Top 5 tips to help understand yourself better

Do you think we ever truly know ourselves? As leaders, it is vital we understand our reactions and approaches to situations and people. In truly understanding ourselves we then use our strengths to help others and continue to develop ourselves. Knowing our weaknesses means we can offset them and work to change our approach.
Here are 5 tips:

1. Examine your life. Explore your values and what motivates you. Truly understand your strengths and talents. If you don’t understand how you feel and what you think then how can you help others? It’s part of you growing as a person and a leader. It’s about leading yourself. How can you lead others if you can’t lead yourself? Knowing what you believe in really makes the difference.

2. Look at how you handle change situations when it is “done to you”. Understand your reactions and your behaviours. Look at your behaviour as it makes a huge difference to the people around you. Really work to understand your triggers are and how to help yourself by taking a different approach.

3. Do you really understand your personality type? Are you driven by emotions or recognition? Are you an introvert or an extrovert? By understanding your personality, it identifies what you need to do to be successful. There are a lot of personality tests but a free one is https://www.16personalities.com which I’ve used several times. Do you always do things the same way? Often within our personalities, we like consistency and reliability but sometimes doing something a different way can reawaken your creative streak, give you new insights and open up a whole new world.

4. Leaders understand their own emotions and those around them. This is key for effectiveness. As a leader, it helps you respond the right way. Once you understand yourself, you know the impact and accordingly adjust as needed. It helps you to inspire and motivate as a result. Self-awareness helps you be more creative and make sounder decisions. 

5. To be more self-aware you need to seek feedback. It needs to be genuine, honest feedback. A good way is through a 360 feedback which is anonymous and has set rules. The environment for genuine feedback needs to be safe. Informal chats often give you insight though. Colleagues often say things that make you stop and think. If you don’t agree, ask for specific examples to understand. Don’t dismiss it, if it’s not what you want to hear. Analyse and explore. Is there a nugget of information that could make you develop.   Feedback is often a recognition of contributions you’ve made and how you handled it. Record the positive affirmations into a journal so when you are having a bad day you can read them.

 

Let me know how you get on with these?

 

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