Why self-awareness is a key to inclusive, modern leadership and your performance secret weapon
Ever ditched a spin class before the warm down? Jumped in the shower after a run instead of stretching? What about leaving a yoga class before savasana? For our founder, Elana, that’d be three big ‘yes, ma’am’s,’ but we know she’s not alone.
Whether it’s cutting a meditation short, skipping the stretch, or taking a ‘no corpse please’ approach to yoga, we all have our strategies for avoiding the slow down. And yet we also wonder why we’re feeling like zombified automatons most of the time.
More than ever, we are committed to equipping founders with the tools they need to create meaningful change. We want to see more women to feel and be at their best more often, which requires us to build a deeper understanding of who we are, what we value, what feels purposeful, and what recharges or drains us. In other words, it takes self-awareness.
Using our signature Ripple Effect Framework™, let’s take a look at how we can cultivate greater self-awareness and unleash it as our high performance superpower.
The hustle is hard, but slowing down can be harder
Ask any yogi and, chances are, they will tell you that savasana is the hardest pose of all. We might think it’s easy, or even a waste of time — to lie down on the floor, legs slightly apart and arms by our side. But instead, it’s a deeply conscious asana aimed at being fully awake, yet completely relaxed, and designed to assimilate and integrate the rest of your practice, calm the nervous system and promote equanimity in your entire body. It is a chance to see how much is *actually* going on for you, because even though you might think you’re ‘doing nothing,’ there is still so much happening.
Savasana is an almighty practice in self-awareness. It can feel both deeply restorative and extremely uncomfortable, and everything in between. It sees our bias for ‘doing’ and raises it an invitation to ‘be’.
So, what does this so-called ‘corpse pose’ teach us about the importance of slowing down?
Perhaps, firstly, that slowing down can be a radical act, and we rush it at our peril. But also that maybe there’s a reason we keep hearing that practices like yoga, journaling, meditation, and breathwork are our ‘productivity superpowers’. Ancient practices with myriad modern applications, the science has now caught up with what devotees have known all along: we cannot evolve our sense of self-awareness without them.
Paying attention to what’s actually happening
Most people think yoga is about perfecting the pose or touching your toes, but it’s actually about becoming an A+ noticer. Are my hips tighter than they were last week? Is my left side feeling more free than the right side? What does the ground beneath me feel like? Because here’s the thing: if you want to have more presence and impact, you have to get more present!
Yoga is fundamentally about being curious as to what’s going on, and meeting that experience with awareness, compassion and non-judgment. Think of it like collecting data from a living system, and then allowing our emotional intelligence to prioritise demands or explore our creativity.
It’s a similar concept for mindfulness meditation, journaling or any other practice designed to get us to switch off autopilot and start connecting with what’s actually going on around you and within you. Through regular practice, we learn to focus on our breath, body, and mind, which helps us tune in to our thoughts and feelings, and become more mindful of our actions and their impact.
This matters because what we are also fine tuning when we slow down is our internal operating system. We are noticing how full our cache is, how much battery we have, how many tabs we have open. And it is this self-awareness that organisational psychologist and executive coach Tasha Eurich, and others, have described as: “the meta-skill of the 21st century…critical for success in today’s world”. So, are you as self-aware as you think you are?
Are you as self-aware as you think you are?
Over several years, Eurich and her team of researchers embarked on a large-scale scientific study of self-awareness, involving 10 separate investigations and nearly 5,000 participants. What they found is that, even though most people believe they are self-aware (~95%), only a small handful (10-15%) actually are. Or as Eurich facetiously puts it: “80% of us are lying to ourselves about whether we’re lying to ourselves.” So, why such a large discrepancy?
Part of the reason is that we often think of self-awareness as being about ‘introspection’ or the examination of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. However, the research shows that people who introspect are often less self-aware, not only compared to others but compared to what they think they are. *Awkward*.
What Eurich and her team also found is that introspection not only impacts our self-awareness, but it’s also making us less happy, more stressed, more depressed, more anxious, less in control of our lives and less happy in our jobs. Yikes.
One reason for this is that so much of what goes on in our minds is subconscious, and therefore inaccessible (at least without a little help, but more on that another time).
Getting to the core of our motivations, behaviours and thoughts through reflection and introspection is often ineffective because it can reinforce cognitive biases (e.g. confirmation bias) that already exist in the mind. By giving inflated credence to our underlying values and assumptions, we effectively thwart any efforts to nurture greater self-awareness. So, how can we ‘get better’ at building self-awareness?
When it comes to self-awareness, start with ‘what’ not ‘why’
As purpose-driven business leaders, we know the importance of starting with ‘why’. However, when it comes to cultivating greater self-awareness, asking ourselves ‘why’ will not help us get closer to the answers we are seeking. Instead, the question we are looking for usually starts with ‘what’?
What am I noticing when I start to pay attention?
What happens in my body when I think about that deadline, that client, that project, that person?
What am I believing about myself, or someone else, in this situation?
What would make today great, even if nothing else happened beyond this morning?
What is my definition of productivity and success in this instance?
What happens when I pay attention, or are there any signs of fatigue I am ignoring?
There are many powerful and incisive questions that you, or a developmental leadership coach (hi, hello!), can ask to help flex your self-awareness muscles and build your personal mastery. And the way we see it, it starts with these four elements:
Physical awareness
Emotional awareness
Inner battery-level awareness, and
Nervous system awareness
Supporting greater EQ by cultivating self-awareness
Most of us spend so much time in our heads these days that we sometimes forget how deeply interconnected, and overwhelmingly intelligent, our bodily systems can be for giving us clues as to how we are feeling in any given moment.
