How self-aware are you? Andrea shares the definition of self-awareness, different types of self-awareness, and how we can improve our communication effectiveness by being more self-aware.
CONTENTS Resources * Transcript*
RESOURCESThe 3 Point Body Language Scan
Talk About Talk Website: TalkAboutTalk.com * LinkedIn: Andrea and TalkAboutTalk * Weekly Communication Skills Newsletter – https://talkabouttalk.com/blog/#newsletter-signup * Email* – Andrea@TalkAboutTalk.com
TRANSCRIPTToday we’re talking about Self-Awareness and communication. Specifically, how you can use this notion of self-awareness to boost your communication skills.
To start, I have two quick stories that I want to share with you. Both are from conversations I had with clients in 1-on-1 coaching sessions. So of course I won’t share their identity in any way.
The first was about two years ago, when I was coaching a senior partner from one of the big consulting firms that you’ve heard of. Let’s call her Ashley. Ashley and I worked together for a total of six months. Ashley was exceptional. She was already successful, incredibly high IQ and very well-liked by her colleagues and clients. She’d been identified as high potential for one of the top positions in the firm globally, and I was coaching her to elevate her communication skills and executive presence so she could make that happen.
At one of the first coaching sessions, not the first session, it was maybe the 3rd session, I started by asking Ashley how her week was and whether she had a chance to work on what we’d discussed the week before. She said something like, “Andrea I had an epiphany. For the first time since we’ve been meeting, actually for the first time in my life, I was in the middle of a meeting and I suddenly became very self aware. I was aware of my body language, I was aware of my words and I was aware of how other people were perceiving me.”
My jaw almost hit my desk. I was speechless for a moment. What? That was the first time ever when you were self-aware, aware of your communication and how you were being perceived? Wow. I have so much to say about that. For starters though, that’s a very good thing.
So that’s my first story focused on self-awareness. The second story is also from a conversation that I had with a client who also happened to be a partner – but at one of the other big firms. Let’s call her Betty. Similar to Ashley, Betty was also very bright and technically exceptional. She knew her stuff. She was high IQ, very creative, and very ambitious. But Betty was very different from Ashley in that she was less well-liked. She told me that she’d received feedback that she was arrogant. I spoke with her manager, as I often do with my clients – I check in with 1-2 of their managers to make sure we’re focusing on the right things. Anyway, her boss confirmed to me that, yes, Betty does come across as arrogant. When I brought up the topic again with Betty, she argued and justified herself, telling me, and I quote, “I’m not arrogant. I am very self-aware.”
It struck me immediately that Betty’s definition of self-awareness was very different from mine. Then I started thinking about my conversation with Ashley, and her comment about not being self-aware until our communication coaching encouraged her to do so.
Those two conversations really got me thinking, and they inspired this episode. Are you ready to Talk About Self-awareness?
In this episode, we’re going to focus on how to leverage self-awareness to help you improve your communication skills.
You’re going to learn what self-awareness is, the types of self-awareness, and how you can use this idea of self-awareness to help improve your communication skills. I’m telling you right now, thinking about your communication through the lens of self-awareness can be very beneficial.
First though, let me introduce myself. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki and I’m your executive communication coach. Please call me Andrea! I’m the founder of Talk About Talk, where I coach communication skills to ambitious executives to help them elevate their communication, their confidence and their clarity, so they’ll get noticed for the right reasons and ultimately get promoted! That’s my goal here. I want to help you accelerate your career trajectory.
If you go to the Talk About Talk.com website, you’ll find many resources to help you out. There’s information there about one-on-one coaching, online courses, corporate workshops, the archive of this bi-weekly podcast, AND, I really hope you’ll sign up for the Talk About Talk newsletter. That newsletter is your chance to get communication coaching from me every week.
All right let’s get into this. Let me start by saying that when I was pulling together the outline for this episode, I realized there’s too much for me to get through. So this might just be the first of many episodes focused on self-awareness.
I absolutely love this topic. When I was a doctoral student at HBS, one of my favorite courses that I took was in the Psychology department at Harvard, so across the river from the business school. That was when Natalie Portman was there. I remember seeing her in the elevator a few times and thinking two things: 1.) She’s tiny! Her backpack full of textbooks was almost bigger than she was. And 2.) I felt sorry for her because everyone around her was whispering “there’s Natalie! That’s Natalie Portman!” That’s gotta be weird.
