🔶 As Leaders, we always want to improve, outgrow our old selves and make sure our leadership skills are exceeding (our own) expectations.
We’re constantly invited to put work and attention into things such as communication, emotional intelligence, our own expertise, management techniques and more.
📌 Yet, I believe none of that can make an impactful difference unless you’re tapping into a basic skills that’s often underestimated:
SELF-AWARENESS
đź”” While many believe it is something we’re simply born with, self-awareness is a skill that – like any other – can be developed.
If you’re a leader, it’s definitely a skill you want to invest time and energy in.
Why?
🚀 Because it’s at the core of creating the results we want and multiplying them exponentially.
When we increase our self awareness, we can understand the type of ripple effect (positive or negative) we’re having on our environment and those around us.
Self awareness is the gateway to become a Multiplier and achieve the success we aspire to.
It helps us see how we are showing up, who we are being, the impact we’re making and how we’re performing.
In my work with founders and CEOs, I see they have great vision and work really hard towards it. Yet, they’re often feeling frustrated and stressed because the results are not what they expected.
Maybe they realise their own performance is lacking, or maybe they observe low retention rates and a team that’s not working as it should.
Of course, they start to question why that’s happening and what it is that’s truly holding them back.
Most of the time, the answer can be found in a lack of self awareness.
You see, when you start to look deeper at yourself, suddenly a whole new perspective opens up, leading us to better:
- Internal self awareness
- External self awareness
As leaders we need to have a great balance of both, if we want to achieve next-level results.
✅ When we increase our Internal Self Awareness, we can clearly see our values, goals, aspirations. This helps us to then evaluate our feelings, thoughts and actions and the impact they’re having on our work or environment. Internal self awareness also plays a key role in giving us motivation to chase our vision, define it and fully live it. It shows us our strengths and blindspots, so we know exactly what to leverage and what to change to make disruptive progress.
✅ On the other hand, increased External Self Awareness gives us a chance to look at how others are evaluating those actions and being affected by them. This comes particularly handy when leading teams; think for example about what would happen if you made a decision you believed was motivational for your team, but that ended up making them feel demotivated. Without external self awareness, you wouldn’t be able to understand why their performance is dropping and they’re becoming less engaged. You’d just feel frustrated and unsure about how to best face this obstacle.
As I also mentioned above, higher levels of self awareness act as a gateway to become a Multiplier and be a more impactful and effective leader.Â
By tuning into both your internal and external self awareness, you are able to:
- Understand how you’re showing up
- Your impact on clients and teams and how it affects retention, loyalty and productivity
- Improve your emotional intelligence, so you know how to inspire and motivate others
- Become a more effective communicator and be aware of how your message is landing
- Have higher levels of resilience and effectiveness and show up with more authenticity
- Unlock maximum levels of potential to create bigger impact within your organisation and industry
As you can see, self awareness can really be a game changer for founders.
👉🏽 So let me ask you: are you actively working on increasing your self awareness? How does your internal self awareness compare to the external one? What could you do today to develop more self awareness?
If you want to explore your current levels of self awareness and learn how you could increase this fundamental skill, feel free to book a complimentary call with me at this link.
I can’t wait to support you on this exciting and transformational journey
