self-awareness overview

Self-awareness is the ability to recognize and understand your own emotions and reactions, as well as those of others. It is important because many people think they are self-aware when they actually are not. Self-awareness requires being honest with oneself and taking action to improve. A lack of self-awareness can lead to misunderstandings and misinterpretations. It is crucial to have someone, like a coach or mentor, who can help us see ourselves more clearly. When coaching to self-awareness or becoming a student of self-awareness, we first have to understand what self-awareness truly is. It's the ability to recognize and understand your own moods, emotional reactions, and drives, as well as those attributes of other people. Now, I'm going to introduce you to a character to provide a reference to this definition – Ya But Bob. Everybody's got one person in their life named Ya But Bob. Ya But Bob interrupts and disrupts, knowing you're wrong before you even typically get to the end of your first or second sentence. Now, I bet you're laughing a little bit. The fact of the matter is, self-awareness is tough. And again, I've cited this so many times in other types of work that we do, but when I think about self-awareness, I think about Tasha Urich, PhD industrial psychologist, wrote a New York Times bestseller, has done extensive research on self-awareness. In her survey, 95% of people said they were highly self-aware. Through her research and testing, she found out roughly 10% to 15% of people were self-aware. That is a dramatic fallout. If you're a leader and you have 10 people, 8.5 of your people are actually fooling themselves. So self-awareness is about being honest with yourself and as we've always defined coaching as a two-step process. One, getting someone to look in the mirror. Two, getting them to take action on number one, yet very few people do number one arbitrarily on their own. We have literally cited that definition of coaching for the past 30 years. Now the industry is somewhat caught up to this in the fashion of really talking about self-awareness. So think about self-awareness. Think about yourself. Think about a time when you had this great intent, yet someone had a perception that was out of context of what you were trying to achieve. Doesn't mean your intention was bad or your communication was bad, yet people can perceive us sometimes in a wrong way. Let me give you another one. I remember walking up, and I've used this story so many times, but it really draws attention to self-awareness. I was walking up behind one of my favorite client's employees and she had gone for an interview and didn't get the job and was pretty upset about not getting the job and she started to tell three or four co-workers how the guy who interviewed her was really unfair and she felt very attacked in the interview. Now she was going from a plant supervisor position to a customer service job to work in the office setting. She had no office skills, by the way. So think about what she said. The guy attacked her. About three or four people walked away as they saw me standing behind her. She turned around and she goes, oh, I didn't know you were there. I looked at her and I said, how did he attack you? Well, I just kind of felt the interview wasn't very fair and I go, no, no, no, no, no. You just told three or four people he attacked you. Did he throw a punch? She goes, what? I go, did he throw a sharp object at you? She goes, of course not. I go, you just told three or four people he attacked you. Now the next time he posts a job, do you think those three or four people want to interview for it? And she had this overwhelming look of fear come over her face. And I said, oh, by the way, those four people are going to now tell three or four other people. You're going to have 12 to 16 different versions of what actually occurred. Do you think they're going to be accurate? She said, oh, my gosh, no. I said, not at all. Think about that. And she goes, oh, my gosh. I said, by the way, do you know how to do pivot tables and do you know how to build PowerPoints? Do you know how to bring formulas into Excel spreadsheets and tie them over and hyperlink them to a PowerPoint presentation so they update automatically? She said, no. I said, I can't believe he didn't hire you. Now, I know this young lady really well. I could be sarcastic. And she said, oh, my gosh. I said, now you've got some danger at your doorstep. She said, what do you mean? I said, those 12 to 16 people, it's eventually potentially going to get to this guy. And do you think he's ever going to want to interview you again? Now, some of you who are listening to this go, well, geez, you really confronted her. Yeah, I did. There's no doubt I did. I had to get her to be highly self-aware because the time was very short. I'm not saying you have that type of conversation in every situation. You have to know your style. You have to know your people. You have to know if the relationship will warrant that type of conversation. Yet her emotions, her reactions, her mood created its own narrative. Completely unfair. To this young lady's credit, went up to the guy and said, look, I was upset. I didn't get the job. I realize I'm lucky I was interviewed. And I kind of said some things to a couple other people. And I took it out of context. And the guy said, you know what? I appreciate it. You know, we all get upset. And this guy handled it beautifully. And then she did something that I asked her to do. And it has served her well. She said, would you be my mentor? He said, absolutely. He goes, do you know why I interviewed you? She said, no. He said, you are qualified for the job, but I can't say that. He said, I wanted to give you a chance so you knew what you were getting into. So it went from attack to, wow, this guy's a great guy. Self-awareness is really powerful. We have to ask ourselves questions. We have to have a coach. We have to have a mentor, a peer, someone who has our best interests at heart by not always telling us the things that we want to hear. Self-awareness, again, is the ability to recognize and understand your own moods, emotional reactions, and drives.