Anyway, I enrolled in a very small seminar in the psych dept. There were only about 8 or ten of us? And the course was simply called, “The Self.” This course was absolutely incredible, with lots of self reflection, but also of course, covering the academic research focused on the self-concept, self-awareness, and so on. At about the same time that I was taking this course, I read an article for another course I was taking that really served as a catalyst for my future research. It was a seminal article by Constantine Sedikides comparing self-assessment, self-enhancement, and self-verification. I vividly remember reading the article, in my living room. I was sprawled in a big comfy chair. I skimmed the article. Honestly my heart beat accelerated. I could feel the adrenaline pumping. I sat up straight and re-read the article top to bottom. Then I stood up and declared, “this explains everything! This explains why people say what they say, or why they choose not to talk at all.” These insights into the self, and the self-concept, are what motivated my dissertation research, which focused on self-enhancement and word-of-mouth.
I could go on about that, but here we are, many years later, talking about self-awareness and your communication skills. Hmm.
I’m doing my best to keep this succinct. I’m following the advice I give you about communicating with precision. Here’s where we’re headed.
We’ll start with the definition of self-awareness, and particularly the types of self-awareness. Then I’m going to map those types of self-awareness back to how you can leverage self-awareness to improve your communication effectiveness. Sound good?
DEFINITION
Simply put, Self-awareness is recognition of the self. It is one’s recognitions of one’s emotions, triggers, reactions, and the impact of those reactions.
Self-awareness is about being conscious of our consciousness. Of being conscious of our SELF. Very few animals are self-aware. In fact, human babies don’t become self-aware until they are toddlers.
How do we know this exactly? Well, researchers use the mirror test, which was created over 50yrs ago by evolutionary biologist Gordon Gallup. First, they let an animal get familiar with a mirror. Then they put a mark someplace on the animal’s body that it can’t otherwise see. For a human the mark could be on their nose or on their back. They can only see the mark in the mirror. If the animal looks in the mirror, sees the mark, then looks for the mark on its own body, then it passes the test. The animal has demonstrated recognition of its self as a unique entity.
What animals pass the mirror test? Humans do, starting when they’re about two years old. Also chimpanzees. Gorillas. Dolphins, I went down a rabbit hole when I was reading up for this episode, and apparently magpies, those incessant loud birds, they’ve even passed the mirror test. That got me thinking about the ridiculously clever raccoons we have here in Toronto. Are raccoons self-aware? My guess is yes.
Anyway, so the mirror test measures self-recognition, which qualifies a species as being capable of self-awareness.
I want to point out that this is different from consciousness which is also different from the term self consciousness.
Consciousness is the most general term. To be conscious is to be aware. We can define consciousness in terms of the opposite. A lack of consciousness is unconsciousness. When we’re unconscious, we have no awareness. So when we’re conscious, we are aware. But all sorts of animals – squirrels, dogs, cats, they can certainly be conscious. But that doesn’t mean they have self-awareness.
Self-awareness, what we’re talking about here, is really about being conscious of our own consciousness. It’s a meta-awareness.
Then there’s also self-consciousness. Usually people who are self-conscious are nervous. Self-consciousness is about being conscious of a negative self-perception.
Did you get all that?
We’re NOT talking here about self-consciousness, which is about negative self-perception.
We’re focusing today on self-awareness, which is about being conscious of our own consciousness. Being conscious of our SELF.
We all have some degree of self-awareness. How would you rate yourself?
Remember at the beginning when I was telling you about my client Ashley who told me in our 3rd coaching session that she had an experience where for the first time, she experienced self-awareness. Of course she was exaggerating. But focusing on her quest to improve her communication skills, she went from 0-100 on the self-awareness scale, suddenly conscious of her mindset and her body language and how she was being perceived by others.
Again, I ask you, when it comes to self-awareness and your communication, how would YOU rate yourself?
According to some research I read, only 10-15% of us qualify as highly self-aware. But the good news is that we can turn the dial on self-awareness. We’ll talk about a few of those things in a minute. First though, WHY should we care about self-awareness? And why should we try to improve it? WHY was I celebrating when Ashley told me she was suddenly self aware?
Well, the research on this is definitive. Self-awareness has a significant positive impact on us in several ways, including improving our confidence, our influence, our creativity, our ability to collaborate, our ability to regulate our emotions, and self-awareness decreases our stress levels and makes us happier.
Let’s dig in a little deeper.
TYPES OF SELF-AWARENESS
Most models of self-awareness talk about two types: there’s internal or private and there’s external or public.
INTERNAL/PRIVATE
This is about being introspective.
It’s about identifying or noticing and then reflecting on your internal state.
It’s about being conscious of your feelings, emotions, desires, and beliefs.
Like when you notice yourself feeling anxious before an important meeting. Of when you notice your apprehension about disagreeing with your boss when you know you’re right.
It’s really about being conscious of what you’re thinking about.
EXTERNAL/PUBLIC
Being aware of how we appear to others, how we’re perceived.
