From student to confident professional
When it comes to the top skills of effective leadership, nothing trumps self-awareness. As I’ve mentioned previously, improving your self-awareness can have a positive effect on your level of self-confidence. That should be enough to make most people want to focus in on this important attribute! But in case it isn’t, here are another 11 benefits of self-awareness that are in your best interest to experience.
Life coach, business coach, relationship coach – what the heck are all these fancy titles? It’s no wonder there’s so much confusion in the world about what the coaching profession is all about! Let’s dive in to what leadership coaching is centered around, and why it’s so beneficial to those who engage in it.
Let’s be real here: communication is often a make-or-break skill for an aspiring leader.
The first two segments of this series on core leadership skills explored two critical starting points for a growing leader. We started with self-awareness, which is a very internally-based component of leadership. Then we moved to how to develop relationships with followers/reports (which is often done on a small-but-intense scale). With communication as the focus of this post, the size of the stage that we play on as leaders is takes a major jump!
When we think about leadership, our relationships with others aren’t usually the first thing that jumps to mind.
Instead, the focus might be on creating motivation, pushing a teams to greater heights, or running into a new project with full steam at the head of the pack.
We might also think in terms of personal, self-directed growth. We look at who we are as individuals, what our strengths are, how we can maximize our gifts.
As discussed last week, self-awareness is certainly the first area of focus when it comes to becoming an excellent leader. However, effective leadership works through the relationships we have with others, and that’s the focus of this post.
If you go back to our post about what the four core leadership skills are, you’ll notice the big emphasis that was put on self-awareness. What makes self-awareness so important?
One aspect of this importance is that all three of other core skills rely heavily on a person being solidly self-aware. If you don’t know yourself, it’s hard to really know who others are beneath the surface. The other part of the self-awareness equation is this: improving your self-awareness builds the confidence needed to step into your full leadership potential.