9. Don’t be fooled by a good mood, either. You should also seek to understand why your good moods happen, both for the sake of understanding your emotions better, and to avoid the harm that can come from a good mood (irrational exuberance, for example).

10. Stop and ask yourself why you do the things you do. Your emotions will alert you to things you never would know otherwise.

11. Visit your values. Contrasting your values with the way your emotions compel you to act is a helpful exercise to increase your self-awareness. Take a piece of paper and write down your values in one column, and anything you’ve done recently that you’re not proud of in a second column. The authors suggest doing this somewhere between daily and monthly in order to keep it in your mind before you react in a way you’d regret.

12. Check yourself. Your physical appearance always gives good clues about how you feel. Observe your facial expressions, body language, clothes, etc.

13. Spot your emotions in books, movies, and music. Art that you identify with can offer further clues about your emotions. Consider which of these things grabs your attention, and ask yourself why.

14. Seek feedback. Because your understanding of your emotions is limited by your one perspective, getting feedback from others is invaluable. Ask others for specific examples and look for similarities in different people’s answers.

15. Get to know yourself under stress. Learn to recognise your personal physiological and emotional first signs of stress, and take the time to rest or recharge before that stress piles up.

Summary

The more self-aware you are, the more authentic and effective leader you will become.

It means being vulnerable and acknowledging your weaknesses as well as your strengths.

Being a leader means being responsible for who you continually become.