Lead Strong 1 | Self-awareness
Lead Strong with Shelley Moore
1 | Starting with self-awareness as your foundation for unlocking your power
ON THIS EPISODE
Great leadership starts with self-awareness. Awareness of your strengths and lesser strengths helps you understand how to leverage your and others’ strengths more efficiently and productively to accomplish results.
Learn about the three parts of the mind and how they combine to make each of us unique.
Affective preferences include our feelings, emotions, beliefs, and values. Our feelings are a choice and can change over time.
Conation is part of the mind that represents our natural instincts and talent to strive and perform at our best with less stress. The objective is to reduce stress by following our instincts and doing tasks how they are natural to us.
Cognitive strengths represent our education, training, and skills that we have learned over time.
Assessments can be used as a baseline for understanding your strengths and those of others.
Being conscious of our strengths and actions gives us the power to gain confidence and learn more.
RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE
TRANSCRIPT
Hi everyone. This is Shelley Moore, and welcome to Lead Strong. This is my first lead set. The topic I decided to pick is self-awareness. I've said for years that the best leaders I know are the most self-aware leaders I know. And so, in the next 15 minutes, we are going to explore what exactly does self-awareness mean?
(00:25)
Early philosophers like Aristotle and Plato established long ago that there are three parts of the mind, the affective, the conative, and the cognitive. The affective part of the mind houses our emotions and feelings, and our feelings are a choice. Personality assessments look at the affective part of the mind at any time, and your results can change. If you've taken a DiSC, you understand how you rate the levels of dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness or compliance. Myers-Briggs looks at various aspects of how you show up in social settings or problem-solving situations. The Strengths Finder categorizes your primary themes for being motivated to achieve success. There are hundreds of others. They take a look at your values, your beliefs, your personality traits, how you externally relate to others, and also how you will internally relate to yourself.
(01:21)
Psychologists have spent much time analyzing the affective part of the mind. Our emotions about how we're made to feel about ourselves, but also other people, and how we were made to feel about the world through our upbringing and our conditioning from the environment from which we were raised. These aspects form our feelings, our emotions, and how we feel we should show up in situations versus how we might have natural tendencies to show up. Our emotions shape what we like and what we don't like.
(01:56)
The conative part of the mind takes a look at our natural instincts. It defines our modus operandi. These are our natural drives for how we'll strive in problem-solving. It's fixed. It doesn't change. It remains constant. So perhaps you know people who, every time something new happens, they get a little frazzled because it disrupts their routine. Or perhaps you know someone who, every time there's a new situation or a problem to be solved, immediately starts asking questions and interrogating everybody. Or maybe you know someone who is an idea person and their constantly coming up with ideas one after another where one day they can say, "Hey, let's do X." And then the next day it's, "Let's do Y." And they're often contradicting themselves. However, when it comes to originality, ad-libbing, being in the moment, and experimenting, you know, they just seem to pull solutions out of nowhere.
(02:58)
Maybe, in problem-solving, you know someone who just knows how to naturally build things. They know how to implement in terms of tools and equipment and materials that are high in quality, and when they build something from scratch, it's built to last. They make the things that museums are made of, the artifacts, the things that will never go away, and are the physical, tangible proof that something has existed. These implementers have the ability to be very concrete. They have to see it to believe it.
(03:35)
While on the other end of the spectrum, people who are shorter implementers are the people with imaginations who can abstractly conceptually see things in their mind, and they have no natural drive or instinct to pick up the hammer and nails and build something. Many times people think it's the personality differences that cause brain stress, but more times than not, it's conation. If we were asked to work against our grain, that usually causes mental stress. If we are hooked up to neurotransmitters and asked to do something different than how we would naturally do it, we can see the brain waves be in distress, versus if we're working within our grain, the brain waves are flat with no stress.
(04:22)
The objective in the conative part of the mind is to be stress-free, to be free to be ourselves, and to do things the way we were naturally meant to perform. This is our God-given gift, to use our strengths, and our talents, to create and problem-solve. It is what we will and won't do naturally.
(04:44)
The cognitive part of the mind has to do with how we think and how our brains process information. Our IQ certainly falls in this arena, and so do our education, training, and habits. It's about the things we've learned, how we learned, and the experience we have gained. It is what we can and can't do, based on the knowledge and skills we have gained over time.
(05:18)
See, I believe that these three parts of the mind are as unique to us as our DNA or our fingerprint. I don't believe that we were designed to be well-rounded human beings, perfect. That there's a perfect way to be. So when you take such assessments that will help with your self-awareness, the objective isn't to say there is a perfect way to be because those three parts of the mind come together. They represent the manifestation of our DNA and, how we were raised, how we were conditioned. But also how we can transform ourselves emotionally to believe differently in what's possible.
