Self-Awareness: 4 Steps in the Journey
In my last post, I wrote about how my journey towards real self-awareness came as an epiphany in an Army exercise. I began to discover, not just who I was, but how that intertwines with those I lead and work with. Initially, I just did a self-look and tried to unwind who I was. But, it took digging deeper into some of the various personality traits and strength analyses that exist out there. Additionally, thanks to an Army course, I received a robust 360-degree feedback report that truly helped me see how my actions impacted others.
You see, self-awareness by itself is just more knowledge. Good (and great!) leaders take that knowledge and turn it into action. Here are 4 action steps for a leader on a self-awareness journey to take. I strongly encourage you to find a coach to work with on this. I’d love to be that coach (set up a Discovery Call today!), but if not me, walk through it with someone who is trained and focused on helping you achieve leadership health and growth!
4 Action Steps for Your Self-Awareness Journey
1. Seek to understand your motivations and tendencies! You must be eyes wide open to both the positive and negative qualities of who you are and how others perceive you when you act. It is helpful to enlist the assistance of those who know you, and who have your confidence, to share with them what you’re learning, and ask for their thoughts. This only works if you are committed to being open to what they have to say. Sometimes others know parts of us better than ourselves because they feel the impact of our actions where we feel the intention.
2. Understand what health, in your personality, looks like. The multiple personality assessments out there all point out how someone might use their personality for good or evil. It’s critical to understand what health for you looks like so you may take your insights from Step 1 and decide where you are on that healthy/unhealthy continuum.
3. Identify what actions you already do that indicate health. This step identifies areas of engaging others and leading where you are doing well and should seek to maintain. You will likely find some of them to be second nature, part of your everyday being, therefore requiring little maintenance. Whereas, others are more likely to be areas you have more recently been intentional on improving. This is a good indication that you are, and have been, a learning leader. Now you are also becoming a self-aware leader, and that enables you to continue to improve or maintain the work you had started.
4. Identify what unhealthy actions you take. Take some time to think about them, and prioritize them by both easiest to address and most important to address. See where there is some overlap and take steps TODAY to improve. Find accountability and be open that you are going to be a better, more healthy YOU for yourself and everyone you lead!
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
