Intentional Leaders Podcast with Cyndi Wentland

The Power of Self-Awareness on Success

• Cyndi • Episode 132

Share episode

I'd love to hear from you! Send a text message.

Discover the surprising truth about self-awareness and its profound impact on leadership effectiveness as we unravel the disconnect between perception and reality. In this episode, we shed light on the critical role introspection and conscious change play in enhancing our leadership qualities. We've all heard that self-awareness is key, but how many of us truly understand the depth of our own consciousness? This episode promises to expose the surprising statistics from Harvard Research Group that reveal just how few people are as self-aware as they think they are. As we navigate through the intricate maze of our subconscious minds, we learn how this hidden pilot shapes our decisions, relationships, and everyday actions, often without our conscious recognition.

Self-awareness is more than about recognizing our strengths and weaknesses; it's about committing to the challenging task of aligning our innermost identities and purposes with our daily lives. Learn how mindfulness, soliciting feedback, and journaling can open doors to a heightened sense of self, and why carving out time for these practices is essential for anyone, especially leaders, seeking personal and professional growth. Join us as we explore the intricacies of empathy, communication, and the myriad ways in which self-awareness influences our capacity to lead and connect with others. And don't forget to peruse my blog for more in-depth discussions and resources on this transformative topic.

Be the Best Leader You Know

Perform with Power, Lead with Impact, Inspire Growth

To sharpen your skills and increase your confidence, check out the Confident Leader Course: https://www.intentionaleaders.com/confident-leader

Cyndi:

Welcome to the Intentional Leaders Podcast. Today we are going to talk about self-awareness. What an adventure that I've had over the last I don't know probably year at least deep diving into this topic, and I find it endlessly fascinating, and I'm going to tell you why today. I think it's also important for you to lean into and understand more about, because Harvard Research and also Tasha Urich did a TED talk about self-awareness and the statistics are very shocking that 95% of people think they are self-aware and this is totally validated by so many classes that I do. I've been asking this very consistently at the beginning of most, if not all, of my classes and most people raise their hand, or virtual or in person, and say, yes, that is true. Shockingly, only about 10 to 15% of people actually are self-aware, and that disparity has a significant impact on us as leaders because, absolutely positively and I think my 30 years in working with people bears this out that self-aware people are better able to understand their strengths. They're better able to understand what they need to do to change communication, decision-making, problem-solving all of that. A nd in fact, a study conducted by Green Peak Partners and Cornell University found that self-awareness was the strongest predictor of overall success for leaders, even more than intelligence or previous experience, that individuals who lack self-awareness may not perform as well, collaborate or even navigate challenges in the workplace. I have dedicated, as I said, the last probably year to dive into this topic and really understand why. And if you lack self-awareness, it doesn't mean you're a bad human being. It means, probably, that your brain is working effectively and your brain is working below the surface to just keep you alive and make things as efficient and effective as possible, but this results in a lack of awareness about what we're doing, how we're thinking every day beyond the surface level.

Cyndi:

Here are some of the books that I've been reading that have really brought this home to me. I did a podcast with Ryan Gottfredson, his books Success Mindset and the Elevated Leader bear this out with leaders, but also some of the books that I've been reading about the Outward Mindset, the Peak Mind, Unlocking Leadership Mind Traps, Incognito by David Eagleman, Emotional Agility, Mindsight by Daniel Siegel. All of these books are really focused on our subconscious taking over for us and doing things on our behalf without clear awareness of our day-to-day activities and the decisions we're making and why we're making them. At a very fundamental level, when we look at some of the challenges around self-awareness, this affects some really important areas for us as leaders and I share this with you, not to kind of freak you out, because it did freak me out initially, but really to understand the effect that self-awareness has on us every day. And number one, absolutely our personal relationships.

