The Self-Awareness Guy

Self-Awareness and Your Work/Life Balance - On Developing Self-Awareness and Being Self-Aware

Self-Awareness and Your Work/Life Balance

/ / Self-Awareness, Self-Consciousness / , , ,

Self-awareness means living meaningfully instead of frantically. I was coaching a highly driven, successful leader recently who told me she had a very full schedule and felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of activity in her life. She felt empty and exhausted at the end of the day and wondered why she wasn’t happier even thought she worked so hard. After describing her situation for a while, she confided that she had been juggling so many different tasks that she was unable to take the time to look at her life meaningfully or even begin to understand what balance means.

It’s easy to get sucked into living a fast-paced life and forgetting to enjoy the journey. The key to living a happy life is to have the self-awareness to evaluate what you’re currently doing and introduce some new ideas to become more balanced. Let’s look at how reflecting, prioritizing, and relaxing can help you create balance between your professional and personal life.

It’s important to reflect on what you’re doing so you can identify what really matters to you in life. When you reflect consciously you can make adjustments that will help you feel better. It’s up to you to decide what you want to focus on in life. Do you want to work fifteen hours a day at the office or spend more time with your significant other? Will you regret taking on anther work project instead of spending more time with your kids? You have the ability to prioritize your efforts and decide which ones merit the most attention and you get to choose whether you live meaningfully. Take the time to reflect on what’s really important to you and make a conscious decision to move in a positive direction.

The next balance-increasing idea is to prioritize. If you work too much you might consider increasing the amount of time you devote to your personal life. If you don’t work enough you can make an adjustment to increase your activity level. The idea is to be somewhere in the middle between all work and all play. You don’t have to be perfectly balanced all the time, but it is more enjoyable to spend your time in the middle where you’ll feel more calm and relaxed instead of struggling with extremes.

It’s also important to relax regularly. Taking frequent breaks is beneficial to your body because is helps you replenish your energy and brain power. Although you might be able to endure arduous activity for long periods, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is good for your body or mind. You weren’t designed to go at top speed permanently and you aren’t built to process and endless stream of overwhelming information. Relaxing means not doing anything for a period of time so you can function more effectively overall. You can relax by taking a walk, doing non-strenuous exercise, meditating or breathing mindfully. The idea is to interrupt the non-stop action going on in your life.

When you possess a high level of self-awareness you realize that life isn’t a perpetual rat race where you constantly exhaust yourself. The discomfort you feel when you’re out of balance arises because you’re missing a stable center point. Experiencing too much of anything has a tendency to marginalize the other areas of your life. To restore balance you just need to take the time to adjust your life by incorporating more of what’s missing. If you work too much, relax a little; If you are always napping, take action more often. You don’t have to do everything at once, just make small adjustments to balance things out. What will you do to find balance?

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Awareness and Choosing Your Path - On Developing Self-Awareness and Being Self-Aware

Self-Awareness and Choosing Your Path

/ / Self and Self-Awareness, Self-Awareness, Self-Consciousness / , ,

Self-awareness allows you to consciously and deliberately choose your path in life because, when you know yourself well deep inside, you’re able to manage your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in a way that leads to success.

There are no rules as to which path you need to take in life. All you have to do is continue building self-awareness and move in a direction that makes you deeply happy and reflects your true self. That means that you get to choose what you want to do and how you want to do it based on your talents and abilities.

People hold themselves back because they choose paths in life that don’t reflect who they really are. The trick is to be self-aware enough to understand what your strengths and areas for improvement are and then plan a course of action that helps you learn and grow while making your dreams come true.

What will you do to develop self-awareness and choose the path in life that is a natural fit for you?

Cheers,

Guy

Key Team Building Questions Self-Aware Leaders Ask Themselves - On Developing Self-Awareness and Being Self-Aware

Key Team Building Questions Self-Aware Leaders Ask Themselves

/ / Self-Awareness in Leadership /

Self-aware leaders are comfortable with themselves and are always asking themselves questions about how they’re doing and how they might improve, including on issues like team building.

The standard approach to team building helps people bond casually but often neglects the deeper things that bring people together. As a leader all you have to do is look deep inside yourself and determine whether you’re ready to build great teams. Here are some key questions you can ask yourself to improve the results you get from team building.

Empathy

Do people deeply understand other people’s points of view and are they able to empathize with others?

Listening

Do people really listen to each other and let the other person say whatever is in his or her mind? Do they do it without interruptions, sarcasm, punishment, jokes or advice-giving?

Long-Term Commitment

Is your organization firmly committed to helping people build stronger teams long-term? Is there a culture of team building from the top down?

Deeper Connection

Do people interact with each other on a deeper level? Do they move past superficial conversation to really getting to know each other?

Mutual Support

Are people there for each other no matter what? Do they consistently help each other because they genuinely care?

Think about how your team building philosophy meshes with the ideas we’ve talked about. Team building can yield much greater results for your organization if you move beyond short-term efforts and shift to approaches that are aimed at the values, culture and functioning of the organization. What will you do to develop self-awareness and promote team building in your company?

