Latest / Enhance.training / What Is Self-Awareness And Why Improving It Will Make You A Better Leader
Transcript
- 0:00SPEAKER_00: What is self-awareness?
- 0:02SPEAKER_00: What are you feeling right now?
- 0:04SPEAKER_00: And more importantly, what is making you feel that way?
- 0:08SPEAKER_00: How is what you are feeling influencing your decisions and your interactions with those people around you?
- 0:14SPEAKER_00: How are you making other people around you feel?
- 0:17SPEAKER_00: Most of us know when we are happy, sad, angry, frustrated.
- 0:22SPEAKER_00: How many of us really know what is causing those feelings?
- 0:26SPEAKER_00: For example, what causes us to snap or have anger explode out of us over the smallest of annoyances?
- 0:33SPEAKER_00: A totally disproportionate reaction.
- 0:35SPEAKER_00: What makes us feel lonely or down in the dumps or unfulfilled at work or even with our lives?
- 0:42SPEAKER_00: Finding our own answers to these types of difficult questions is why self-awareness becomes an incredibly valuable skill for anybody looking to be better, to be happier, and to be more confident about themselves.
- 0:56SPEAKER_00: 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.
- 1:06SPEAKER_00: Gaining better self-awareness changes how you and how other people experience you.
- 1:11SPEAKER_00: Better self-awareness and self-management in turn makes you a better leader, a person others will find a lot easier to follow.
- 1:20SPEAKER_00: Today I'm covering what is self-awareness in a leadership context, and then second, why improving self-awareness will make you a better leader.
- 1:29SPEAKER_00: Throughout, I'll be posing questions that will help you improve your own self-awareness and get you thinking and take another step towards being a better leader.
- 1:38SPEAKER_00: My name is Jess Coles, and if you're new here, Enhanced Doctraining shares people management expertise, resources, and courses teaching you how to build high-performing teams.
- 1:49SPEAKER_00: We have lots of free resources and webinars available to add more depth to your knowledge or save you a ton of time.
- 1:55SPEAKER_00: So do visit us at Enhanced.training to make use of these.
- 2:00SPEAKER_00: So let's start with what is self-awareness in a leadership context?
- 2:05SPEAKER_00: Leading others is not really about a position.
- 2:08SPEAKER_00: You become a leader when others want or choose to follow you.
- 2:12SPEAKER_00: Leadership at its heart is about relationships.
- 2:15SPEAKER_00: You follow those that you like, trust, and that can help you and the group be better.
- 2:21SPEAKER_00: Great leaders are great at leading themselves, first and foremost, which makes them very effective and good at leading others.
- 2:29SPEAKER_00: To be good at leading and managing yourself, you have to know yourself.
- 2:34SPEAKER_00: Self-awareness is a skill and process to learn and understand more about yourself.
- 2:40SPEAKER_00: How good is your awareness of your own emotions, your state of mind, and how you think?
- 2:46SPEAKER_00: Are you continually tuned into your mood and feelings?
- 2:50SPEAKER_00: Do you make the time to explore the causes of strong emotions or reactions and understand what caused you to feel this way?
- 2:58SPEAKER_00: How aware are you of your own hot buttons?
- 3:01SPEAKER_00: What makes you angry, annoyed, excited, impatient?
- 3:04SPEAKER_00: How good are you at managing your reactions when others push your hot buttons?
- 3:10SPEAKER_00: Do you know what your strengths and weaknesses are?
- 3:13SPEAKER_00: What do you excel at and should make time to do more of?
- 3:18SPEAKER_00: What do you struggle with and should feel confident asking others to help in these areas?
- 3:23SPEAKER_00: Knowing your strengths and weaknesses as a leader is a massive advantage.
- 3:28SPEAKER_00: Playing to your strengths will take you a lot further than trying to improve weaknesses.
- 3:33SPEAKER_00: 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.
- 3:43SPEAKER_00: How do your preferences, your values, and your life experiences influence your decision making and the actions you take?
- 3:50SPEAKER_00: How will you improve your awareness of these influences enough to choose to override them or ignore them at the right times?
- 3:59SPEAKER_00: What do you want and need from others around you?
- 4:03SPEAKER_00: What expectations and demands do you make of them?
- 4:07SPEAKER_00: Are you conscious enough of the reasons for your needs and wants and the expectations you set to contail any unreasonable demands you place on others?
- 4:16SPEAKER_00: Are you asking from others what you lack from inside yourself?
- 4:21SPEAKER_00: How realistic a view do you hold of yourself?
