In the business world, knowledge, strategy, marketing and technical skills are crucial but they’re not the whole story. The most powerful way to elevate success is to increase your self-awareness. This is of course partly about understanding where your strengths and areas for improvement lie but it’s so much more than that. What do you know about how your behaviour impacts others? How do you feel about how others view you in your organisation? We all know those leaders who might be able to get results but their team members despair about their incredible lack of self-awareness!
Understanding ourselves, our unconscious drivers, triggers, needs and motivations is absolutely essential to lead others effectively. What most people don’t understand is that we communicate unconsciously most of the time. There is a ‘top story’ of course which is the bit that we verbalise to each other but the unconscious bits are the parts underneath that others ‘read’ and they’re the feelings that we get about someone; why perhaps we feel uncomfortable about someone but we don’t really know why. Our bodies and our energy do a great job of picking up these unconscious signals and if the vibe doesn’t match with what we say, this can feel really inauthentic.
This not only happens for our team members but for our clients and stakeholders too. If our energy doesn’t match what we are trying to sell, people pick up on this and there is something unspoken and intangible that puts people off.
The good news is that developing self-awareness is a skill like any other and it’s something that can be worked on and practised so that it becomes habitual. Becoming self-aware is really the powerhouse of business. Imagine a whole organisation in which the culture is centred around self-awareness and conscious communication; how incredible would that be?!