I like to think about the concept of “the looking-glass self”. It’s kind of like the mirror test, but in a social context. Imagine you are a third party, you had a camera and you were looking down at the situation, watching the players in the room, including yourself, and noticing the impact that you’re having on others…
It’s about our impact on the social dynamic.
External or public self- awareness allows us to successfully interact with each other.
Back to my story about the other manager Betty, who I told you about at the beginning. Betty was the super-smart, super capable leader who was perceived by others as arrogant. Yet she declared that she was highly self aware. There was a disconnect. My take on that was she’s perhaps high on internal or private self-awareness, but low on external or public self-awareness.
So those are two ways of thinking about self-awareness – internal and external. Or private and public.
Other researchers have identified three types of self-awareness. And I think this classification of self-awareness is even more helpful for us in terms of boosting our communication skills. The three are:
Introspective self-awareness
This is basically the internal or private awareness that I was just talking about.
I have three specific suggestions for you in terms of how to improve your communication through introspective self-awareness. These are suggestions for being aware of your thoughts and doing something about it. It’s about self-talk.
Being mindful of your objective. It could be a meta-objective, like being more empathetic, or of demonstrating your leadership, or being more confident. Or it could be an immediate term objective, like when you’re in a meeting with a client and your objective is to demonstrate your responsiveness to their concerns. It’s about being mindful. What’s my goal here?
Get rid of distractions. Turn off our phones. Stop multitasking. Focus.
Focusing on a mantra. This is one of my favourite tactics for focusing our mind. Come up with a sentence or phrase that focuses you on what you WANT to focus on.
Bodily self-awareness
I read somewhere that bodily awareness allows animals to understand that they are physically different from the rest of the environment; it’s also the reason why animals do not eat themselves.
Wow. OK!
Well, in our context of communication skills, I suggest we use this concept of bodily self-awareness a little bit differently. We can think of it in terms of our body language.
There are 3 things you can think about here – the Talk About Talk 3-point body language scan! Episode #96. I’ll leave a link to this episode in the shownotes.
The 3 points are Your Posture, your hands, and your eyes. What you need to do with your posture, your hands and your eyes depends on the context. But generally for posture it’s about being expansive, for hands it’s about using slow purposeful movements and showing your hands – but not too much! And for eyes, of course it’s about eye contact. There’s a lot more to this, which you can learn about in ep96. In the meantime though, when you’re aware of your body language, which I hope is more often than not, just think 3-point body language scan.
So that’s the second type of self-awareness – now we’ve covered introspective self-awareness and bodily self-awareness. The 3rd and last type of self-awareness is
Social self-awareness
This maps beautifully to what I was talking about before in terms of external or public self-awareness. What’s going on in the social context, how am I being perceived, and what impact am I having on the dynamic?
When it comes to social self-awareness and improving your communication, there are 3 things you can think about here:
Generally being empathetic. Scanning the room, as they say, scanning others for how you are impacting them. Being other-oriented. Tuning in to others. Watching their body language, especially in their interactions with you. How are they responding to you?
Listening, tracking the ratio of you talking versus others talking, listening in a truly collaborative way
Asking for feedback! This is a great way to improve our communication. Asking the people with whom you interact how you can improve. It’s very meta. You’re calibrating what others think you could focus on in terms of your social self-awareness. My brain’s exploding!
That really is meta, and probably a great place to stop.
Back to the 2 stories about conversations I had with clients about their self-awareness.
There was Ashley, who had an epiphany a few weeks into our coaching sessions where she suddenly experienced a heightened level. Of self-awareness. She became acutely conscious. Of her. Mindset. That’s introspective self-awareness. Of her body language, that’s her bodily self-awareness. And also how she was being perceived, her social self-awareness.
And there was Betty, who was socially perceived as being arrogant, and yet believed she was highly self-aware. She may have had high introspective self-awareness, but her social self-awareness was lacking.
Do you see now how thinking in this disciplined way about self-awareness can really help you improve your communication skills?
At a high level, when you focus on your mindset, on your body language, and on how you are perceived, you are improving your communication and setting yourself up for success.
So we’re all clear on what we mean when we say we’re self-aware. And we know several ways to use self-awareness to improve our communication effectiveness.
Now, I’m wondering whether you have any questions for me. Is there a particular area or topic within communication skills that I can help you with? Or maybe you have a podcast topic suggestion? There are two main ways you can contact me. You can email me at andrea@talkabouttalk.com or go to the talkabouttalk.com website and leave me a recorded message there. While you’re on the website, please please sign up for the weekly communication coaching newsletter.
If you enjoyed this podcast episode, I hope you’ll share it with your friends who might also be seeking to improve their communication skills.
Thanks for listening. And talk soon!
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