But how aware are you?
But how aware are you?
The leadership superpower we don't talk about nearly enough
🥳 Hey, Kasey here! Welcome to this week’s 🎢 High Growth Founders🎢newsletter. Every email is full of actionable content designed to help you grow your self and your business. I sometimes have affiliate links, but only for products I genuinely love and use myself. If you haven’t already, subscribe to get each issue delivered right to your inbox.👇
In this issue:
Growth Lesson of the Week: Leadership Superpower — Self-Awareness: What it is and how to build it
High Growth Founders Podcast Episode: How to Hire Your First Marketer
Growth Tool I Love: The best survey, form, and questionnaire software out there…and I’ve tried them all
Asking for Feedback: I’ve got a quick ask of you
Growth Lesson of the Week
We often talk about strong leaders’ ability to think two, three, or even ten steps ahead of the competition. They have an uncanny ability to assess a situation and not just quickly identify its dangers and opportunities, but also understand how to avoid the former and seize the latter. It’s this ability we reference when we marvel at a leader’s business acumen or strategic expertise.
This acuity to the changing dynamics of the business environment is indeed admirable. But there is another kind of awareness that is rarely mentioned, but, I would argue, is an even more powerful strength for a leader to possess: Self-awareness.
First, what do I mean by self-awareness?
“Self-awareness is the ability to focus on yourself and how your actions, thoughts, or emotions do or don't align with your internal standards. If you're highly self-aware, you can objectively evaluate yourself, manage your emotions, align your behavior with your values, and understand correctly how others perceive you."
Psychologists Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund
It’s all about knowing yourself — internally, to make choices that align with your core goals and values, and externally, to understand how others perceive you and properly take that perception into consideration. This self-knowledge allows you to better manage your actions, emotions, behavior, and choices.
Self-awareness is a leadership superpower. But it’s hard to develop for a few reasons.
No one teaches you self-awareness. Especially if you’re a woman, you’ve likely been taught to focus on everyone else’s wants and needs. Not on your own. And school doesn’t particularly want you to be self-aware. They’re training you to be rule-followers and worker-bees. Self-awareness would not be a desirable quality.
Our world is designed to keep us distracted. Between our devices, our apps, our many forms of media, and our hectic, busy lifestyles, the presence required to cultivate self-awareness is difficult to source.
There are no textbooks about you. There is no course you can take or scholar you can study. You can learn about human nature and psychology, but you must craft your own learning journey. There is no rulebook to follow. It takes consistent learning, reflection, experimentation, and repetition.
The journey is never-ending. You are constantly evolving. As soon as you feel you truly understand some aspect of yourself, you will grow into the next level of you. You will peel back the layers of the onion of your own self for the rest of your life. Yes, that can be daunting, but it can also be downright beautiful.
Hopefully, I have not discouraged you from wanting to level up your self-awareness. So let’s dive into how to do it.
There are countless methods you can try, but here are the practices that have made the biggest difference in my own relentless journey to self-awareness.
As you might imagine, the methods I am going to mention are designed to address the 4 reasons why self-awareness is difficult in the first place — find a teacher, be present, study yourself, and stay consistent. Some of these methods address multiple reasons, some only one. I recommend picking several and finding ways to incorporate them into your own life.
Find a teacher
Go to Therapy
And go for longer than you think you need to. Therapy has been the single most powerful source to increase my own self-awareness. But going for 6 months wouldn’t have given me the results I was ultimately seeking or that made the difference for me. It takes that long alone to build a deep level of trust with your therapist. And I’ve learned more about my self during the times of relative calm than those of crisis or struggle.
When I am not stressed or strained by difficult challenges in my life, I can take the time to delve deeper into my past and feel safe enough to peel back the layers of self-protection and emotional armor that keep me numb to whatever pain or grief has been bubbling beneath the surface.
You may feel you don’t need therapy. In my experience, those who most adamantly insist they don’t need therapy need it most. We all have pain, insecurities, and learned behaviors from our childhood or youth that can show up in unexpected ways as adults. Understanding your triggers is the only recourse to managing them. If you ever find yourself having stronger visceral reactions to people or situations than they deserve, you are being triggered. Do the work, figure out where they come from, and learn how to navigate them.
Another upside to therapy — and to self-awareness in general — is that by better understanding myself, I better understand others as well. It is far easier for me to empathize with others’ experiences and recognize myself in their emotions and behavior so I can more effectively communicate with them and give them the energy and attention they need.
Get a Coach
Therapy provides the most direct path toward emotional self-awareness, but coaching is the most direct path toward performance self-awareness. The power of a coach is their ability to provide an outside perspective while also having a vested interest in your growth. They are trained to help you better understand your own thoughts, actions, and desires, and then help you navigate them in a way that gets you closer to your goals.
Be Present
Meditation
I can already feel you rolling your eyes at me. And I get it. I struggle with consistently meditating as well. My brain typically runs at a break-neck pace or feels like it’s trudging through three feet of water. Rarely anything in between.
But I have worked hard to incorporate 10-20 minutes of meditation into most of my mornings. I also try to do Yin or restorative yoga each night before bed as well and this slowing down and focusing on the stretching of my muscles serves a very similar purpose.
