All good communication starts with your audience.
All good performances start with self-awareness.
Yet too few realise the first.
And only the very best make conscious efforts to consistently work on the second.
You may be sceptical about being self-aware.
But research has shown developing a depth of awareness makes us less frightened of failure, more enduring and resilient.
LeBron James, greatest basketball player in history agrees:
“As an athlete, there’s a lot of focus on physical fitness. It’s mental fitness I’ve always prioritised, and it’s just as important to my game, my career, and my life than anything I can do physically. The ability to focus and calibrate everything going on inside your mind is a skill that can be strengthened over time.”
There are two types of self-awareness: internal and external.
Internal self-awareness is how clearly you understand your values, aspirations and reactions to your lives through thoughts, feelings, actions and behaviours.
External self-awareness is understanding how people view you again using values, aspirations, feelings etc.
I’ll bring this to life for you and how you communicate through three examples.
1. Self-awareness will help you to have better conversations
Conversations are only as good as their inputs. You need to put into the conversation the right prompts for the other person to get meaningful and useful outcomes for you both.
But you will only do this if you understand how the other person is viewing you. Then you can be sure what they want to get out of the conversation, how you can help them, and even something as basic as what are they trying to say?
2. Self-awareness will help you prepare for your next communication moment
Put simply, your feelings and emotions are signals from your brain that something is going on and that something could be an opportunity or a threat. If you can properly recognise your emotional response to a situation then you will be able to prepare for it better.
It may be that you were nervous the last time you spoke at an all-hands meeting and felt you garbled your words. Having the awareness of what happened, how you felt and how this changed how you acted in that situation is the start point for next time.
3. Self-awareness will help you get better when something goes wrong
Throwing a hissy fit when something goes wrong may feel good at that moment but is rarely productive for you or your team. It can mask the actual feelings which will be the signals you need from your unconscious brain of what needs to change.
Having an overly emotional response may also alter how others see you.
You can only have an accurate perspective of what has happened and why something has gone wrong if you truly reflect instead of just react.
If you have awareness of yourself, the routines and teams you are in, and how all this helps or hinders how you perform, then you will be able to take steps to improving how you communicate in these and many other examples.
Then you can truly thrive.