Before you can lead others successfully, it’s critical to know your own internal states and preferences and be self aware and able to self regulate. Successful leaders work hard to do both. They recognize their effect on others, they know their strengths and limits, and they keep disruptive emotions and impulses in check. They can handle disruptions, changes, and stress, and have healthy and appropriate self-esteem and self worth.
To develop stronger self awareness and the ability to self regulate:
- Use HALT as a signal to step back and suspend action when you are hungry, angry, lonely or tired, and put off writing the email or performance review, calling someone, or sending an instant message when you are in HALT mode.
- Remember that less is definitely more when you are not feeling your best because when we act or react to such times, the outcome is less likely to be successful. After the HALT period passes, your perceptions and mood often shift, and your actions are more measured and likely to lead to good outcomes.
As you work to develop self-awareness and the ability to self-regulated you’ll know you’re making progress when you:
- Know which emotions you are feeling and why.
- Realize the links between your feelings and what you think, do, and say.
- Recognize how your feelings affect your performance.
- Have a guiding awareness of your values and goals.
To strengthen your ability to be self-aware:
- Get more feedback from others and listen to it.
- Pay more attention to your feelings and observe outcomes of having various emotions.
- Get in touch with yourself and start understanding your own emotions more fully.
Never forget — The better you know yourself the stronger your ability to know others becomes.
Remember:
Do:
- Know yourself — your strengths, your weaknesses, your hot buttons, and your values.
- Understand what turns you on.
- Be clear about who you are.
- Understand and appreciate how people react to you and see others as others see you.
- Manage your emotions and regulate your moods and know your emotions are not always important to your goals.
- Begin with the end in mind.
- Be transparent when you can.
- Think before you speak and manage your execution and body language.
- Be aware of your impact on others,
- Keep impulses in check.
- Have healthy self-esteem, manage your words and voice.
Don’t
- Kid yourself or think too well or too little of yourself.
- Think your moods don’t matter.
- Act as if you aren’t impacting others.
- Lose control or act out.
- Share all your feelings.
- Be packaged.
- Act without regard for its impact.
To be more self-aware also try this . . .
Engage in frequent self-reflection.
Great leaders are self-aware and being self-aware takes a very deliberate commitment to engage in self-reflection and introspection.
But great leaders also know that while being self-aware is important for leading self that it’s also a vital foundation piece for leading others and for leading the organization.
The key is to keep things moving actively forward toward your dreams and those of the organization – by encouraging others to have “ah-ha” moments, to engage in active self-reflection and introspection, and to live with passion and drive.