5 Tips to improve your self-awareness to open opportunity doors

Have you ever received a task from your manager and you didn't understand what he wants after an hour of explaining? Have you ever give directions to coworkers and discovered later that they did it totally wrong? Do you interrupt people and don't want anyone to interrupt you?

If yes, then you have poor communication skills. This results from lacking self-awareness, which leads to missed deadlines, burned-out employees, and bad performance.

Today, when the world turns out to adopt remote working systems, communication becomes more difficult. So, to excel in your career and take leadership positions, you've to develop your self-awareness to maintain more effective communications skills, leading to more productivity, engagement, inspiration, and retention of good employees.

So, What's Self-awareness?

Self-awareness is defining your image of yourself as well as defining people's image of you. When you're self-aware, you become a leader, high-performer, decision-maker, excellent communicator, and genuinely confident person.

Although many people believe that they are self-aware, only a few of them truly are. In one of Harvard Business Review articles, they have mentioned that only about 5000 respondents, about 10-15%, are qualified as self-aware.  

Moreover, the study found that when the leader and the team have the same opinion about the leader, more efficiency, productivity, and the team learn new skills and have more powers.

Leaders defer this to the changes in the work environment and systems, making more formal feedback and giving orders leave a bad effect on the work progress. Employees now put more confidence in managers who are friendly and communicate to them, not at them.

The good news is that you can start developing your self-awareness from now. To ensure your self-awareness, here are some tips to boost your self-awareness:

Obtain Feedback

"Feedback is the breakfast of champions"… it becomes a buzzword in our work world nowadays. So, it's a key for leadership. Getting feedback from people in higher positions and getting feedback from team members is essential to draw a real image of yourself. Try to maintain regular a Regular, anonymized 360-feedback questions that will show how your team sees you. This will help you to learn, grow, and improve.

Evaluate Your Success and Failures

Spend more time evaluating your success and failure situates to define factors that lead to both results. This will help you learn from your mistakes, develop more actions, and maintain factors that lead to successful projects.

Keep Learning

Learn new things every day, professional or personal. Continuous learning is essential to cope with the current, constantly changing world that needs only professionals. Moreover, when you keep learning, you become humbler as you always remember that you're not, Mr. know it all. Stay inspire and have patience because you'll truly be rewarded. There are still new skills to learn and achievements to accomplish.

Maintain Your Mental Health

Contemplative meditation, which you practice for some minutes, has been proved to increase concentration and allow people to pay more attention to details. This brain stimulation will help you to be effective listeners by being able to deal with outside distractions. You'll avoid all stressing factors, and you will be able to concentrate on what you're doing only.

Measure Your Self-Awareness Level

As we live in a world of numbers, assessments, and measurements, many tests can help you evaluate your self-awareness and discover new traits in your personality. Some checks define the skills that you've developed over time and changes in your mindset. On the other hand, assessments can help you measure your emotional intelligence level and recommend steps that you can follow to develop your weak areas.

If you want to be a leader who can successfully: empower his team, inspire people, communicate his plans, and develop more personal and professional relationships that open more doors for opportunities that mean more success, you've to keep growing your self-awareness all the time because in some point it will be a skill that everyone must-have.