Towards Better Self-Awareness at Work
It might come as a surprise, but we are — at work or not — pretty bad judges of ourselves.
An example?
Majority of drivers (up to 80%) rate themselves as “above average” on a range of driver characteristics.
Research shows that while about 95% of us think we possess adequate self-awareness, this is true for only 10 to 15% of people. Self-awareness — understanding who and how similar or different from others we are — is crucial to one’s successful performance at work. To illustrate, for a work team to be effective, each member must recognize his/her unique strengths and assess where they fit best in the team. Self-aware teams have been found to trump their less self-aware counterparts in decision making and conflict management.
Quick brain fact: Recognizing yourself in a mirror and thinking of who you are happens in different brain regions.
But being self-aware means much more than being a good team member capable of making sound decisions. Self-awareness helps us recognize our triggers — the external events which cause us to feel irritated and stressed and, more often than not, lead us to have knee-jerk reactions. Being able to recognize those triggers equals a certain level of control over how we react to them. In addition, being self-aware means you also know when and how you work best. Do you have the most energy in the mornings? Plan your workdays accordingly. Are you easily distracted while working? Take your gadgets to a room separate from the one you work in. Do you struggle with that new task? Assess what is it in the task that you are most unfamiliar with and ask for help.
Luckily, self-awareness is a skill that can be developed and nurtured.
Be mindful.
The root cause of why mindfulness is such a good tool for defusing emotional flare-ups in meetings and helping us focus amid buzzing environments is its direct involvement with the self. Mindfulness is a helpful step towards self-awareness as it ensures we are more aware of ourselves and of our environments. While there is a number of mindfulness apps worthy of your attention, one easy and quick way of introducing mindfulness to your everyday life is intention setting. At the beginning of a hectic workday or a big meeting, set an intention for how you choose to show up and which one of your core characteristics you want to rely on. With an act as simple as intention setting, you create a roadmap of the kind of leader or professional you strive to be.
Ask for feedback.
“Feedback from one person is a perspective, feedback from two people is a pattern, but feedback from three or more people is likely to be as close to a fact as you can get.”
We have already established that we are often bad judges of ourselves. This is why the quest for true insight regarding the self requires us to hear how others see us. Actively listening to and accepting feedback can help us assess and grow all aspects of our work. And while accepting feedback is not always easy, the good news is that being self-aware helps. The more self-aware you are, the more likely you are to separate your own self from the feedback you are receiving, helping you fit the feedback into a bigger picture and hold onto the bits that really help you refine your ways. Here at Glasswall, we recently partnered with Clear Review in an attempt to make receiving and giving feedback a convenient and growth-promoting process.
While mindfulness and feedback can help us become more self-aware, continuous reassessment of the self helps us stay that way. Change of our interests, values, perspectives, as well as of our environments, is inevitable. Consequently, self-awareness needs to be nurtured regularly. If you work alone, consider keeping a journal in order to stay mindful of your strengths and attentive to any opportunities for growth. If you work in a team, try some mindfulness techniques, and embrace feedback — both will help you note how you have improved and how to continue improving.
