In my experience, effective leadership has to begin with self-awareness and, more importantly, self-reflection. Life is a long series of experiences, decisions, successes and lessons learned. One of the keys to ultimate success is the ability to make sense of, appreciate and grow from those experiences. As you get ready to hustle in 2019, take time to reflect and determine what worked for you, where you had challenges or made mistakes and where you experienced failures over the past year.
I've said for many years that one of the most important characteristics a leader can have is self-awareness. You are the one continuous influence on all your actions and accomplishments, so it's vital that you understand yourself for continual growth. This is where self-reflection can become a very sobering and fundamental process. Self-reflection can be a very tough exercise, and because of that, many leaders choose not to engage in this task.
Let’s take a look at the components of self-reflection that will give you the chance to set the best goals for your personal and professional development.
Self-Reflection Defined
Before you begin your 2018 introspection, let's take a look at the definition of self-reflection and outline its importance. Self-reflection is all about spending time evaluating your actions, successes, mistakes, character and beliefs. Life gets so busy with all the minutiae of daily obligations that you may rarely have time to examine why things occurred the way they did. Planning time for self-reflection can give you the gift of developing a deeper understanding of your personal and professional results. By taking this look in the mirror, you can give yourself the chance to develop new skills, polish your effectiveness and question yourself in a constructive way that allows for growth.
Setting The Stage
Two of the most important components of self-reflection are scheduling an appropriate amount of time and choosing a place where you'll be comfortable, won't be disturbed and have the tools you need to capture your thoughts. At this point in your introspection, it's all about understanding and making sense of what transpired in the past year. Once you have this insight, you can develop a new vision, goals to reach that vision and plans to reach those goals.
Components Of Self-Reflection
Understanding and developing emotional intelligence: These are two more of the most important components of introspection. There are five core components of emotional intelligence, and two of them are self-awareness and self-regulation, or self-control. Rule No. 1 in my book on ultimate leadership is, “Never allow your emotions to dictate your actions.” This can include not only whether you react negatively but also whether you allow your emotions to influence decisions. When you can understand your emotions and how they influence you, you can get a great leg up on developing a process to improve your ability to lead and succeed.
Examining your integrity: Over the years, my beliefs have changed, my morals have transformed and my values have grown. Taking a look back gives you the opportunity to examine your core principles and reinforce your leadership integrity. What I like about this step is that it can help you produce better quality results for yourself. At times, we're tested with situations that may have questioned or compromised our integrity. Take the time to reflect on your principles, beliefs and values to ensure they haven't changed too drastically, and decide which of them you will never compromise on. You can then start 2019 knowing that your integrity will continue to be part of the foundation of your success.
Assessing strengths and shortcomings: One of the biggest failures of leaders is knowing where you excel but not where you're weak. I once had a mentor tell me that sometimes our overdeveloped strengths can actually be a weakness. Assessing your strengths and shortcomings is how you can set the direction for personal and professional development. What skills do you need to grow and polish in 2019?
Discovering the learning moments in successes and failures: You don't know everything there is to know about being a professional. There are tons of lessons you should be learning throughout the year. Take some time to think over your successes and failures and analyze what worked or didn't work and why. Just because you made a mistake or failure doesn't mean you were wrong. The first time you make an error, it's just that — a mistake. But the second time you make the same mistake, it's a choice.
One of the last questions I ask myself is, "How do those I lead see me?" Sometimes through the introspection process, we may mislead ourselves about what others think of our leadership. This is where a scary task comes into play — you may need to ask those you lead how you're doing as their leader. I used to ask my workforce two specific questions that allowed me to gauge my leadership effectiveness: The first was, "If you were the leader of this department, what's the one thing you would change and why?" This allowed me to understand whether the organization was missing something that I wasn't seeing. My second question was, “How can I be a better leader for you?” I prefaced this question by saying that my leadership style may not be for everyone and that I wanted to be able to focus on their specific needs.
As we begin the final drive toward 2019, you have an opportunity to set a vision for what success looks like for the new year to come. Without reflecting on how you did in 2018, you may be destined to repeat the same routines and practices and get the same outcomes you did in the past. During this holiday season, give yourself the gift of understanding, introspection and development.