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Aware Leadership and the Compassionate Workplace - On Developing Self-Awareness and Being Self-Aware

Self-Aware Leadership and the Compassionate Workplace

/ / Self-Awareness in Leadership / , , ,

A lot of leaders think that it’s impossible, or impractical, to behave with compassion in the workplace. Self-aware leaders understand that building a compassionate workplace is possible. You can design any type of workplace you wish, from the harshly autocratic to the kind and compassionate.

You can consciously promote compassion in the workplace by doing things like:

  • Behaving with kindness.
  • Treating people like human beings.
  • Supporting flexible work hours.
  • Providing benefits.
  • Allowing people to grow.
  • Allowing employees to think for themselves.
  • Encouraging diversity and inclusion.
  • Listening to people’s ideas and concerns.
  • Giving people responsibility.
  • Understanding that people have lives outside work.

I can hear the steam coming out of some leaders’ ears as they struggle with the idea that you can actually create a compassionate workplace and get stuff done. For too long, the norm has been to build workplaces that subjugate and control people instead of helping them grow and succeed. You can be the one to use self-awareness to break that cycle, especially if you’re in a leadership position.

What will you do to increase self-awareness and promote compassion in your workplace?

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Aware Leaders Help Their Employees Succeed Rather Than Bossing Them Around - On Developing Self-Awareness and Being Self-Aware

Self-Aware Leaders Help Their Employees Succeed Rather Than Bossing Them Around

/ / Self-Awareness in Leadership /

A lot of leaders who lack self-awareness are great at bossing their employees around but less adept at helping them succeed. Self-aware leaders understand that helping is different from directing because it focuses on what you can do to support your employees so they can thrive and excel instead of forcing them to complete tasks. The standard leadership model is like sports coaching, where you talk at people and push them to do something, whether they want to or not, rather than finding ways to have them motivate and educate themselves from within.

Helping is a valuable tool to improve staff morale, increase productivity, build stronger teams and promote excellent workplace communication. You can delegate more effectively and give your staff the opportunity to demonstrate what they can do. Here are some tips you can use to begin being more self-aware and helping instead of giving orders:

  • Offer educational opportunities.
  • Praise the things they do well.
  • Support employee skills and talents.
  • Don’t discipline, help people learn from their experiences.
  • Let employees have independence.
  • Give employees decision-making ability.
  • Use employees’ ideas.
  • Allow various points of view and approaches.
  • Brainstorm.
  • Listen to employees.
  • Problem-solve collaboratively when appropriate.
  • Help employees find their own solutions.
  • Direct less.
  • Meet regularly to listen to employee feedback.
  • Help people keep growing and advancing.

Self-aware leaders know that, when their employees feel their skills and abilities are being recognized and utilized, the organization benefits. By helping instead of bossing, you get to create a happy workplace environment which, in turn, reduces turnover, hiring costs, morale problems and other glitches.

Helping is an ongoing process that encourages employees to learn and grow. When you help someone, you move from directing to encouraging them to succeed based on their own interests, talents, and abilities. What will you do to increase self-awareness, boss less, and help more?

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Awareness and How You Treat Other People - On Developing Self-Awareness and Being Self-Aware

Self-Awareness and How You Treat Other People

/ / Self-Awareness, Self-Consciousness / , ,

Many individuals walk through life missing the self-awareness to understand how their thoughts and actions impact others. One of the hallmarks of understanding yourself well is that it helps you be so happy and balanced that you treat other people well. The better you feel about yourself, the easier it is to interact positively with other human beings and create a more positive world. Here are some signs that you practice self-awareness and treat others with care and compassion:

  • You experience positive results from your interactions with others.
  • You create meaningful friendships.
  • You feel good deep inside.
  • Your relationships are reciprocally satisfying.
  • You don’t have a lot of enemies.
  • People generally say nice things about you.
  • You experience very little conflict with others.
  • Your default behaviors are kindness and empathy.

I these outcomes sound familiar, you know how wonderful it feels to like yourself and others. Life is too short to behave negatively and step on others when there are so many other more positive options. What will you do to treat others wonderfully?

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Awareness and Thinking about Others - On Developing Self-Awareness and Being Self-Aware

Self-Awareness and Thinking about Others

/ / Self-Awareness, Self-Consciousness / , , , , ,

Perhaps you’ve met individuals who assure you they possess self-awareness and then trample all over other people. It’s like the boss who says she’s wonderful and caring and shouts at her employees or the husband who says he’s a great guy but does things that deeply hurt his spouse.

When you have a high level of self-awareness you naturally think about others. The more comfortable and knowledgeable you are about what drives your thoughts, feelings and behaviors, the more likely you will be to feel happy and balanced and treat other people in a caring, compassionate way. If you solely care about your money, your power, your own success, your immediate needs, your safety, or your own point of view, you’re less likely to think about other people.

The key to living a genuinely fulfilling, happy life is to realize that you can take care of yourself and others, not just one or the other. As you become healthier and more tuned in to who you are deep inside, you’re much more likely to help others do the same. What will you do to keep building your self-awareness and thinking about others?

Cheers,

Guy

The Self-Awareness Guy