Four Ways to Improve This Significant Area of Your Leadership Ability
Your emotional state sets the tone for everyone around you. Your team and others around you will take on the same tone and tenor as yours, as their leader. The leader’s emotional state will set the tone for the entire team’s emotional state.
“Emotional self-awareness is the building block of the next fundamental emotional intelligence: being able to shake off a bad mood.”
– Daniel Goleman, author and social scientist
Here are a few things we can all do, on a regular basis, to become more and more self-aware of ourselves, our emotions, and our strengths, over time:
- Seek feedback from your family, friends, coworkers, and your own leaders. The extent to which you can seek and ultimately receive honest feedback from loved ones (those who genuinely care about you today and your potential success in the future), will have a significant impact on your ability to become more self-aware. The first step is seeking feedback, and an important next step is to accept it.
- Practice mindfulness by finding time, each day, to meditate, pause and reflect, and pray, if you are so inclined.
- Journal your emotions when you experience them, which helps you identify what emotions you feel, at the times you feel them, and most importantly what may have triggered your emotions.
- Invest in personality and strengths assessments
- DiSC, Meyers Briggs, True Colors ®, Clifton Strengths ®
Challenge yourself to answer the following questions:
- What are my pet peeves? What really triggers my negative emotions?
- What makes me happy, uplifted, and encouraged?
- When am I at my best?
- Based on what I’ve learned about myself, what are the areas in my life or work that I need to improve?
“Without self-awareness, we are as babies in cradles.”
— Virginia Woolf, English writer
