Self-Awareness Toolkit: Individuals

Dec 14

Improving self-awareness is the foundation to almost all growth as leaders. Cultivating awareness of our emotions, motivations, thoughts, and triggers enables us to make more intentional choices and have healthier interactions.

Wherever you go, there you are. It’s a bit of a platitude, but it’s grounded in a deep truth. No matter what you do, your work emerges from your self – which encompasses your historical self with all of your baggage and history and your current self with all of today’s stresses, hopes, and caffeine.

Self-Awareness Is the Foundation for Success

Self-awareness means giving yourself the space to acknowledge, understand, and deal with what is going on inside you. This includes your thoughts, feelings, motives, values, and defense mechanisms. It is important for you and your entire organization to learn how to practice it. Feelings can drive both our best insights and our worst reactions. For a team to be empowered, fast moving, and still able to see things clearly, eventually everyone must spend the time to master their inner-self.

“The inner game drives the outer game,” according to Anderson and Adams in their fantastic book, Mastering Leadership (2016). “The maturity of the inner game is mediating and managing the outer game. Since this truth is largely ignored, most efforts to develop mastery in leadership focus on the outer game of competence with little focus on the inner game of consciousness” (p. 27).

Self-Awareness for Individuals

To lead an effective team you should cultivate practices that encourage self-awareness across the entire organization, starting with yourself. This week’s post focuses on individual practices, and next week we will address practices for teams and organizations.

Individual Tactics

Breathing. Simply taking a single very deep breath has been scientifically proven to boost well-being and performance. A variety of other breathing exercises are designed to slow us down, to calm the racing thoughts in our minds, and to attune us to our bodies. Here are a few simple methods that have lots of backing from experience and science:

4-7-8 Breathing (of Ted Lasso fame): Breathe in for a count of four; hold for a count of seven; breathe out for a count of eight. Repeat.
Box Breathing: Breathe in for a count of four; hold for a count of four; breathe out for a count of four; hold for a count of four. Repeat.
Deep Breaths - Just inhale fully so that your chest rises, and let it out slowly. Got 30 seconds? Do this 3 times. It will help you calm down. Got a few minutes? Do 10 deep breaths and kind of settle into yourself.

Name your Emotions. Just try to notice what you are actually feeling at different times during the day. Do you feel excited, nervous, frustrated, angry, scared, joyful? Don’t worry at first about explaining the emotions. Just notice them. Emotions are data. They tell us about what is going on inside us and in the world around us. The first step is just to collect the data.
Four Why’s. Once you notice an emotion, you can start to get curious about them. Peel back the onion one layer at a time. This is a bit like a Root Cause Analysis. “Oh, I’m feeling angry right now. Why is that? And what’s behind that? And what’s behind that? And what’s behind that?” There’s nothing magical about asking four times, but the core reason is usually buried under several layers of defensive protection. When we get to that core, we often discover a deeply held insecurity we are trying to protect. Once we get there, we can do something about the real issue.
Nature. Get outside. For a few minutes or a few hours or a few days. Take what you can get as often as you can get it. From forest bathing, to plant therapy, to green space in urban planning, to nature walks, the science is clear. Being around nature is calming and healing. Even if you just step out onto your patio for 60 seconds between calls, this can help recenter you for the rest of your day.
Meditation Apps. Yes, there’s an app for that. If you find that you’re really struggling to go it alone without support, you might want to try meditating with an app. Headspace has some particularly useful introductions to quiet meditation. The Calm app is similar and is even offered for free through some health insurance programs.

Individual Strategies

Take Care of the Basics. This may sound simplistic, but a core part of self-awareness is a healthy self.

Sleep. Get 7-8 hours a night, 6 at a bare minimum on busy days. Seriously, sleep is the foundation for mental acuity, and sleep debt drives all kinds of unhealthy behaviors. It’s not heroic to get 4-5 hours of sleep every night. It’s foolish.
Eat healthily. Easier said than done, but work on it. For an easy starter, just eat more fruit.
Exercise regularly. The holistic benefits of regular exercise are evidence-backed but still amazing. A few pro-tips here.

The “right” kind of exercise is whatever you enjoy and will do regularly.
Making it social helps. Find a run buddy. Join a sports team. Sign up for a dance class. Use Strava.
Start small, go slow, and keep at it. You can only run for 5 minutes at an embarrassingly slow pace … so what? A good run is a done run. Go again next time and add a minute or a block. It’s fine. Just move.

Get a Therapist. Learning how to radically upscale your leadership is tough work. It involves unpacking and processing all kinds of inner junk and triggers. You can accelerate this process by getting some outside support.
Screen for (and Treat) Depression. This may come as a surprise, but leaders have a higher rate of depression than the average population. We have a lot of pressure to grow our organizations, and we tend to have very high expectations for ourselves. We also tend to burn the candle at both ends. All of this often leads to low internal reserves – specifically insufficient serotonin levels in our brains. Serotonin is a regulator of brain and body functions. Depression in leaders often looks like irritability, loss of joy, fatigue, impatience, and … the occasional fleeting fantasy that we could get hit by a truck just so we could have an undeniable excuse just to take several uninterrupted weeks off. This is actually very normal. Talk to your doctor, and take your meds like they are your daily multivitamins.
Get an Accountability Partner. This is the super-habit to check all habits. Once you start to outline your tactics and strategies to live more of the life you really want to live and to work in the ways you really want to work, then you probably need some help sticking with it. Otherwise, this very good work will end up in a dusty drawer along with the past 10 New Year’s resolutions. Find somebody who is doing similar internal work and set aside an hour a week just to check in on how you’re really doing with the habits that lead to greater personal health and professional productivity.

Leadership and Self-Awareness

The core components of emotionally intelligent leadership are: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness (or empathy), and relationship management. Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee (2002) summarize the primacy of self-awareness for leaders: “In short, self-awareness facilitates both empathy and self-management, and these two, in combination allow effective relationship management. EI leadership, then, builds up from a foundation of self-awareness” (p. 30).

Self-awareness is not optional. It’s not a nice-to-have. Self-awareness is a fundamental need-to-have for business and for all leadership roles. Working to develop self-awareness is a good investment of your time and effort.

Common Pitfalls

Thinking This Is Optional

The scientific evidence is exceedingly clear; cultivating self-awareness and mindfulness boosts performance, especially for leaders. You simply can’t reach your potential without becoming more self-aware. You can’t get where you want to go or scale your company without your key leaders developing more self-awareness. This is mandatory work for all serious leaders.

Dismissing This as Woo-Woo

All of this talk of probing the inner world can feel a little like mystical navel-gazing. Who has time to climb a mountain and sit on a yoga mat with a guru when you’re trying to grow a billion dollar company? Some of the tactics described above may feel a little uncomfortable. They may not be the right fit for you. That’s not the point. You don’t have to do everything, but you do have to do something to increase your awareness of your historical self and your present-in-the-moment self.

Start Now

Reflection Question: How often are you aware of what you are feeling and why?
Immediate Action Step: Right now, wherever you are, take three deep breaths. Breathe in until you can see your chest rise, and let the air out slowly. If you can, step outside and take three to five more deep breaths. Do that several times a day.
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Josh Broward