One of the most intriguing facts of life is
how much we are aware of ourselves. This led me to formulate some of
the simple steps that can be implemented to understand our emotions and become
more self aware…
A key aspect of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is knowing your
emotions, allowing yourself to feel them, and expressing them
appropriately.
A second key
area is knowing your values. Your
values are the attitudes, beliefs, opinions and experiences that govern how you
behave. Your values shape the choices you make every day, and you're either in
or out of alignment with them. Your values are always a function of your life
experiences, so another good activity is to write your life's history. Now I'm
not talking a novel, but a couple of pages listing key experiences that have
shaped who you are, professionally and personally. You might
consider your family life, your education, your cultural heritage, major
successes and failures, traumatic events, and your hopes and aspirations.
The third key
component is assessing your skills. Your
professional life requires you to tap into a wide variety of functional and
technical skills. Skills are foundational such as, time management, building
relationships, and communicating effectively. And many skills are specific to
your job, function or industry like finance, design, or teaching.
A good way to determine which skills you need is to look at your job description and performance review. This will give you a list
of major skill areas and perhaps even an assessment of your skill level. You
want to identify where you're exceptional, acceptable and in need of
improvement. Another great tool is to use the assessment affiliated with the
Strengths Finder books. It provides and affordable and well-rounded view of
various skills.
A fourth key
component is your communication style. We
all have preferred ways of communicating that fall on a continuum ranging from
indirect, or even passive, through to assertive and direct, and all the way
over to aggressive. We also have communication patterns. Some people share
information in a linear point by point fashion, where others use a circular
style that weaves together information to arrive at the main point.
The fifth
theory to explore is your work style, knowing how you approach
work, and how your approach affects, and is affected by your colleagues, is
really valuable. One of my favorite tools is the DiSC Assessment. It's really
helpful when members of a team take it together.
The sixth key
component is your personality or temperament. This is
not how nice or outgoing you are, but is based on research in psychology and
measures how you view and approach the world. Again, there's some assessments
for this. The
two most prominent being the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and the Keirsey
Temperament Sorter .Both will
give you an understanding of how you process information, make decisions, work
with others, and organize your life.
Seventh, we all
have a conflict style, which is
how we approach conflict that's a combination of our assertiveness and our
commitment to cooperation. I recommend the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument
to assess your conflict style. You'll learn how you score on the five styles of
conflict and the best style to use in different situations.
The last major
component is your leadership style. This is
your philosophy and approach for how you lead others. There are lots of models out
there, but my two favorites are The Leadership Practices Inventory, which is
affiliated with the book The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes and Posner and the
Situational Leadership model by Ken Blanchard that's affiliated with the book
Leading at a Higher Level. There're other aspects of yourself to explore, but I
consider these the core eight, as they relate to our professional work.
Building this knowledge of yourself is not something you
can do overnight, so pace yourself. Pick a couple of things to explore first,
and then go from there. You'll also change over time, so self-exploration is a life
long journey, and a rather fun one at that.
Sd/-
Roohul Haq
No comments:
Post a Comment