Unlocking Success: Self-Awareness Is the Ultimate Leadership Superpower

If you want to develop good leaders within your organisation, the most important muscle to develop is self awareness. 

Research tells us that leaders who have self awareness are happier, have better relationships with their teams, are more empathetic and creative and are perceived as more effective.  

Since people tend to leave their jobs because of their bosses, creating self-aware leaders is going to help you with your staff-turnover and employee engagement. Research tells us that happy employees are 12% more productive (and unhappy ones are 10% less productive).

And yet how many recruitment processes consider someone’s self awareness as part of their strategy?

Dr Tasha Eurich’s research splits self awareness into two distinct facets.  Our ‘internal self-awareness’ which is defined as our ability to clearly see our values, passions, strengths and weaknesses, our reactions (based on our beliefs, thoughts, feelings) and our impact on others. 

The second facet is ‘external self awareness’ is our ability to understand how other people perceive us in terms of values, passions, strengths and weaknesses etc.  

Interestingly these two types of self awareness are not linked but independent of each other - so we could be someone who is very aware how others see us but not very aware of how we see ourselves.

One type is not better than the other but in order to become a more self-aware leader we need to cultivate both types of awareness and have some congruency between them.

We think of self-awareness as reflecting on ourselves, our behaviour etc but research found that the more people reflected, the more anxious, stressed they became.  The reason, Eurich’s research discovered, was the way in which they were doing it.  

People were asking themselves ‘why’.  The problem with the ‘why’ question, is that it implies a judgement which pushes us further from finding insights and just makes us feel bad.  ‘Why did I react in that way?’ or ‘Why am I feeling like this?’.  

What was discovered was that the people who have a good sense of self awareness are much more likely to ask the ‘What’ question.  ‘What happened here?’ ‘What am I feeling?’. This creates a space for curiosity and learning, without judgement.  Boom!

Going on a coaching journey is one of the best things you can do to develop your self-awareness, understand yourself better, get closer to your values and see yourself more clearly.  This is why so many leaders, entrepreneurs and fresh thinkers have coaches beyond just goal-setting and accountability. 

In one of the disciplines of coaching that I learnt (CTI’s Co-Active) we were shown the power of the ‘What’ question over the ‘Why’ question and for that reason 'Why' rarely gets used.  It’s great to see that the research supports that the nature of the question is so powerful to experience the insight and self-development that helps you evolve as a human. 

If you’re interested in considering a coaching journey for yourself or your leaders, you can book a no obligation intro call with me HERE to explore one to one coaching or my CoCreative leadership group programme

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