Sara Sheehan talks about self awareness and how vital it is to developing your leadership effectiveness. She details several foundational aspects of self awareness including active listening, gratitude, and consistent life habits. Sara confirms that mindset, which is part of self awareness, is one of the most powerful tools a leader can possess.
Active listening, one of the first foundations of self awareness, is the act of being fully present in conversations. Both engaging with others and identifying areas for improvement within yourself simultaneously. Sara explains the SCARF model, a tool for working on active listening, to guide your efforts.
In this episode, Sara Sheehan addresses gratitude and meditation as well as developing consistent life habits for yourself. Gratitude and meditation both contribute towards a positive mindset and personal resilience, according to Sara, and she breaks down how they’ve helped her. She also offers the habits that she’s worked on to better herself and explains how to engrain habits in your brain. Listen to what Sara shares and don’t hesitate to reach out to her if you’d like to learn more.
Resources discussed in this episode:
- BRAINZ magazine
- “SCARF: a brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others” by David Rock, first published in the NeuroLeadership Journal, Issue One, 2008
- Headspace
- Insights Timer
- Calm
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Contact Sara Sheehan | Sara Sheehan Consulting:
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Transcript
Sara Sheehan: [00:00:02] Hello there. I’m Sara Sheehan and welcome to my podcast Transformational Thinkers with Sara Sheehan. Today, I’d like to talk a little bit about self awareness and how it plays such a big role in any leader’s development. There’s a lot that goes into it. If, after listening to today’s podcast, you would like to learn more, check out the show notes for a link to book a meeting with me.
Sara Sheehan: [00:00:38] So today I’d like to talk about self awareness and the critical role it plays in effective leadership development. There’s a lot that goes into it. In terms of unpacking it, I first want to ground the discussion today in that the content that is framing this podcast is from an article that will be published in Brainz magazine. The title to the article is ‘Self Awareness: The Key to Effective Leadership Development’. Active listening is one of the most foundational parts of self awareness. Active listening means that you as a participant in a conversation, you are fully present in your conversation and you’re actually able to engage others and identify areas where you can improve, simultaneously. You’re able to gain insight on how you engage with others so that every interaction can become better. One of the tools that I find really helpful in talking about active listening and self awareness is David Rock’s The SCARF Model. And the SCARF Model is related to Status, which is about where you are in relation to others around you. Certainty, which is concerned with being able to predict the future. Autonomy, which provides a sense of control over events. Relatedness is a sense of safety with others, of a friend rather than a foe. And finally, Fairness. It’s a perception of impartiality and just exchanges between participants. This model really helps to consider how you might impact others in your interactions, but you can also find ways to make a conversation more beneficial for the other person.
Sara Sheehan: [00:03:29] Just take it into consideration. Think about how you relate with those domains and see how you might pull the lever differently in your next conversation. A lot of times there is an inner dialogue that’s taking place within your mind, clearly, that inner dialogue is literally between the ears and it is a critical part of your own self awareness, becoming more aware of the thoughts that are going through your mind. These thoughts and beliefs are things that you hold true about yourself. They can significantly impact your professional and personal life. Your mindset is an absolute help or inhibitor to your success. Becoming more aware of these thoughts, you can shift your success and future in a more positive direction. You have to choose to turn on a little bit more attention to what’s going on in your inner dialogue to do that. That’s the key.
Sara Sheehan: [00:05:00] I’d like to talk a little bit about gratitude and meditation and how these two wonderful practices can impact your own self awareness. When you’re a little bit more aware of what’s going on in your mind and your thoughts, you can cultivate a positive mindset through doing things that are positive and helpful to others, specifically showing outward gratitude, overt acts of thankfulness, as well as taking time out of your busy schedule to quiet your mind and focus through meditation. Getting a daily gratitude practice into your life could be as easy as writing three things down every single day that you’re thankful for. You can choose to make it more overt and extroverted. You might put a post on LinkedIn, a social media post where you’re grateful for the team member that went the extra mile for you and a very important deliverable. You might write a personal thank you note that you put actually in the mail, which is a very lost art. Absolutely a lost art. When you’re doing this kind of thing, you are shifting your mind and your heart towards more positive things in your life and it becomes sticky. This is a very good thing because negative thoughts tend to have the power to override positive. But if you’re constantly practicing gratitude, you’re doing it every day through writing down three things that you’re thankful for, you’re doing more overt, extroverted practices of gratitude, you’re sending out positivity into the world, and it does overwrite the negative. Over time, it absolutely does.
