Noticing and Mindfulness: Your Best Friends in Building Self-Awareness

Photo Credit: Lesly Juarez, Unsplash.com

Self-awareness is the key to becoming an effective leader, a topic we discussed here. As Tasha Eurich states in her book Insight, self-awareness in leadership is “the single most important, and yet least examined, determinant of success or failure.” She goes on to cite a PDI Ninth House study, “Accurate Self-Insight Decreases Derailment Risk,” which concluded that senior leaders who lack self-awareness are 600% percent more likely to derail, which costs companies a staggering $50 million per executive. So it’s probably safe to say that developing self-awareness belongs at the top of the development list for all leaders. However, the question often arises about the best way for one to get started in developing this crucial skill.

Developing Self-Awareness

While self-awareness is a relatively self-explanatory concept, getting to a place where you are regularly practicing effective self-awareness is not always simple. Many leaders have gotten so caught up in their hectic businesses and lifestyles that they’ve forgotten how to put themselves in a place where self-awareness is even possible. That’s why I wanted to rewind a bit in this post and talk about the basic building blocks of self-awareness: noticing and mindfulness.

Mindfulness has gotten a lot of press recently and I’m sure you’ve all seen countless articles on using mindfulness to fight anxiety, be more present in your daily life, and find inner peace. Unfortunately, many people don’t even know what mindfulness is. Really, what it all comes down to is noticing. Once you start noticing, your awareness increases and you can put mindfulness practices into place that will help you notice even more.

So what should you be noticing, anyway? Click here to continue on to the rest of this article, and the three ways of noticing that can help increase self-awareness and improve results!

Trish Cody is a speaker and coach whose work is focused on raising awareness of how our default tendencies and beliefs predict our capacity for success, and how those defaults can be adjusted to create more positive results. As a Certified Professional Coach and Energy Leadership Master Practitioner, Trish works with clients to uncover their core values and beliefs, and learn a process of leading energy to attract positivity and success naturally.

To learn more about how Trish can help you and your team with one-on-one coaching, team coaching or speaking at your event, please contact trish@trishcody.com.