Self+Awareness

media type="custom" key="20410434"

Self Awareness
There are parallels between being self aware in a project setting and being emotionally self aware. Someone who is self aware understands what he/she does well and where he/she has weaknesses. A project manager might know that she is a very strong writer, so she takes on script writing tasks, but as a very poor coder, she brings in someone to help with development. An emotionally self aware person also understands how she feels in certain situations and why she feels that way. ([|Mind Tools, 2012]) Having heightened emotional self awareness gives people the wherewithal to react appropriately to emotional situations, an important quality in a leader. Having excellent self awareness also allows leaders to act in self assured and self confident ways without being falsely humble or over confident, often gaining the respect of their followers.

Improving Self Awareness
This activity, by [|Skills Converged]will help improve your level of self awareness by inviting you to understand and identify emotions. You can do it alone, or with partners, coworkers or friends. You only need to do steps 1-4 once. Continue to do step 5 daily or weekly to see continued improvement.

1. Take a stack of note cards and write as many emotions as you can think of, one emotion on each card. 2. Shuffle the cards 3. Pick two cards from the pile. 4. Reflect on what it would take for you to go from feeling the emotion on one card to the emotion on the second card. 5. Check in with yourself each day to ask: (Crompton, 2010) What am I feeling? What is the Source? How are those feelings coming out? For example, your shoulders might be tight because of the stress you're feeling at work. Use all the emotions you wrote on the cards, and think about what emotion you want to feel if you want to change it and what you need to do to get there.

If you need suggestions for more emotion names, you can find some on this Wikipedia list.

Self Awareness in Action
Sidney works at Acme as a project manager, recently she was passed over for the lead project manager on a project she was very excited to take on. When she was in the kick-off meeting for that project, she was asked to do some research. She knew she could easily excuse herself from that task and it would make life tougher for the person who was leading the project because they would have to do it. For a moment, Sidney thought about refusing to do the research, but she recognized that she was angry because she was passed over for the project lead and that she was not angry at the person who was selected to lead the project. She willingly offered to do the research.

Sidney was able to identify what emotion she was feeling and where the emotion came from, which allowed her to act like a professional team player. If Sidney had a low level of emotional self-awareness and didn't realize where her emotion was coming from, she might have refused to take on the research task to get back at the project manager. If she had an even lower level of self awareness she might not have recognized that she was angry and perhaps would have snapped at her coworkers or said something mean, acting purely out of unrecognized emotions.