Awareness is one of the most valuable practices you can implement in virtually all areas of your life. Your conscious and subconscious mind become more engaged as various stages of awareness develop. Part of the benefit of becoming aware is that it will help you communicate with others much more easily and effectively.
An Introduction to Self-Awareness
As with many things in life, the roots of your skills, knowledge, and emotion lie within you. Happiness is not something we go out and get; it comes from within us. The same is true for awareness, and developing your self-awareness is the best place to start to lay a solid foundation for growth in your mindful leadership skills, including communication.
You can help develop your own self-awareness and communication skills by learning the four basic stages of competence, which can be applied to many different aspects of life and learning and should shed some light on the general learning process.
1. Unconscious incompetence. You don’t know what you don’t know and something makes you wish you did.
2. Conscious incompetence. You understand the value of what you’d like to learn and often make the decision to do so.
3. Conscious competence. You are actively learning and executing a new skill or habit, but it still requires conscious effort to do so and may involve a few failures along the way. Don’t give up!
4. Unconscious competence. Your new skill or habit gradually becomes second nature; you’re so familiar with what you’re doing that it requires little or no conscious effort and gets easier and easier.
Developing self-awareness is learning a new skill, and it’s extremely beneficial to learn self-awareness before attempting to be aware of everything else around you. That will come more naturally as you practice paying attention to your environment and people’s behaviors.
Please note: self-awareness is not the same as being self-conscious, narcissistic, or ego-driven. Acknowledging your skills, for example, and knowing you’re better at something than someone else without feeling the need to boast about it is a part of self-awareness. It becomes a matter of helping others rather than trying to keep things to yourself. The same thing can be said about acknowledging when you don’t know something and being open and willing to ask questions without fearing ridicule or judgment. Once you’ve begun developing self-awareness, it will be a matter of curiosity and a willingness to learn rather than anxiety and fear of failure.
Ultimately, developing self-awareness will allow you to recognize and realistically take a look at how others may see you. This in turn will help you to choose the way you communicate wisely, make sure your medium is appropriate for your message, and deliver your message or ideas in a way that resonates with people. Once this has become a habit for you, you’ll find yourself drawn to paying attention to your surroundings.
The World Outside of Yourself
Have you ever noticed that some people pay much more attention to the world around them than others? Some are trained to do this because of a job, but others do this naturally. It can be anything from a military veteran who memorizes the license plate numbers of all the cars in the parking lot to a waitress who has learned how to speak to people based on their body language and demeanor.
This part of your awareness comes down to one simple thing: paying attention to your surroundings. If you notice that someone on your team seems unmotivated, a simple conversation can work wonders to help them pull themselves out of that funk. It could also be something as mundane or seemingly trivial as noticing that something needs to be done or that someone dropped something. You never know how much your noticing may mean to someone else, and that simple act of taking notice could very well change the way things work as a whole.
No matter what the specifics may be, your communication skills will be centered in a state of awareness of self and others, making your kindness and empathy as a mindful leader shine through automatically.
