Self-Awareness is the Key

The previous two blogs illustrating the differences between Command and Control and Trust and Inspire are both based on self-awareness.

In the first story, John was a Command and Control leader who thought he was a Trust and Inspire leader because that’s who he wanted to be.

In story two, he had the experience of hearing Stephen Covey speak, and then reading his book, Trust and Inspire, which acted as a guide and sparked a journey of self-awareness, which allowed him to develop into a true Trust and Inspire leader.

If you don’t have self-awareness, you don’t really know who you are, and if you don’t know who you are, how do you know how you lead? If you don’t have clarity on your why, how can you impart that clarity to your team members to inspire them to claim ownership over their own responsibilities in the company?

The first step to clarity and self-awareness is vulnerability. You will never change without brutal honesty. You have to own every part of yourself, warts and all, to know who you are and make changes where necessary.

We’re afraid to be vulnerable because we’re under this crazy impression that everyone else has it all figured out. But when you’re vulnerable and share your failures, you’ll find that other people feel free to share their own failures as well. We go through life thinking everyone else is perfect because we haven’t been vulnerable enough to share our own failures with others, so they haven’t shared theirs with us.

We’re afraid to be brutally honest with ourselves because we don’t know how to address our failures without shame.

This shame cycle prevents you from looking objectively at the situation, evaluating why you failed and understanding what led to that situation. If you look at failure objectively and without shame, you can create a roadmap for similar situations in the future, which will help you avoid making the same mistake twice. If you don’t learn from your failures, they’re compounded. All that pain was for nothing.

Assessments are a great way to build self-awareness. The first step in the EDGE Method is E, Explain, and what better way to build self-awareness than by having assessments that “explain” different parts of yourself to you.

One of my clients has started with Dan Sullivan’s program, The Strategic Coach. Step one is to take assessments: the Kolbe A Index Assessment, StrengthsFinder, and Working Genius. I believe taking those assessments (in addition to the 16 Personalities assessment) plays a big part in becoming self-aware. Each one is unique, and they each measure different things about you in different ways, to help you understand yourself as a whole.

Step two is where vulnerability comes in to play. You have to be willing to accept the results of the assessments—even if you don’t like them.

You also have to really understand what those results are telling you and be honest about what they say about you. When the Kolbe A Index first came out and I took it, I owned being a “Quick Start” and not having much in the way of “Follow Through” or “Fact Finding.”

In fact, I mentioned that in my first book. In Andy Andrews’ book The Traveler’s Gift, there is a quote that says, “God did not put in me the ability to always make right decisions. He did, however, put in me the ability to make a decision and then make it right.” That is a wonderful quote that blesses people regularly.

I, however, used that quote in conjunction with my Kolbe A results to give myself permission to make reckless decisions with no input from trusted advisors. You can probably imagine how that turned out. That’s not true self-awareness, that’s becoming aware and then using it as a crutch or defense mechanism.

After I was fired and started working with my counselor, we started processing my motivation behind the siloed, independent decision making. It all started as a coping mechanism after losing my dad, and being forced into the position of having to make lots of decisions alone. Then I decided I’d just own it. I didn’t need anyone else, I could take care of myself. I took a coping mechanism and turned it into a personality trait.

At that point, I was so tired of hurting myself and others with my actions, but I knew I couldn’t discover what to do—then actually do it—without a guide. My counselor, Twila, was a guide who helped me become more self-aware about my responses and decisions. The journey to self-awareness usually begins with a failure, and the pain experienced from that failure.

Many of the counselors I’ve known over the years got into it because they wanted to solve their own problems and once they began to gain understanding about the roots of those problems, they decided they wanted to be a guide for others.

That’s what I decided to do with my books, and this blog. I want other people to understand themselves and their failures before it turns into something painful. And if not that, I want people to understand how to come through to the other side and know they’re not alone.