If meditation feels tedious or impossible for you, cultivate the feeling of quiet, slowness, and peace through other means.
The point of meditation isn’t to think about nothing, empty your mind, or control your thoughts. Anyone who tells you this doesn’t know what they’re talking about. The point is to quiet everything, focus on one thing at a time — your breath, a mantra, etc. — and allow thoughts to come into your mind freely. And then return your mind to that one thing you were focusing on.
What’s magical about this process is that as you get better at cultivating quiet, your mind will slow down so the thoughts that arise will stop being the frantic ping-ponging of your to-do list and start being realizations about life. Hence, the self-awareness.
Study Yourself
I’ll admit this is the section of self-awareness resources that is the most fun — especially if you’re a nerd like I am.
Take Personality and Psychometric Tests
Taking tests like Strengths Finder, Myers-Briggs, Predictive Index, and the Enneagram can be eye-opening, but it’s critical to understand that each test has its limitations. I find Strengths Finder and the Enneagram to be the most comprehensive and helpful in illuminating aspects of yourself or your personality that you may not fully recognize or have struggled to put into words on your own.
Use them as thought-provoking exercises not roadmaps for your destiny.
Write Your Goals and Track Your Progress
Even the process of deciding what you want in life can unlock insight into who you are and what really matters to you in life. But the true learning comes from the process of execution. How do you proceed? How committed do you stay? Where do you get stuck?
Committing to a higher goal and the process of working toward it teaches us volumes about our resilience, grit, and even limitations.
Learn a New Skill
If your motivation for self-awareness is your professional growth, it can be tempting to focus only on activities related to your work, but deciding to learn a new sport, creative hobby, or life skill can transform your self-understanding, while also strengthening your resilience.
Years ago, I was an avid gym-goer and fell in love with lifting heavy things. I’m 6 feet tall, uncoordinated, and have degenerative neuropathy. My body was not meant for powerlifting, but I loved it nevertheless. Showing up each morning to push myself a little further, and having the opportunity to marvel at my own strength taught me more about myself than I could possibly quantify.
Cultivate Curiosity
Perhaps the best skill my therapist taught me was to be curious about my reaction to people and situations. Instead of attempting to quiet my emotions, he showed me the value of exploring them and learning what they meant.
One of the most helpful practices you can develop for yourself is self-reflection. We are often taught to suppress our feelings, find the silver lining, or simply carry on. Our emotions are there to show us something, teach us a lesson, and give us a direction. But you need to listen first.
Stay Consistent
All of the above will make a huge difference, but there is still one practice that will tie it all together.
Document Your Journey
We move so quickly in this life it can be challenging to stop and see the signs of what is going on in your life, body, or mind. The goal is not to be tracking for a specific purpose or to hold yourself to certain standards, but simply to learn. Commit to the practice and then occasionally review what you see. You will find patterns and aberrations that teach you something powerful about the way your mind, body, and heart operate, all so you can better support yourself.
This can take a variety of forms:
Journal
Habit tracking
Mood tracking
Sleep tracking
I journal for 5m nearly every morning (I miss some weekend days). And this simple practice has had a tremendous impact on my decision-making, my ability to know what I want (and what I don’t) and to think through ideas or struggles that I’m grappling with.
As someone with some chronic health challenges — Hashimoto’s and Lyme disease to be specific — I learned to track damn near everything. And yes, I identified all kinds of foods to which I am intolerant, activities that have positive or negative effects, and other physical health-related information. But I also discovered things about myself and my personality I wouldn’t have otherwise.
Documenting my health helped me realize I sleep 2-3x better if I exercise for 30-45 minutes and abstain from alcohol — which immediately made me exercise more and drink less.
Whatever you can manage, track it.
~~~~~~
I feel I must give you all a warning, however. This journey toward self-awareness should not be used as ammunition for self-criticism or flagellation. It is a practice of self-love, care, and kindness. You learn about yourself so you can better serve yourself. So whatever you do, do it with love.
HGF Episode of the Week:
One of the most common reasons why startup Founders hire me is because they either hired the wrong marketer or they simply don’t know whom they should hire, so they’ve hired no one.
In this episode, I break down how to hire the right marketer at the right time, and the hiring strategy that saves a ton of time and money, but not enough Founders use.
Also, I discuss some strategies to help your current marketing team grow into the leaders you need them to be.
Listen now! Online | Apple | Spotify
Growth Tool I Love:
You should know by now that I am mildly obsessed with 2 things:
Constantly conducting research
Building systems that streamline my business
And that’s why I currently have 47 forms and surveys built-in Typeform. I’ve tried every tool for this and Typeform beats them all. It’s beautiful. It’s easy to use. It integrates with everything.
They even recently created a Google Docs integration so you can type all your survey questions there, import the doc, and Typeform automatically builds your form for you. ::chef’s kiss::
Asking for Feedback:
I want to make this newsletter as helpful and interesting as possible. Nearly 50% of you open it every week, but I’m not sure what parts you’re appreciating and which are falling flat.
Could you hit reply and tell me what you want to see more of? Less of? Anything?
In Love and Growth,
Kasey
P.S. I’m so dang grateful for you 💋