Cyndi:

According to research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, people with low levels of self-awareness tend to have poor relationships with others. They tend to experience more conflict and have difficulty understanding how their behavior affects things around them, which translates into less effective conflict resolution. If we don't have that self-awareness, if we don't know what is going on around us in that way of how we're affecting conflicts, we may struggle to improve and navigate through conflicts and disagreements constructively. And I know you might be thinking right now well, duh, of course people who lack self-awareness don't know how to mindfully affect conflict effectively and how common really is that you might be thinking I know how to do this. B ut I am shocked at how many people don't know the approach they're taking to conflict, how they're showing up, what their style is, what their stress reaction patterns are and being honest about looking at that and is it working or not. Is it improving the situation or not? And that is an area that our brain can derail us, because under stress we don't see things with clarity and objectivity. We tend to see things through the mirror of how our brain is affecting us and creating threat or a perception of threat that's not really there.

Cyndi:

This lack of self-awareness also results in poorer communication skills, and we know the importance of communication to our effectiveness. I was just teaching a class yesterday and I asked them what is the number one thing that you think is important in team leadership and across the board. Every single one of the people in class said communication. So we know that to be true. But how deliberate are we in our communication patterns, in our habits? Do we understand how we're communicating and also how that communication is being received? Because, interestingly, I do a lot of communication assessments with folks I work with, whether that's in coaching or in training, and when people identify their communication style, it's not always a surprise like, oh yeah, I'm a people pleaser, or I'm indirect or I'm too direct. But I think the challenge is taking even that surface self-awareness, translating it into why we're coming across in that way and is that communication style serving us well? And then how do we change it. Because self-awareness is also about what are you choosing, what are you doing, and if it's not effective, you got to change it. And I think that's the part that is so challenging when we see things that we know and then when we choose not to do anything about them. That is a struggle, of course, because change is hard.

Cyndi:

Connected to effective communication and our ability to navigate with a constructive communication style is also the ability to be empathetic. Can we connect with others in an authentic, genuine and compassionate way? This one is tricky in the sense of I think some people believe they're born with the empathy gene, some people aren't, some people have to learn it. That also comes through self-awareness. Why are some of us less comfortable with empathy? And how do we learn compassion? How do we learn empathy? How do we learn to read other people's emotions? Because this is essential to connecting with others effectively and, I think, right now particularly effective, as we are in the post-pandemic period, where people are still reeling from the effects physically, emotionally and mentally of COVID. We're still trying to heal and our ability to empathize and be compassionate about the journey each one of us is taking is essential to effective leadership, strong relationships and just being a great human being. Connected to self-awareness is absolutely better health and better well-being.

Cyndi:

When we have self-awareness, we're able to identify the levels of stress and anxiety we have, and only when we name it can we tame it. And I hear that a lot these days that we have to name things to tame it, and that has to do with our ability to label our emotions effectively in order to take action. What's ironic about self-awareness when it comes to our emotional state is Brene Brown mentioned in one of her books I think it came from Atlas of the Heart, She talked about the fact that most people can only identify three emotions happy, sad and mad. And yet her book, atlas of the Heart, is focused on 80-some emotional reactions. So we don't even have awareness of what's going on from our emotional state. It's really hard to name it, to tame it, because we don't actually have a word for that, and this also bears true in the classes that I do, when I ask participants to write down an emotional situation that they've had that has caused them challenges. Some people really struggle with that and some people, frankly, have to go back like a year or two to write down something that's very profound for them. Then I give them the list of emotions from Brene Brown's book and then they're able to go through that list and identify, the last two weeks, what they've experienced.

Cyndi:

Without an emotional vocabulary, without being able to label, it is much more difficult to identify what is the emotional experience we're having and what are we going to do about it. How do we process those emotions in a helpful, healthy way? And that's our emotional awareness. I started this research into our subconscious and how much it affects our daily life, our interactions, our communication, our decision-making, in ways that we don't even recognize, of course, then the question is, what do we do about this? What I want to offer are four strategies for increasing self-awareness, and, as a leader, I can't even stress enough how important this is to focus on.

Cyndi:

But number one is practicing mindfulness. I used to think of mindfulness as something that was really woohoo, and I even remember in yoga classes, when I did yoga many, many years ago, I was like, oh my gosh, let's just get into the bending and flexibility, and I really disliked the mindfulness part. I disliked the breathing part. I disliked when they told me to just breathe and stay in the moment, because I was like, no, what I want to do is exercise, what I want to do is become more flexible. And I didn't realize the purpose of mindfulness, the purpose of being in the present moment, being able to pay attention to it. And I have started yes, it's true a meditation practice for myself over just the last few weeks and, oh my goodness, this is noticeable to me, it's a noticeable shift.

