Welcome to the self-leadership series. This week we will focus on cultivating your self-awareness. Self-awareness is the most important capability for leaders to develop. Studies have found that companies with strong financial performance tend to have employees with higher levels of self-awareness than poorly performing companies. Find out what self-awareness is all about and why it is important.

WHAT IS SELF-AWARENESS?

Self-awareness is the ability to slow down and reflect on your thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, and behaviors. It includes the ability to pay attention to who you are and what makes you tick as well as your resources. And it also involves the ability to develop a deeper understanding of your belief systems, mental patterns, biases, saboteurs, inner conflicts, mental and emotional defense mechanisms, your worst fears, habits, your impact on others, etc.

You first need to have a sharp realization of who you are to be able to intentionally flex and adapt your approach, behaviors and beliefs to have the impact you desire on yourself and others. Once you are aware of your thoughts, emotions, and behavior, you will be able to take control of your life, and be in the drivers’ seat of your future.

The question is: how do we develop the capacity to honestly observe the way we act and think?

“Self-awareness involves deep personal honesty. It comes from asking and answering hard questions”(Steven Covey)

WHY IS SELF-AWARENESS IMPORTANT?

Self-awareness is one of the most important skills for success. A study conducted by Green Peak Partners and Cornell University found that “a high self-awareness score was the strongest predictor of overall success”.

The most critical qualities for business and leadership success today, such as emotional intelligence, empathy, communication, collaboration, influence, all find their roots in self-awareness. Research has shown that people who have a clear vision about themselves, build stronger relationships, communicate more effectively, demonstrate greater self-confidence, are more creative and make better decisions. In addition, self-aware leaders guide with purpose and integrity, inspire confidence, know their strengths and weaknesses, and understand what they need to build an effective team. All these benefits ultimately have an impact on companies' bottom line.

In short: “it’s almost impossible to be a good leader without self-awareness”.

Why only 10-15% of people are truly self-aware?[1]

Although most people believe they are self-aware, only 10% to 15% of the people fit the criteria according to a study done by Tasha Eurich, an organizational psychologist, and author of the book “Insight”.

Why is that?

Mind wandering. Most of the time we function in « automatic pilot », not aware of what we think, feel or do at a particular moment as our minds tend to wander away. Experts estimate that the mind has between 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts a day, which means an average of 2500 à 3,300 thoughts per hour.
Cognitive traps. We all have cognitive biases influencing the way we see ourselves. We tend to believe narratives that support our already existing sense of self. We unconsciously tell ourselves stories about our past experiences which influence the way we perceive events today and the decisions we take today (gap between the remembering self and the experiencing self). Additionally, our confirmation bias will have us search for or interpret information in a way that confirms the way we see ourselves.
Lack of feedback. The lack of willingness to seek feedback from others to have a more holistic view of ourselves.
Power and experience. Studies highlight that experience and power hinder self-awareness. As highlighted by T. Eurich, seeing ourselves as highly experienced can limit us in our capacity to question ourselves and to challenge our assumptions. It can also lead to an over-confidence in our performance and self-knowledge, and a reduced capacity to accurately assess one’s leadership effectiveness. Similar results have been highlighted for power. The more power a leader holds, the more likely they are to overestimate their skills and abilities (incl. their emotional intelligence, empathy, trustworthiness and leadership performance). According to Business professor James O’Toole “as one’s power grows, one’s willingness to listen shrinks, either because they think they know more than their employees or because seeking feedback will come at a cost”.

The most successful leaders counteract this tendency by seeking regular feedback and by building a self-awareness practice into their rituals (such as meditation and mindfulness). Steve Jobs, Jeff Weiner, Bill Ford, Richard Branson are only a few example of successful leaders practicing meditation to clear their mind and grow their self-awareness.

The 4 self-awareness archetypes by Tasha Eurich

There are 2 categories of self-awareness:

internal self-awareness is the conscious knowledge of your personality, values, passions, aspirations, fit with your environment, reactions (including thoughts, feelings, behaviors, strengths, and weaknesses), and impact on others. Internal self-awareness is associated with higher job and relationship satisfaction, personal and social control, and happiness; it is negatively related to anxiety, stress, and depression.
external self-awareness, means understanding how other people view us, in terms of those same factors listed above. People who know how others see them are more skilled at showing empathy and taking others’ perspectives. For leaders who see themselves as their employees do, their employees tend to have a better relationship with them, feel more satisfied with them, and see them as more effective in general.

As a leaders you should actively work on internal and external self-awareness, thus on both seeing yourself clearly and getting feedback to understand how others see them.

Stay tuned! Next post is dedicated to tools to develop your self-awareness.

Find out more on self-leadership, read my dedicated blog post.

Feel free to contact us for additional coaching support or leadership programs.

Further resources:

Recommended books:

Insight, The Surprising Truth About How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think; by Tasha Eurich, June 2018

Online assessments

Self-awareness quiz

Articles:

How to become a better leader

About the self-leadership series

This weekly series aims to share tools to help you grow your self-leadership and to connect to your three leadership intelligences: Head, Heart and Gut. When using these three intelligences, you increase your impact, relational skills, adaptability and resilience and can navigate the ever-changing environment with ease. So grab a notebook to make these practices powerful for you!