Imagine if every time you looked in the mirror, the reflection staring back at you was that of a stranger— someone who didn’t look, act, talk, think or love the same way you do. Over time, you may notice yourself adopting the stranger’s traits until eventually your true self becomes overshadowed by the one you have subconsciously been portraying.
Self-awareness is intensely powerful and can affect every aspect of your life.
The way you see yourself ultimately becomes the way you show yourself to the world, so taking time to discover who you truly are is vital.
As a leader, self-awareness is especially important because your behaviors affect your team and, ultimately, your organization. Increasing your self-awareness will unlock your leadership potential and help you lead your team to reach the highest pinnacles of success. By unearthing your inner self, you can act in a way that boosts your leadership abilities and allows you to focus on any areas that might need improvement.
The journey towards self-awareness in leadership starts when you engage in executive leadership coaching with an expert like Steve Farber, who will help you identify and develop the traits to amplify your leadership impact.
Why is Self Awareness in Leadership Coaching Essential?
You know better than anybody how full an executive leader’s plate truly is. From managing your teams and driving results to putting out fires and responding to immediate needs, your days are filled with helping, supporting and guiding others. This leaves little time to work on your own development and growth, even though doing so will ultimately benefit you, your team and your organization.
Self-awareness in leadership offers invaluable benefits for your organization.
When you unlock a deeper understanding of your strengths, weaknesses, values and beliefs, you will improve your ability to make more informed decisions, communicate effectively and motivate your team to achieve their greatest potential.
6 Ways to Improve Self-Awareness for Leaders
As an Extreme Leader, understanding why self-awareness is important and creating strategies to heighten it is imperative to maximize your leadership impact.
Implementing the following six ways to increase self-awareness for leaders, then seeing the expert support of an executive business coach like Steve Farber will allow you to leverage your leadership potential and build even greater success for your organization.
1. Acknowledge and Accept Your Vulnerability
An important step toward heightening self-awareness in leadership is to admit vulnerability. This step can be challenging for anybody, but especially for leaders who are expected to always project strength, power and confidence. Accepting your vulnerabilities may seem counterproductive to cultivating the image you wish to portray, but rather than showing weakness, it will actually make your executive leadership coaching more productive and successful.
Instead of damaging your reputation, acknowledging your vulnerability will effectively create space for personal growth and development. You will attain a greater understanding of your blind spots and create strategies to overcome them, which organically leads to an increased ability to accept constructive feedback and learn from past mistakes.
Another reason why reaching this level of self-awareness is important is that it leads to greater empathy, better communication and a more collaborative and compassionate leadership style.
2. Learn to Listen to Yourself
Seeing yourself as you are is one aspect of discovering self-awareness in coaching that you need to focus on in your sessions. Another, which is equally as important, is finding ways to quiet the noise of your day-to-day in order to truly listen to yourself.
Achieving your greatest leadership potential requires paying attention to your thoughts, feelings, and reactions, then using that information to guide your decisions and actions. Doing this will allow you to become more attuned to your inner voice and intuition, which will help you identify the warning signs of stress. Now, when you feel overwhelmed or uncertain, you can deploy strategies to combat these emotions.
Another benefit of heightening self-awareness in leadership is the comfort you will discover in your increased ability to manage the inevitable changes and challenges that lie ahead for your organization. This level of self-awareness will help you recognize your strengths and weaknesses and further fine tune your master plan for improving your leadership skills.
3. Practice Mindfulness
Another important step on the journey toward realizing all the benefits of self-awareness in leadership is to practice mindfulness. It’s easy to get caught up in the chaos of the endless multiple tasks and responsibilities that you can lose sight of the big picture. When you aren’t able to visualize where you are headed, it’s impossible to stay on track.
This is where mindfulness comes in.
Mindfulness is about being fully present in each moment and observing whatever thoughts and feelings arise without judgment. Achieving this level of self-awareness will help you remain calm, focused and in control, even in high-pressure situations. It can also result in more effective decision-making and improved communication.
Taking the time to slow down and focus on the present moment will help reduce the impact of stress, build resilience, adaptability and increase your overall well-being.
4. Emphasize Strength-Based Leadership Coaching
Similar to your reflection in the mirror, the traits you focus on will be the same ones that are most evident to others. Even though self-doubts are normal, especially for new executives, it is important to minimize those and emphasize your strengths instead.
This is another reason why self-awareness is so important— it directs you to focus on your strengths, which assists in building confidence, improving your performance and cultivating a positive and productive workplace culture. Focusing on your strengths, rather than perceived weaknesses, will allow you to reflect your best leadership self back to your team, and inspire them to do the same.
Through strength-based strategies, you can cultivate self-awareness in a coaching session, enabling you to identify your inherent strengths and competencies and utilize them to accomplish your goals. An expert in leadership development coaching like Steve Farber will guide you through strength-based leadership techniques and help you hone the skills needed to become the best leader you can be. Together, you can identify new opportunities and craft new strategies for success.
5. Ask for Feedback
Without constructive feedback, it is easy to become stagnant or unclear about the direction you are headed. As an Extreme Leader, you understand that to achieve true success, you must continue to grow and improve, and recognize that this can only be done by encouraging feedback from others.
When you regularly seek feedback, you gain insight into areas that need attention, enabling you to quickly adapt and remain on track with your goals. For leaders, who at times may feel isolated, the open dialogue will keep you connected with your team and demonstrate to them that you care about and respect their opinions.
Taking time to genuinely listen to constructive feedback and following through on any necessary changes will have a multitude of positive effects on your team and organization. Sharing the thoughts of your team with your executive business coach will not only increase your self-awareness in the coaching session, but will assist in the success of the coaching process as well.
As part of the coaching process, your coach will also seek your feedback, by challenging you to answer the question, “how does self-awareness affect leadership?”. Your answer will guide the direction and level of the coaching process as you work to achieve your desired goals.
6. Take Action on Your Insight
Once you gain a deeper insight into your own skills and abilities and receive feedback from others, the next step is to take action. And now that you know how self-awareness affects your leadership style, it will be easier to implement the strategies created with your coach.
Doing so will demonstrate to your team that you are deeply committed to bettering yourself and the workplace culture, which will inspire them to trust you and respect your decisions. Further, by taking action based on your insights and the feedback from others, you are naturally building the skills needed to overcome challenges and achieve even greater success.
As you develop an action plan and follow through on its steps, you will build a roadmap that guides you straight to your loftiest aspirations.
Create Your Executive Leadership Road Plan with Steve Farber
Leading with love means starting with yourself. With the support of executive leadership coaching from an expert like Steve Farber, you can focus on heightening your self-awareness and becoming a powerful leader that motivates others to achieve their own greatness.
Make self-awareness in leadership one of the stops on your journey to success and you’re guaranteed to successfully reach the destination of elevated leadership impact.