Building Self-Awareness
What is Self-Awareness?
Self-awareness in the workplace represents the ability to appraise your emotions, behaviours, strengths and limitations and recognize their impact on others. It serves as the foundation for improving interpersonal communication, enhancing decision making ability and promoting teamwork between employees. Being tuned into your inner emotional experiences and behavioural patterns can therefore, help foster a more collaborative and positive work environment.
Why is Self-Awareness Important in the Workplace?
Enhances Emotional Intelligence
Allows employees to recognize and manage emotions more diligently, thereby improving their capacity to handle difficult emotional states and enhance productivity.
Improves Communication within People
A better understanding of your emotions encourages empathy, allows you to express yourself more effectively and build better connections in the workplace.
Recognising Strengths and Weaknesses
Assists employees become more aware of their abilities and helps them enhance their efficacy at work.
Enhances Decision Making within People
Awareness of their unique behavioural and emotional patterns enables employees to make rational and fair choices at work.
How to Enhance Self-Awareness at Work?
Practice Self Reflection
Take time out regularly to track your work performance, interactions and emotional regulation patterns. Reflecting on how you faced challenges in the past, what you did well and how you could improve, can help you build emotional intelligence in the long term. By looking at previous emotional situations with a new emotional know-how, people can prepare themselves better for future situations. The following worksheet can be used as a guide for practicing self-reflection.
Practice Mindfulness
Once we understand our emotions, the next step for improving self-control is mindfully regulating them. Mindfulness is the ability to be fully anchored in the present and being aware of what you are doing and feeling in any given moment. The primary benefit of mindfulness is derived from its ability to dial down our body's response to stress. This practice can help you process your emotions, dispel intrusive thoughts, improve focus and attention, reduce stress and become more present focused. The following mindfulness exercise can serve as a good starting point for becoming more present oriented.
Recognise Emotional Triggers
Identify situations and interactions that elicit a strong emotional reaction from you in the workplace. Increasing awareness of how you react to particular workplace triggers can help you manage them more proactively. These triggers tend to vary across individuals but some common triggers may include:
- Pressure to meet deadlines
- Conflict with a colleague
- Workload imbalance
- Feedback or criticism from supervisor
- Lack of appreciation or recognition
- Changes in operations and procedures
- Inadequate support or lack of resources
- Work-life balance challenges
Assess Your Strengths and Weaknesses
Develop a better understanding of areas where you excel and can lean on to accomplish your goals and aspects where you are lacking and require improvement. This insight can provide an employee the necessary direction required for self-improvement. This is what an efficient strength and weakness analysis may look like:
Strengths – Examples
Creativity and Thinking
Creativity & Thinking
See Example for Analysis >>
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence
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Conflict avoidance Traits
Conflict avoidance Traits
See Example for Analysis >>
Teamwork Collaborate
Teamwork Collaborate
See Example for Analysis >>
Time Management
Time Management
See Example for Analysis >>
Define Personal and Professional Goals
Stipulate clear goals for growth based on insights gleaned from self-awareness practices. Regularly track progress and adjust plans. A concrete way to build self- awareness regarding your performance is to connect your daily work to the broader team or company goals. This allows you to stay attuned to why you are invested in doing what you are doing. You can use the provided worksheet to record your personal and professional goals.
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- Seek Feedback and Practice Active Listening
- Observe Others to Learn
- Managing Inner Self-Talk
- Self Clarity
Tune into your inner dialogue and determine whether you are overly self-critical. Reframe your thoughts by way of replacing the negative thoughts with rational ones. An effective way of modulating your negative self-talk is by using the 3C's method to catch, check and change negative aspects of your thought process. This approach involves identifying negative self-talk, testing it against reality and changing the unrealistic or irrational components of your inner dialogue. You can use the provided worksheet to effectively manage your inner self-talk.
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