Cyndi:

I read the book, as I mentioned earlier, by Amishi P. Jha, called Peak Mind, and how we have to focus our attention and be mindful and how our brain derails us in doing this. I was fascinated by this book. I loved it. I'm telling everybody about it and, of course, I'm telling you go get this book, listen to it, read it, do whatever you need to do. It was so profound how our brain takes us away from the present moment about 50% of the time. We ruminate about the past, we fret about the future, and it draws us away from the here and now. We can't possibly be self-aware if we're not in the moment, so you've got to be attuned to your thoughts and feeling and what's going on in your body. Practicing mindfulness allows us to observe our inner experiences and make decisions about how we want to show up and how disconnected we are typically from doing that.

Cyndi:

Seeking feedback is also an important aspect of becoming self-aware, because we can't possibly know all of our unseen areas, the blind spots that we have, and this affects each and every one of us. And yet taking feedback is very difficult to do. Asking for feedback with honesty and with thoughtfulness and transparency is very difficult for many leaders to do, and yet it's essential to our performance. We have to know what other people's perspectives are about our effectiveness in order to increase our self-awareness. There's a great article that I read and this was many years ago. I use it in my feedback classes, and it's called 13 Ways that we Deflect or Rationalize Feedback. Anything from disagreeing to making fun, deflecting in all kinds and ways that don't help us to really hear what others have to say, and minimizing what other people's perspectives are, doesn't help us to grow stronger. I've come to think of feedback as something that, no matter how it's delivered to me, no matter who's telling me, there's something for me to learn in the feedback that I receive.

Cyndi:

Next is keeping a journal and this is hard some people just naturally like to write things down and our ability to write it down and then look at what are the patterns, what can we discover about ourselves, what are our observations about the world, how are we thinking about those patterns and themes in our life? It is very difficult to do without some kind of documentation of it, because in the moment again, we get overwhelmed with what the day-to-day activities are and we aren't searching for those patterns. I really encourage people that I'm coaching to write down an emotion journal and just keep track of what emotions you're experiencing in order to help strengthen the awareness of what triggers those emotional reactions, what's happening around us that affects us, and without clarity on that, without writing things down, it's very difficult to see those patterns objectively, because our memory and hindsight can be very biased about what we remember and how we remember, because we tell ourselves stories. So writing things down and reflecting on it accurately will help us to do that more effectively.

Cyndi:

The final strategy in increasing our self-awareness is self-reflection, and I think this may be one of the most challenging ones of all, because it means pushing pause on all the things we're doing, our busy life, all of our tasks, to reflect on who we want to be. It pauses us from doing and scrolling and activities and obligations to reflecting on who we are, what is our purpose, and thinking about the congruence between what we do every day and who we want to be. That requires some insight and as we consider those questions, those really really important questions, it takes time. We have to turn off our brain and focus on the here and now. We also have to focus on the future and the way we want to craft the future and the way we want to get there. Who we are, what is our purpose and are we congruent and in alignment with that? That takes some serious time and thought, and are we willing to carve out the time to do that on a regular basis? T hat is the big challenge.

Cyndi:

So the journey into self-awareness is one that is critical to our success, not just as leaders but as human beings, and, as I mentioned, there are so many effects that self-awareness has. So if you want to improve your interpersonal relationships, your health, your ability to adapt to change, be resilient, also navigate through conflict and be more empathetic, be a better communicator. All of these things are tied to your self-awareness. By practicing mindfulness, seeking feedback, writing things down and giving yourself an opportunity to self-reflect, you, too, can strengthen your self-awareness. I'm going to be focusing a lot more in the future about this, because for us as leaders, we have to show up with a higher level of self-awareness, and that means we also have to confront the possibility that we actually are not. Maybe you're the kind of person who likes to not only listen to leadership ideas but have written articles as well. I know I do. Check out on our website my blogs. You can find them all conveniently at www. intentionaleaders. com