- 4:23SPEAKER_00: When you ask others to describe you, your strengths, your failings, your ambitions, your influence, how close is their description to yours?
- 4:32SPEAKER_00: 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.
- 4:41SPEAKER_00: And accept and be happy with each of these.
- 4:44SPEAKER_00: A strong feeling of self-worth is common in those with good self-awareness.
- 4:49SPEAKER_00: What is self-awareness in the context of leadership is now hopefully a lot clearer to you.
- 4:54SPEAKER_00: Now I'll explain why improving self-awareness will make you a better leader.
- 5:00SPEAKER_00: Improving your own self-awareness is not easy.
- 5:03SPEAKER_00: It can be uncomfortable and even painful.
- 5:06SPEAKER_00: It does feel safer not to confront the parts of ourselves we don't like.
- 5:12SPEAKER_00: Accepting the good and the bad about ourselves is a journey.
- 5:16SPEAKER_00: Becoming a good leader and manager is a personal journey as much as a professional journey.
- 5:21SPEAKER_00: Improving your self-awareness is giving yourself a map for your personal journey.
- 5:26SPEAKER_00: A map helps you travel faster and further.
- 5:30SPEAKER_00: Why improving self-awareness will make you a better leader?
- 5:34SPEAKER_00: Self-awareness helps us keep disruptive emotions, impulses and reactions under control.
- 5:40SPEAKER_00: Our emotions, impulses and reactions influence the energy, mood, and performance of the team we lead.
- 5:46SPEAKER_00: Displaying our positive side keeps the team positive and performing.
- 5:51SPEAKER_00: Improving self-awareness leads to increased confidence and acceptance of ourselves.
- 5:56SPEAKER_00: We are more comfortable being transparent and displaying honesty and integrity to ourselves, which leads to greater trustworthiness.
- 6:04SPEAKER_00: Better self-awareness enables us to be more flexible.
- 6:08SPEAKER_00: We can sidestep our own beliefs, assumptions, and life experiences to better adapt to the person and situation in front of us.
- 6:15SPEAKER_00: This helps us get more from them.
- 6:18SPEAKER_00: The more we know about ourselves and like ourselves, the more positive we are likely to be about the world around us.
- 6:25SPEAKER_00: Positivity is infectious and it helps teams be more positive and energetic, in turn, helping teams deliver more.
- 6:33SPEAKER_00: 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.
- 6:43SPEAKER_00: We're also in a much better position to help others overcome their own struggles, having already made this journey ourselves.
- 6:51SPEAKER_00: I think having good self-awareness grounds us and helps us stay true to ourselves, our values and our beliefs.
- 6:58SPEAKER_00: This makes us more dependable, more consistent and more trustworthy, which in turn helps teams understand and deliver against what we expect from them.
- 7:07SPEAKER_00: Being more grounded and being comfortable saying no also helps us keep the team on a more consistent course, which again increases team performance.
- 7:17SPEAKER_00: In any leadership position, learning how to say no without offending is a crucial skill to develop.
- 7:23SPEAKER_00: Saying no takes self-confidence and being okay with potential conflict.
- 7:28SPEAKER_00: Self-awareness helps your confidence and getting comfortable with conflict.
- 7:34SPEAKER_00: 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 good leaders of others.
- 7:46SPEAKER_00: The higher you rise, the less feedback and help you get to improve, which makes the ability to self-learn invaluable.
- 7:54SPEAKER_00: 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 open-minded, more accepting of others and their differences.
- 8:06SPEAKER_00: Improving self-awareness is a vital foundation to become a good and effective leader and manager of others.
- 8:13SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of things to learn, and every person's journey through improving their self-awareness and getting to know themselves better is different.
- 8:22SPEAKER_00: 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.
- 8:30SPEAKER_00: To explore if our coaching programs are the right fit for you to become a stronger, more effective leader, visit our website and give me a call.
- 8:39SPEAKER_00: So, in summary, self-awareness is our ability to monitor and understand our own emotions and their impact on us and those around us.
- 8:48SPEAKER_00: 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.
- 8:56SPEAKER_00: Self-awareness is incredibly important in developing your own self-confidence and self-worth.
- 9:02SPEAKER_00: Improving your self-awareness is incredibly important when you are being asked to lead others.
- 9:07SPEAKER_00: How can you lead with credibility if you are not good at managing and leading yourself?
- 9:13SPEAKER_00: Improve your self-awareness and make yourself a lot easier to follow.
- 9:18SPEAKER_00: 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 at enhance.training and I'll get back to you.
- 9:30SPEAKER_00: Thanks very much for listening, and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.