Elevate Your Self-awareness

Welcome to the new installment of The Leader’s Toolbox, my LinkedIn Newsletter. In each edition, I'll share thoughts, actionable tips, and advice to help you thrive anywhere.

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What is self-awareness?

It is a buzzword for sure, but what lies behind it?

Let’s review some definitions given by thought leaders.

Daniel Goleman defines it as “The ability to recognize and understand your moods, emotions, and drives, as well as their effect on others."

In another article, Tasha Eurich defines two types of self-awareness I’d like to explore in this blog.

Internal self-awareness represents how clearly we see our own values, passions, aspirations, fit with our environment, reactions (including thoughts, feelings, behaviors, strengths, and weaknesses), and impact on others.

External self-awareness means understanding how other people view us, in terms of those same factors listed above.

Why is it important to become more self-aware?

When you become more self-aware, you can identify your strengths and areas for improvement.

You can also adapt your leadership behaviors and build more positive relationships with your teams because you will understand how they may see you.

Overall, it also helps you to gain confidence and self-esteem and to inform your decisions.

How to elevate your inner self-awareness

The first piece of advice is to take communication, personality, and leadership assessments to understand where you stand. Debrief with an expert to discuss the findings.

I also love the Process Communication Model, which has really helped me to understand how I communicate and behave, including in stressful situations.

A difficult but valuable exercise is to listen to your own voice. By producing my podcast, I’ve become aware that I speak rapidly and energetically, which might be overwhelming for some people.

Filming yourself can also help you analyze your communication style by making you aware of your body language.

Another piece of advice is to build a personal advisory board. Simply put, this is a group of trusted friends or colleagues to whom you can reach out when you have doubts or questions. You can get fresh perspectives that can help you avoid ruminating. It provides a safe psychological space.

The last piece of advice is to keep a journal to measure the changes you have made and identify the improvements that are still needed.

How to elevate your external self-awareness

Listen to the feedback you get from your team. Discuss it with your personal advisory board.? You’ll learn to understand how your behavior is perceived.

You can regularly send an anonymous survey to people you collaborate with to receive feedback. I have set up one of these for myself, and the results have been insightful.

Leaders who focus on building both internal and external self-awareness, who seek honest feedback from loving critics, and who ask what instead of why can learn to see themselves more clearly — and reap the many rewards that increased self-knowledge delivers. - Tasha Eurich, in the Harvard Business Review article What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It)

How do you elevate your self-awareness?

You can download your call to action memo. You'll learn, you'll move forward, you'll thrive.

See you soon!

Thanks so much for reading this month’s newsletter. If you enjoyed it, I invite you to hit the "Subscribe" button in the top right corner.

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May you and your family stay healthy and happy -

Yasmina

P.S If you want to know more about the Process Model Communication, you can listen to my podcast's episode, where I talk with Dr Nate Regier about it