February 2022: Self-Awareness

Back at it again, I come to you with my second post of this year 2022.

I’m not sure if this comes later as a matter of tiredness from other activities or the need to summon whatever mixture of discipline and motivation to push through this month’s writing – or maybe it’s a desire to work on other projects clashing with the personal demand to stay on schedule with this project – who knows?

Regardless, as I participate in this monthly leadership course, I’ve been handed a topic that I will share lightly with you this month: Self-Awareness!

I doubt it’s a coincidence that this is the first of the topics for this course. It seems to be a fundamental approach when it comes to leadership development courses – it sets a baseline.

I think it’ll be discernible by the end of this less than excellent post, but maybe it’ll be much clearer than I realize. I doubt it… but, I digress – let’s get going, shall we?

What is Self-Awareness?

To get us started on the same boat, I want to be clear that I’m talking about being aware of yourself in two ways.

The first form of Self-Awareness is that of understanding the way Others perceive the Self. Demonstrating this Others-focused Self-Awareness can mean that you understand that punching someone else is generally not socially acceptable. It can mean knowing that there may likely (or likely not) be consequences if you fail to use typical greetings and valedictions in emails at work.

This is a valuable form of Self-Awareness that will help you interact with the Others in your environment.

The second, but no less important form of Self-Awareness is that understanding of the Self that allows you to adjust your priorities and behaviors. Demonstrating this sort of Self-Awareness can mean recognizing that you were about to order delivery for dinner, but you have been trying to lose weight and/ or spend less money, and that desire does not align well with that decision.

This is a valuable form of Self-Awareness that will help you align your Self in the Present with your vision of your Self in the Future.

Why Should I Care?

Okay. Maybe now we’re thinking along the lines of “Okay, since you wrote about this topic, it’s probably somewhat important.” I appreciate the sentiment if that’s you. 

Other readers might think “I don’t think I have any problems with self-awareness, so this seems like it might just be a waste of time to read through.” Well, I can’t force you to sit and read through this – I could barely keep myself seated long enough to write it – but maybe peeking ahead at the bold text might pique your curiosity’s staying power.

Here are just a few benefits of improving your self-awareness.

Self-Awareness enables relationship building. Specifically, by improving your self-awareness, you can better grasp the perspectives of others and you can more strongly escape your own view of the world to really ingest the worlds of others. Maybe that sounds counter-intuitive, but read on – we’ll get there.

Self-Awareness enables personal growth. Planning to reach a goal is a pretty easy task. Executing that plan becomes more and more difficult as you realize you are missing the necessary resources, skills, time, or people to reach that goal. Being self-aware means having a better understanding of what your capabilities and purpose are before trying to pursue actions.

It’s like making sure you have a car, fuel, driver’s license, navigational tool, weather-awareness, destination, and sufficient rest before going on a multi-hour road trip, versus simply “Going.”

Self-Awareness enables problem solving. Put simply, if you build relationships effectively and have a group understanding in the build-up toward a goal, the likelihood of that goal succeeding is much higher. Having better self-awareness makes it much easier for you to effectively interact with others, which increases the likelihood of developing an effective team.

Introductory Tips To Become More Self-Aware

Alright, if you’re still here, you probably just wanna know how to get better at Self-Awareness. This will not be an exhaustive list or anything like that, but there will be a few options below that may help you become more self-aware.

Before trying to go into options for increasing your self-awareness, it’s important to prepare yourself for such an effort. It does no one any good for you to seek feedback without some preparation to absorb that feedback.

Then, I recommend you try two things, neither having priority over the other: 

The first is that you write out what you think your values and/or goals are, and try to self evaluate your alignment with those values and progress on those goals.

The second is that you ask for critical feedback from people that will not try to spare your feelings.

Part of preparing to increase your self-awareness is to identify people that you trust to provide you real feedback, to include what you do well, what you do poorly, and areas you can improve in. This will require a little thinking on your part, 

Next, it’s important to recognize that not all of the feedback you will receive will necessarily be useful or accurate. This depends partially on how well the person providing the feedback knows you, but also depends on their own perspective. This is not an excuse to ignore anything you don’t find favorable, either. Assume that the feedback you will get is well-intended and really try to understand and critically evaluate it before judging it.

Writing out your goals can be pretty straightforward. You find yourself in your work for some reason – why do you think you do the work you do? What is it that can or does propel you out of bed every day? What does that have to do with self-awareness?

Here’s my example: I think I’ve mentioned in another post that something I care about is continuous improvement. There isn’t really an “end” goal to that – it’s more of a daily goal. While I do not expect to demonstrate improvements literally every day, the idea is that there is a clear observable progression over the weeks, months, and years. That progression can be anything: I can lift more, I have written more and better quality content, or I have helped benefit others.

Knowing that I care about continuous improvement has a clear connection to the work I choose to do and how I do it: I chose to get an engineering degree before I knew that I cared about that, but it aligns well with technical development, optimization, and streamlining processes. I joined the military partially from family suggestion, but also because I cared about the development of teams and team members. I completed a masters in business administration due to expectations of progression in my career, and the likelihood that it would be more beneficial for my own development and my ability to develop others than a postgraduate technical degree would.

It took some time to recognize my clear interest – frankly, I’m open to that changing over time – but after so many years, it’s the prevailing goal I work with.

Things I value include trying to be my most genuine self, exhaustive work, and honesty. I think that this combination of things also aligns well with my goal. If there is any reluctance or resistance to being myself, then I’m not fully present for the sake of myself but also for the sake of my team. If I don’t do the most or best I can do on something, then I’m not going to make the most mistakes or demonstrate the greatest realization of my potential that I can – both will provide personal feedback to work with. I’m convinced that honesty is self-explanatory, here.

So yeah: consider your goals, consider your values, and consider how they play together. 

Maybe you don’t know what your goals or values are. Maybe you do, but you are not so sure about how well you demonstrate your values or are progressing toward your goals. That’s where getting feedback can help a ton.

In the first case, others may be able to tell you what they see as you interact with them or within your shared spaces. People will remember how you made them feel: they’ll judge whether they trust you, whether they can rely upon you for certain things, what their first impressions of you are, the way you treat others, the way you treat yourself.

They will recognize what your normal is, as well as what your exceptional or off days are. They will learn what motivates you – or they’ll recognize that you are not sufficiently open enough for them to identify what motivates you.

They’ll see what you are good at and they’ll see what you need improvement with.

Self-awareness is something of a team sport. It’s a lot better when you share and work together, and it’s a lot harder when you refuse to work with others. Teamwork is an entirely different topic, but working on your self-awareness to the extent you are able to on your own will help, too.

After you’ve tried these things, I highly encourage looking for other ways to develop your self-awareness.

Conclusion

This was a difficult post to write. The content itself is not uninteresting, but I think it was more involved than I was prepared to write this month. My mind really is on other writing projects and even my work has picked up in its intensity a bit, weighing down my blogging spirit a bit.

This may be a good flag to consider whether to write on this month’s leadership topic from that course I’m participating in versus determining my own topic of choice. Writing on the topic of philosophy a few months ago was a much easier process due to my own personal interest in the subject, after all.

Heck, I wrote on the topic for two months, even…

Hopefully what I was able to write was somewhat coherent, but more importantly, at least minimally valuable. I doubt it is likely to provide instant gratification, which makes this even more difficult to apply after reading, but if you believe that the essence of what I’m trying to say here is true, it is likely to benefit you in the long run.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

I’m starting to learn toward selecting a topic of my own for next time…