What to be a leader? Start here…Self-awareness

Your first role in leadership, how did you get here?

• You are new to your leadership role and you want to be great. 
• You have been a leader for quite some time but you don’t feel you are connecting with your team. 
• You are a small business owner and a leader by default. 
• You grew within your organization and eventually, you were promoted into leadership.

Regardless of how you got to leadership, the thing that matters most is that you are successful in your leadership role. Leadership success is a combination of many skills but the foundation of great leadership is self-awareness. Without basic, foundational self-awareness you will never be one of the great leaders. 

According to https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-self-awareness, self awareness is: your ability to perceive and understand the things that make you who you are as an individual, including your personality, actions, values, beliefs, emotions, and thoughts. Essentially, it is a psychological state in which the self becomes the focus of attention.

Your ability to be self-aware allows you to look at yourself and assess who you are, what you believe and how you behave. That includes how you lead others. Self-awareness is your openness and willingness to look deep within yourself and find areas that need to be improved. We identify what we need and we figure out how to make those improvements.  

The key words are openness and willingness. To be self-aware, you have to be open enough to look at yourself and willing enough to make the changes, otherwise, what’s the point?

To quote Robin Sharma: “To be a great leader, first become a great person.” Are you? Are you genuinely a good person? Great leaders are not built on half-committed, arrogant ball-busters. Great leaders are built on fully committed, confident people that have a desire to develop people and business. 

If you are not willing to take a look at yourself, then leadership is not for you. If you want to fight for it, start with self-awareness. And by all means, hire a leadership coach and listen to what they teach you.