Sara Sheehan: [00:07:39] Separately, meditation has a tremendous power to help you be present and resilient in the face of uncertainty, possibly chaos or crisis. It has absolutely made a difference for me personally. There are apps that you can use for meditation, apps like Headspace, Insights Timer or Calm. I highly recommend all of them, and they come highly recommended to me in terms of personal use. I have used Insights Timer. I also have other sources of music that I love to use in freeform meditation and I just highly recommend starting with even five or ten minutes that you take out of your day to focus. To breathe. And to literally take time to clear your mind. It is amazing what it will do for you long term. Mindfulness is one of those things that will help you literally focus on the positive in the future and be more resilient in the face of change today.
Sara Sheehan: [00:09:13] The last big area that I’d like to talk about today is related to getting some consistent habits in your life that are foundational, like focusing on regular exercise or your sleep. The third big one there, of course, is what you eat. All three things are considered foundational habits. And they absolutely can change your outlook on your life because they have this effect of essentially casting a wonderful shadow. A wonderful beam of light on the rest of your day and they help you to literally boost your performance, increase your energy and literally help you achieve more in a day than you could without them. Separately, when you combine these foundational habits with mindfulness, it is amazing at how much more productive and higher level performance you can deliver. It absolutely will not only increase your overall health, but it will also make you a better person each and every day. Creating a habit takes more than 60 days. According to research, it takes 66 days to truly create a habit with a literal route that is created in your brain where neurons are connected and it’s easier on the brain to do the habit than not after it’s created. It’s a pretty remarkable thing, these habits, because your brain will always choose to do something that it knows to do because there’s no new learning involved. Once it’s learned to do that behavior, it’s super easy to snap the rubber band and get right back to it. You’ll be more likely to keep going if you just keep practicing. I’ve also found that tracking your habits will make you more likely to stick to the creation of a habit, if you track it. I use a tracker within a calendar to track a number of habits that I want to make truly routine in my life. And it is anything from exercise to good sleep to things like practicing writing or practicing time blocking or practicing daily priorities. There’s a good list of habits that I’m working on. My daily priority habit is one where I create a list of the 3 to 5 things that I want to accomplish the next day, and I literally will put an X next to each habit every day to track my completion of the habit and start small, because if you start small, you’re going to be more likely to complete it and be more likely to reach that 66 day magic habit creation finish line. It’s pretty remarkable what happens when you look at a tracker and you’re able to see how many days in a row that you did something and then all of a sudden you can see their gaps and then you’re going to try to find a way to eliminate those gaps. And that’s the magic that tracking provides. Once you create that habit, you’ll see how powerful and beneficial it can be for you. These are just a few of the things that play a critical role in creating self awareness and helping leaders develop more every day by taking time to look within and listen actively, cultivating a truly positive mindset and healthy habits. You can gain a deeper understanding of yourself and how you interact with others. This is going to help you become a more effective leader and truly experience personal growth in the process.
Sara Sheehan: [00:14:58] I have worked earnestly on many of these aspects of self awareness for the past few years, and I can’t tell you how powerful mindset is to help or hinder you in your personal or professional life. I am extremely grateful for the practices that I’ve started over the last two years in journaling with gratitude, a lot of extroverted appreciation, thankfulness and gratitude. It is making a difference not only on my mindset but on others. I can tell in my interactions with people. Make sure you get those grateful words out on paper in your conversations and even in social media should you choose to be that public. It’s tremendous how much positivity will come back to you. It’s really not surprising that these mindset practices can really help you have more clarity, joy, and peace at the end of the day. I know that I am a calmer person thanks to these practices, no matter what’s going on in the world, in the news. I would love to hear from the listeners and hear what you think about these self awareness tactics and how they might make an impact on leadership development or even your development and growth as a leader. Please weigh in, in comments, and if you’d like to learn more, by all means, reach out to me for a meeting.
