Self-awareness: The Core of the Personal Ecosystem

Self Awareness by Paulo Zerbato

When I began my study of emotional intelligence fifteen years ago, I was pretty excited about my discovery. This is it! EQ, not IQ, is the silver bullet! But despite the evidence that it’s a consistently positive differentiator, it’s not embraced as the “way to be” that I had envisioned. IMHO, the reason so many people discount it is the belief that it’s more important to control feelings than to explore them, stemming from a lack of comfort with emotions in general, their own and those of others.  Resistance to accepting and going into your own feelings creates a shaky relationship with your “star player” – You.

Life (everything) is an ecosystem of relationships and interdependencies. The nucleus – the first relationship around which the system builds – is the one we have with our self.  The quality of the sphere that expands and revolves around that center is directly related to the quality of the relationship at the core.  (Can you tell I’ve been watching the Cosmos series?)

In his recent book, Focus, Daniel Goleman updates his definition of self-awareness as the ability to decode the internal cues of our body’s murmurs, the decision rules derived by our life experiences, an inner radar that “holds the key to managing what we do – and just as important what we don’t do. This internal mechanism makes all the difference between a life well lived and one that falters.” This is inner focus, the prerequisite to other focus, and eventually outer focus. As human beings, we develop in that order. Self-awareness opens perspective, enabling empathy and social awareness (other focus) http://www.truba.g..s.html. These are prerequisite to the development of outer focus, the ability to manage the relationships in our personal ecosystems; the constantly flowing people, circumstances, and events in our lives.

Successful leadership development and coaching begin with self-assessment, often accompanied by 360° assessments that open up the blind spots caused, ignoring those uncomfortable feelings. The point of starting with personal assessments is to raise self-awareness. As Goleman says, “it makes all the difference.” This leads me to the story I want to share.

Those of you that follow my exploits know that I facilitated a leadership development conference in Kenya last year for young women entrepreneurs working hard to lift themselves out of the slums of Nairobi.  We began the workshops with a sharing and discussion of what the participants learned from a Big Five Personality test they all completed the week before.  The majority had high scores for Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness. But it was no surprise that many of them were also high on the neuroticism scale, which had to be explained because many of them did not understand the term and that it meant emotional instability. But when they learned that it meant moodiness, irritability, and sadness, they were amazingly quick in realizing this trait was an outcome of their life experiences and the way they suddenly opened with their reflections gave me goose bumps! They began to share their stories and how good it was to have confirmation of their strengths and values, and a renewed confidence in reaching their goals.

One of the young women, who cried the entire time she shared her story, returned to a follow up workshop facilitated by my colleague, Kirsti Tcherkyan, last month. Diana Mwendwa took the picture with Kirsti above to send to me with the message, “tell Olivia I’ve stopped crying.” More goose bumps, deep gratitude, and an affirmation my personal ecosystem is evolving and expanding quite nicely.