For example, if we asked you to rate your battery level today, where would it be? 100. 80. 60. 40. 20. 0? Without thinking about it, your body's intelligence resonated with one of the numbers you just read. Were you present enough to notice it?
Similarly, if we asked you: ‘does your body feel light, heavy, stiff, sore, hot, or cool right now?’ could you tune into your body’s current state? Could you identify what emotions you are sitting with right now? Whether that’s joy, sadness, frustration or delight, simply notice and take stock.
We want to get great at listening to what our body’s giving messages and signals about. Learning to harness that awareness can unlock levels of productivity, creativity and problem solving we never thought possible.
Remember, we can’t control the external things that happen around us, but we can change how we show up to meet those events and how we move through this world.
Getting a sense of where we’re at physically, emotionally and energetically at any given moment can help us make informed choices and set helpful boundaries that make your life feel like it’s happening less ‘to’ you, and more ‘by’ you.
Need a deadline to be at your most productive?
As sophisticated as our human operating systems are (and as opposable as our thumbs are too), one thing that has not upgraded is how our neural wiring responds when threat occurs.
Hands up, who feels like they’re never more productive than when there’s a last minute deadline? There’s a reason for that.
The fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, or what we like to call our ‘what the eff’ modes are our body’s natural reaction to danger. It happens through hormonal and physiological changes that allow us to act quickly and protect ourselves.
Of course, back in the day it was *literal* tigers we were running from. Now, for most of us, it’s a hard conversation, a tight timeline, a challenging diagnosis, or even an ill-timed email that has our adrenals activated and our cells flooded with cortisol and even dopamine.
No human is immune to this. Please read that again. No human is immune to this.
While we have evolved in many ways, our brain and biology still respond in the same way. We are all hardwired to be like this, which is simultaneously extremely helpful and extremely unhelpful.
Over time, our bodies can become addicted to the chemical release so much so that our threat response system can become locked into ‘go, go, go’ mode and start to seek out its fixes. On the other hand, our system can get overloaded and shut down altogether, giving us an almighty ‘no, no, no’ and flicking on an involuntary ‘out of office’ until we can do a major system reboot.
That’s why we have as the final, and perhaps most important, element for building your self-awareness muscle as a deep understanding of your autonomic nervous system.
Spotting modern day tigers
Getting good at recognising *what’s happening* when our bodies have tipped into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn (aka what the eff modes) is not only critical for modern leaders, but necessary for avoiding burn out.
We must learn how to spot modern day tigers when they pounce, and do small things each day to return us to an anchored foundation. Otherwise, we risk being stuck on the hustle culture hell-ride forever.
What that means is that when our nervous system is busy fighting or flighting or freaking the hell out, we need a rolodex of science-backed and regular self-care practices to help us pump the brakes and regulate ourselves.
From breathwork to meditation to movement practices, we need to send signals to our body that it’s safe and the coast is clear.
But what we haven’t mentioned yet, is that as important as it is to slow down — we also need to be able to harness our autonomic nervous system to dial up the urgency when it’s called for.
It’s called the mid-zone, and it’s where inclusive, modern leaders are starting to play with a set of self-authored daily rituals, rhythms and routines to make sure we can still run from tigers but that we aren’t jumping at shadows.
Playing in the mid-zone
It’s unrealistic and, frankly, unhelpful to think we can slow our lives down completely, and sit in contemplation all day every day. Most of our worlds just don't work like that, or at least not as they’re currently designed. And this might be a good thing.
Because while it’s dangerous for our bodies and minds to be on high alert all the time, idleness and sedentariness can also chip away at our humanness and cause problems of their own.
*Only* wanting to slow down can mean that we’re as equally stuck on autopilot and in need of a system upgrade as if we were overworking and hustling all the time.
No longer do we want to swing hard on the pendulum of life from go, go, go → to no, no, no, and back again. We have to start planting ourselves in the mid-zone.
How to be and do your best more often
Being in greater alignment with your best self is the most effective way we know how to support your sustainable high performance and help you make the biggest mark on the world. That’s because — the more aligned you are, the greater your flow is, the more options and choices are available to you, and the easier it is to do and feel your best more often. Alignment, in many ways, is the ultimate antidote for burnout.
The key to sustainable high performance is getting good at knowing and feeling what you love, and what works for you — not implementing some step-by-step process designed by someone else who doesn't live your life.
It’s about creating a self-awareness practice that works for you, and designing from the inside out what you love and what creates calm and recharge for you, rather than taking off the shelf what works for someone else.
As much as we might want to, we can’t control the external things that happen around us. But we can change how we show up to meet those events and how we move through this world.
Cultivating greater self-awareness and redefining sustainable high performance on our own terms helps to ensure that we have enough energy to fix the systems that are no longer working, and the tools to create better ones.
Don’t want to wait a minute longer to create change? Here at foundher., we educate and equip inclusive leaders with upgraded definitions of productivity and performance fit for the modern world.
Our leading Ripple Effect Framework™ guides every experience, program, and partnership we create; a toolkit that catalyses your greatest impact by building skills that enable you to unlock greater capabilities, increase productivity and release self-confidence and courage. And it all starts with self-awareness.
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