Is self awareness your untapped super power?

How you behave has a significant impact on your people and your business. The decisions you make, the things you prioritise and what you’re motivated by are all reflections of who you are. The relationships you build and how they work is a reflection of your inner beliefs and values.

Ultimately, your business will be a reflection of you - so understanding who you are and why is hugely important.

Why? Because we can’t do anything about the things we don’t know about.

Creating awareness is the first step in any change. Whether that’s a change in how you want to feel, or how you want to be perceived, or a bit of both. You can’t change what you can’t see.

Time and time again, I’m amazed at just how much there is to be gained by spending time understanding how and why we think and feel the things we do.

But the statistics around how many of us actually have the self awareness we think we have can be surprising. In a series of studies by Tasha Eurich for her book Insight, she discovered that, whilst 95% of people think they’re self aware, the reality is closer to 15% of us that actually are.

On the face of it that statistic is pretty shocking, but if you stop to think a little more about why that might be it starts to become a little more understandable.

We can think we’re self aware, but the vast contextual change of fast growth means that your behaviour and the perception of that behaviour can change significantly too. Add to that the fact that often the people you are dealing with day to day change then your relationships can change fundamentally too.

The high cost of low self awareness

The cost of low self awareness can be incredibly high. A lack of self awareness indicates a lack of emotional intelligence which in turn can impact how authentic you appear to be. Authenticity is one of the cornerstones of trust within your business relationship, and trust is at the heart of your credibility as a leader.

Without trust or credibility it will be far harder to influence those that count. Not just your team but your wider stakeholders such as customers, suppliers, your board and investors and also potential recruits.

Ultimately as a leader you’re asking people to follow you. To spend their days working on your vision, strategy, dreams even. In a fast growth, high change environment you’re often asking them to push themselves pretty hard to achieve those things.

To do that they’re going to need to buy in to you and who you are. If you know yourself really well that’s going to be a hell of a lot easier to do.

Raising awareness is the key to more conscious choice. 

Our subconscious drives our behaviour… and it accounts for around 80% of our brain power. Let’s think of it like an elephant. Your conscious brain is the part of you holding the reins but the unconscious elephant is very strong and hard to control. So, you need to understand what it likes and doesn’t like, what makes it happy and sad, what distracts it or makes it scared. When you understand these things, you have more of a chance of getting that elephant to go where you want it to go instead of it being in charge. Your choices become more conscious, your behaviour becomes more conscious and you are much more likely to get the results you want.                                                                                       

Having awareness about how you react to certain situations and how you are perceived by different people can help you regain control and be at your best more of the time.

It’s about working out what makes you great, what gives you energy, why you ‘flow’ in certain situations. What brings out your most creative and resourceful self. So that you can do more of those things on purpose.

But yes, it’s also about tackling what's not going so well, working out why some things stay at the bottom of your list, or why certain people drive you to insanity, or why you might find yourself staring out of the window for large proportions of certain meetings.

So how do you increase your self awareness?

Real self awareness comes not just from knowing how you feel or what’s going on beneath the surface, it also comes from understanding how you’re perceived. Which is why I start so many of my coaching engagements with a deep dive 3D feedback process. It’s like holding up a mirror to who you are. You wouldn’t expect to know what you look like without one, so how can you hope to know what you act like without one?

The importance of raising your self awareness. especially during periods of fast growth and high change cannot be overstated. Which is why Elevate and Evolve, my new leadership programme for CEOs, MDs and founders of fast growth businesses starts in exactly this place - a crystal clear view on who you are and how you’re perceived both from your own point of view but also the people around you.

It’s the only starting point that makes sense when you start the work of growing as a leader.

If you’d like to develop your self awareness quickly within the context of your leadership journey, why not check out Elevate and Evolve for yourself. You can find out more here or book a call to chat through whether it’s for you.