Thrive Through Change - Exploring Self Awareness

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 Building self-awareness is a foundational aspect of leading a fulfilling, successful, and balanced life. Having higher self-awareness equips you with tools to navigate personal and professional challenges, fosters better relationships, and promotes overall well-being.

Further, self-awareness is not a ‘one and done’ skill. We might achieve powerful self-awareness at one stage in our life, but maintaining it will require some on-going attention, (re)connecting with and updating your understanding of yourself in the face of new life stages, new challenges, new environments, new audiences, new relationships and responsibilities for example. 

The model and tools shared in this worksheet are designed to support you and your team explore and develop your self-awareness. The good news it that building greater self-awareness provides most of us with immediate and dividends, indeed once you start you might not want to stop 

According to the Archetypes Model powerful self-awareness requires us to have both high internal and high external self-awareness.

Internal Self Awareness is high if we:

·  are aware of environments that suit us, 

·  know our strengths and development areas, 

·  are aware of our thought patterns, including biases and cognitive distortions (e.g. a tendency to overgeneralisation). 

·  know our core values and core beliefs, i.e. what drives us, what nourishes us and what triggers us. 

·  recognise and understand our emotions and emotional responses and what triggers them.

·  are aware of the impact physical factors on our behaviour, such as hunger, lack of sleep or illness (and how these can change as you age..)

External Self Awareness is high if we:

•  understand how others perceive us.

•  understand how our actions, behaviour and characteristics are viewed by others.

•  are receptive/ and seek feedback from others and allow ourselves to be open to understand how our behaviour affects them. 

•  understand the social dynamics and norms that influence us and how we are perceived in different context. (e.g. expectations for dress or formality in different work places for example or compared with expectations in a social setting)

•  have the ability to see a situation from another's perspectives. 

•  are able to adjust our behaviour to improve our teamwork collaboration and effectiveness (taking into account group dynamics, skills and needs of other group members, the context, your strengths etc)

Using the model to identify your current Archetype will also help to identify potential gaps to building greater self-awareness.

In finding and your current archetype it may help to map how your self-awareness has developed through the stages of your career. It is likely at the start of your career you had low(er) internal and external self-awareness. Can you identify triggers, experiences and actions that have supported you to develop your internal self-awareness and external self-awareness? Where are you today – and what’s the next step?

Note: Some people find it helpful to talk this all through with a trusted colleague or friend, someone who knows you well, is invested in your development who might be willing and able to challenge your assumptions. Working in partnership can increase accountability, motivation and perspective.

Questions to ask yourself once you have identified your current Archetype:

1.  Can you see ways you might develop your self-awareness?

2.  Where is the biggest potential for growth in your self-awareness? External or Internal Self Awareness?

3.  What you have done to develop self awareness in the past and what you might be willing to commit to in the future?

Two exercises to build self awareness are provided below. Could these help you developing further insights and self-awareness? 

Link to Tasha Eurich’s Free Self-Awareness Questionnaire can be found at : https://www.insight-book.com/quiz

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360 feedback is a popular tool which can be incredibly impactful but when conducted at work as part of a central initiative it can come with challenges for some, especially if it feel imposed on you. If you struggle with feedback  consider organising and getting your own 360 feedback, it might feel counter intuitive but it can remove a number of critical barriers. In this way you have power to identify your own ‘critical friends’* who you trust to help you ensuring you only get safe, useable, trusted feedback. Remember if you choose yourself these might be people inside or outside your current organisation (ideally both).

• *A "critical friend" is a trusted person who is willing and able to provide you constructive feedback and support with the goal of helping you improve your work, performance, or personal development. 

Ideally you will identify 2 to 3 ‘critical friends’ to provide feedback. Consider, if their initial feedback is useful, you might want to explore if they would be willing to provide regular feedback (e.g. every 6 months). Getting repeat feedback from the same ‘critical friends’ can make the process feel safer and more meaningful for both the feedback giver and getter.

See attached document for a draft template you can use to illicit feedback 

Remember to arrange time to talk feedback back 121 and ideally face to face

Instructions:

1. Think about your life as if it were a book.
2. Divide that book into ‘chapters’ that represent the key phases of your life.
3. Within each chapter or phase think of 5-10 specific ‘scenes’ within your story, these are: high points; low points; turning points; key memories; importance events; or key defining events.
4.  For each of the ‘scenes’ identified, provide an account that is at least one paragraph long. What happened and when? Who was involved? What were you and others thinking and feeling? What about this event was particularly important to you? What does this event say about you who you are and how you have developed over time, or who you might become?
5. You finished your account take a step back and look at your life story as a whole. What major themes, feelings or lessons do you see in your story? What does the story of your life say about the kind of person you are or might become? What does your story say about your values, passions, aspirations, fit, patterns, reactions and impact on others?

Note: Life stories created using this technique will usually identify overarching themes and identifying them can help us make sense of seemingly contradictory aspects of ourselves and create space to significantly increase our internal self-awareness