The leadership role is a combination of skills like effective communication, decision-making, empathy, and more. However, these skills are driven by one primary skill called self-awareness. Often overseen, but self-awareness is the key element of leadership as it helps leaders to understand how their actions and speech affect others and how they influence progress toward their overall goals. The level of self-awareness among leaders can impact the level of communication within their team, faith their employees put in them, and their ability to make decisions quickly and decisively.
Even research says leaders lacking self-awareness are 600% more likely to fall short of both individual and company goals. But you don’t have to lose hope; instead, you can get coaching services to develop self-awareness in your company’s leaders or yourself. For now, here are a few best ways you can utilize to increase your self-awareness.
Start Building Self-awareness with Self-Reflection
To cultivate deeper self-awareness several tasks need to be done within. It requires stern soul-searching and plenty of self-evaluation, the process may even have you encounter some uncomfortable truths. But, the prospective remuneration for your business, relationships, and personal stress level offer plenty of incentive to commit to the journey of developing self-awareness.
Spot your triggers
Everyone has an emotional trigger, but most people do not know what their emotional triggers or ‘button pushers’ are.
Understand it this way; we all have a tendency to react to certain events, actions or people. These reactions are mostly based on past incidences and how we interpret them. For example, maybe you lash out when someone challenges your idea. You can seek the help of coaching for leaders or managers that can enable you to spot the triggers.
While there could be one or more numbers of triggers, it is not helpful to try to overcome or ‘fix’ them all at once. The better way is to start one by one, choosing one trigger at a time to which you are reacting in a way that causes an unpleasant impact on your anticipated outcomes.
Move further to check if there’s a pattern and determine which situation sets off this trigger, quite often. Then ask yourself: what would your preferred reaction look like?
When you find yourself directed into one of those triggering situations, remember your “ideal” reaction and keep it in your mind. Soon you will realize that you are far less triggered and able to react with awareness more often and naturally.
Practice mindfulness
The concept behind mindfulness has received unsurpassed media attention over the past decades. And, practicing mindfulness can be remarkably simple.
The best explanation for mindfulness is being present and aware. When you are noticing physical, mental, and emotional responses to events and other people, without any judgment of good or bad, it means you are aware. Practicing mindfulness on daily basis results in developing the ability to recognize things more easily and quickly. You will be able to name those thoughts and emotions revolving in your head all the time, with low stress and judgment attached to them.
Mindfulness is not complicated but incredibly powerful. It will let you stay in the moment and ease the mental stress of constant repetition of past mistakes, or concern about the future, that our subconscious minds like to occupy.
Keep the urge to dwell away
Maybe you get infuriated at one of your employees and spend the whole day in your cabin beating yourself about it. That is something you cannot use to set an example for your employees.
It would be better to give yourself a break while going through the process and present yourself with patience and grace. Are you going to experience impediments or fall back into old patterns from time to time? But that should not be your focus area; it won’t lead to any improvement.
Go ahead and devote a little time to exploring your reactions and identifying from where they came. And, collecting that information, find what you will do with it, and put that into action. Your focus should be on “what’s next” to avoid reflecting on the past.
Coaching Services to Increase Self-Awareness
As said earlier in this blog, you can always get the help of professional coaches to provide coaching for the team. The best name you can choose is Coach Masters Academy. They offer advanced executive coaching for managers or leaders that results in transformative changes. They employ an empirical method in their coaching services that are proven to be the most effective intervention for growing leaders and to impact the bottom line of the organization.
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