Do you know yourself enough to be considered a great leader?
Suppose we know EQ is the foundation for solid leadership and Self-Awareness is the entry point to becoming more emotionally intelligent. Isn't it helpful to build our self-knowledge bank as much as we do our retirement fund? Coincidentally, those two are intertwined. The more self-aware we are, the more apt we are to experience personal and professional success.
So when I ask what you truly know about yourself, I am asking if you know what motivates you, how you self-sabotage, which triggers take you offline, and what brings you up the ladder of life to where you're feeling like you do when you're eating your favorite ice cream or out in nature exploring the unknown. These are the corners and crevices in which to search within yourself. That's where the gold is, the parts of yourself that are either helping you cross that finish line or tripping over yourself at the start of something exciting.
So how do we do this? There are several ways to begin the journey of gaining self-knowledge:
Seek Feedback: Feedback is such a gift! However, that word alone carries a negative vibe for most people. It's a gift because it's the pathway to acknowledgment and reflection. Viewing it as an exchange where you'll be seen and valued for your accomplishments could be the reframe you need to gain the courage to ask. My favorite way to seek feedback is to make it easy for the person giving it. Ask for one thing you're doing well and one area that could be a growth opportunity, and ask them to share what they think your most significant accomplishment is to date. Some may say the marathon you ran, others may say executing a project everyone pretended didn't exist. Either way, you will know what they value in you.
Reflect On Your Experiences: Take time to reflect on your successes. Who were you in those moments? Where was your drive coming from, and how were you able to sustain it? Reflect on the times when there was struggle, and again, who were you then? What was your desire, and how were your actions misaligned?
Practicing Self-Observing: We all have various parts of ourselves, so learning who is actually doing the talking and the walking is essential. If my People Pleaser, my top Saboteur, shows up to execute a meeting, I bet there won't be a clear direction at the end, but everyone will feel good. But what's my end goal? To learn what your Saboteurs are, click here. I use this assessment with every client, and we navigate how to work with our Saboteurs so they are serving us instead of tripping us at the start line - by the way, that would most likely be the Stickler, aka the Perfectionist, holding us back from finishing.
Daily Routine: Create a self-accountability routine in a journal or your notes app. Ask yourself two questions: What am I doing well, and what is going well for me? This exercise of Positive Inventory will rewire your nervous system to look for the good each day and set your internal GPS to find the positives. We always find what we are looking for in business, in people, and in ourselves. What are you training your system to look for each day?
Many business books espouse the secrets of leadership, all of which have immense value. However, if we don't know who we are, how we've been shaped, our internal belief system, and what's genuinely ours when it comes to the bag of narratives we are still carrying around from childhood, then all of those leadership secrets just become confirmation leadership is difficult or worst yet, make you strive for perfectionism, to hit the mark vs. the goal of self-growth along the journey. Any real quest in life has a prep stage, and this is the stage most skipped over. Why? Because we want to get to the good stuff, jump in the ring where the action is. Self-knowledge is the prep stage for anything we set out to do, anything and everything. As leaders, we can't skip knowing who we are because soon you will ask your team the same questions - what motivates you? What gets in the way of your success? And if you don't know your answers, how can you lead them to theirs?