(06:01)
And when we can get out of our way, we can shift our feelings, which are choices, about the world and ourselves in the world. We can access our natural instincts to problem solve in new and different ways that will allow us to learn and gain knowledge, training, and experience to do anything that we really want to do. The problem is, as human beings, when we aren't self-aware, which I actually believe most people aren't self-aware. I think most people live their lives very unconsciously. They go from one moment to the next. They allow distractions to get in the way, or they just simply don't think with intentionality. In terms of every moment of every day, you have control of it.
(06:52)
You're able to force discipline, to take those aspects of yourself that are true strengths that could be utilized to great efforts, to make the change and transform organizations and even people that you interact with on a day-in and day-out basis. And if you're able to take the whole part of who you are and modify and change those beliefs that are bad and get in the way or cause you to work dysfunctionally with other people because maybe your egos are in the way or your fears are in the way. And those things that you feel you can't do, to stop you dead in your tracks, and then you do look for those distractions, those things to get in the way and take you off course and put you into an unconscious state of mind that disrupts any real opportunity that you have to create great change.
(07:52)
And the thing is when we can't see ourselves, you know, if we aren't open to going and taking some of those assessments to see how we actually do profile because sometimes our self-perceptions aren't really accurate. So you need to do assessments to really baseline and even see how you can change in some areas over time. And those leaders that do that, that, that will assess themselves, that will set those baselines, are those who start to see who they are. And they also can understand others and see others in new and different ways. Because when you know yourself more and more, which is a continual journey, not a destination, we are all messed up as human beings, and we will change and evolve in some ways. But when we can see that, and we can be honest and humble with ourselves, we can see other people in more clear and real ways.
(08:54)
I call that being able to support another person comprehensively. We can embrace the wholeness of being human and understand that we're all a bit F'd up in some ways. Yet, with discipline and intentionality and care and concern for ourselves and others, we're able to work together and collaborate, creating synergy in all of our strengths coming together because each of our strengths creates some pretty big differences.
(09:35)
For myself, you know, I dig into facts. I research, understand accuracy and precision, and what I know is important. Likewise, I'm very strong in originating, creating ideas, and managing resources at the moment. However, when it comes to imagining a tangible solution, I am very short, say, in the implementer range. I'm not going to pick up the hammer and nails, and I'm not going to build anything, so why should I try? It's going to create stress. However, if I really believe in those in-depth ideas I've researched, I will seek the talents of others. I will create that synergy with others to form and transform a new reality, a new tangible reality that someone else can help design and help build and help create. That environment will be a place where people can continue to exchange ideas, build plans and implement those plans and make them a reality.
(10:42)
See, without knowing those things about myself or without you knowing as a leader what's natural to you and then what are the head worms that get in the way, that you can actually get out of the way with some true intentional effort to change your own limiting beliefs, then without that knowledge, without that openness to understand who you are, how can you lead others?
(11:13)
See, I do believe most people are pretty unconscious, and if you know leaders who kind of float and they act the part, but they aren't really doing the part. They have ego strength, personality, and charisma, but are they getting the job done? Are they knowing how to construct teams? Have they ever constructed a team? Do they know how to balance the synergies of others and see people for who they are? And create collaborative efforts that create change for the betterment of the whole. How many leaders you know today that are making high-impact change, and who do you trust? They're open, and they have true, good intentions for the best solutions for your community and your organization.
(12:02)
You know, when we look around, we see people creating stories and realities about other people that, a lot of times, aren't even true. And we see leaders that always seem to be compromised. Do they always seem to be talking out of both sides of their mouth, maybe? Or they aren't fully conscious and aware of how their actions aren't lined up with what they say they're going to do. It seems like today's world, with social media and hyperextension of communication of any perception that anybody has, really creates an inability to create credibility as a leader. But I think it's possible.
(12:44)
I think if you surround yourself with the right people and you have a true mission and a passion for something, and you zero in on the discipline and the actions and behaviors that it requires to fulfill your passion and don't let the distractions get in the way. Stay on target, build relationships, care about people, and see people. Be honest with yourself about who you are and what you have to offer, bring it to the table, and be open about it. And I think you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish. Trustworthiness, influence, and positivity are those types of traits where leaders can inspire people to achieve great things, but you have to know how to get out of your way. And you can only get out of your way if you have a strong basis of self-awareness. You're able to see yourself in a real way and transform yourself where needed to accomplish discipline and the action that's going to get you to where you want to go and bring others along with you.
(13:50)
I hope that you'll take a step today to be more self-aware and be conscious of your actions and your behaviors, and your intentions to make a real change in your world.
(14:12)
The Lead Strong podcast is hosted by me, Shelley Moore, and produced by Seth Creekmore.