Why mastering the art of self-awareness is key to success as a business leader and in life, by Michael Bunting, leadership expert and best-selling author of 'Vertical Growth: How Self-Awareness Transforms Leaders and Organisations.'
All too often, we try to develop leaders by giving them new skills, tools and techniques. But none of these can inspire deep, fundamental, lasting change in leaders. The most fundamental and important aspect of all personal and leadership development is self-awareness.
Leaders who embrace the self-awareness journey become a beacon of growth and psychological safety for those around them. Instead of denying their mistakes, they are honest with themselves and others. They are interested, even excited, by seeing behaviours in themselves that are not working, and they are courageous enough to admit it. Instead of justifying, ignoring, and denying actions that hold them back from deeper insight and wiser choices, they want to understand where, how and why they’re falling short on their values and aspirations. And by doing so, they give others the safety and permission to do the same.
Self-awareness is the central foundation of what I call ‘Vertical Growth.’ Every year organisations will spend huge sums of money on sending their executive team to leadership development programs. However, it is almost a certainty that in the end there will be no lasting behavioural change or long-term improvement in company culture. This is because they’ve only spent their time at the program on acquiring new knowledge and skills (known as horizontal growth), such as empowerment skills, strategic planning skills, or delegating.
Vertical growth, on the other hand, involves both downward seeing and upward growth. We see downward (vertically) into our unconscious patterns of thought and behaviour and learn to deal with them with awareness, patience, and compassion. The more we do this, the more we increase our ability to grow upward in the direction of our values, aspirations, and ideals.
Vertical versus horizontal development
To get started on a journey of vertical growth, there are five key steps:
- Self-awareness: Self-awareness gives us the ability to consciously regulate our behaviour, and we cannot deliberately live a values-based life, nor can we learn to see, accept and compassionately take accountability for our shadow without first properly developing self-awareness.
- Respond with intention: The fast brain engages the parts of the brain that act impulsively, habitually and with short-term comfort in mind. The slow brain, on the other hand, engages parts of the brain that enable us to act with intention and awareness before our fast-brain reflex response takes over. To shift from our fast to our slow brain, we need to have clear intentions and deliberately choose our values and responses rather than being held hostage by habitual responses formed in our past.
- Disrupt patterns of behaviour: Between our comfort zone and our terror zone is what we call the growth edge. We can become comfortable in patterns that don’t serve us. So, in order to grow again, we first must disrupt our sense of order and move outside of our comfort zone to build a new, more functional order.
- Make values a ‘living practice’: Values are far more than 'yawn worthy' statements on a website. They represent an invitation to grow towards more functional order in our lives and organisations. When applied with self-regulation and internal honesty, they are living, breathing forces that direct our behaviour for our own happiness and that of others. Are your values a living practice? What practices do you use and what actions do you take daily to align with what you stand for? If you need to think about it, then it’s probably not operational in your life.
- Commit to daily action: It’s pointless to choose values without a daily commitment to deliberately cultivating that value in action. It's the daily commitment that gives you the opportunity to notice your habitual fast brain patterns, then to engage the slow brain by consciously regulating out of those patterns into a more values congruent, self-aware state.
We know from extensive research that self-awareness is the most important of all leadership skills. It’s the skill that helps us interrupt the reactive-brain habits that take us away from our values. It’s what gives us the ability to manage the physical and emotional discomfort that comes from interrupting those habits. It unleashes us from our unseen limiting and destructive assumptions, thoughts, and perceptions, and allows us to access our best self in times of pressure and stress.
This article was written by Michael Bunting. Bunting is a best-selling author and leadership expert who has worked with global brands such as Qantas, Novartis, HSBC, Kellogg’s, OMG, Swarovski, Hilton Hotels, CSIRO and the big four accounting firms. He believes that less than one percent of the population is truly self-aware and would like to share his top insights for how people can grow vertically to cultivate more self-awareness in their lives. Michael has also recently written a book called 'Vertical Growth', published by Wiley in October 2022. For more information, visit The Mindful Leader website.
