Vertical Growth

7How to practise self-awareness

‘At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.’

Lao Tzu

We know from extensive research that self-awareness is the most important of all leadership skills. It's the skill that helps us interrupt the fast-brain habits that take us away from our values. It's what gives us the ability to manage the physical and emotional discomfort that comes from interrupting those habits. It unleashes us from our unseen limiting and destructive assumptions, thoughts and perceptions, and allows us to access our best self in times of pressure and stress.

Surprisingly, though, very few people know how to practically cultivate self-awareness. This is illustrated when we ask people a simple question: ‘If you were to practise self-awareness right now, what exactly would you do?’

We get all kinds of responses to this question, ranging from being aware of your impact on others, to thinking about your habits, asking for feedback, even following your breathing. But these answers miss the mark.

To be self-aware is to be mindful and conscious of what is going on inside us, then learning how to manage our experiences and habits to act more clearly, deliberately and wisely in real time, not after we have acted, when it's too late. In other words, we radically increase our ability to be driven more by our slow-pathway brain in the moment. This is what we call real-time self-awareness — the kind of self-awareness that is available ...