Being aware of ourselves is one of the most important skills that we can learn.  That said, from my experience it also happens to be one of the harder skills for people to learn.  Figuring out a new technology or sales technique is easy - we attend the training or we tinker with the tool.  Figuring out how YOU work, what makes you frustrated, what your habits are, however, doesn’t have a class or a seminar.  It’s not something you can REALLY tinker with or take apart.  Instead, it requires a level of critical thinking and truthfully examining yourself. This is, to say the least, a bit daunting.

On the up-side, there are many versions of things like the Meyers-Briggs (you know, that one that tells you what color you are, and how your color interacts with other colors?) test to help teams uncover their inner operations.  (Or maybe that’s the MBTI, I always get them mixed up…).  These types of exercises are useful, however I find they usually can’t get deep enough in some areas to really dig into self-awareness.  These exercises help point out how an individual may interact in a professional setting, but it ‘s up to the individual to figure out how to apply that across the board.

This makes sense, since many of these assessments are intended to help groups of professionals work together.  They both provide a common language with which to discuss how people work (“you’re an WRST? I get it now, I’m a BEST!”) and also some general guidance for the individual on how to operate.  This works great for groups that all take it together, however, I’ve found them a lot less useful for individuals.

Work presents an interesting version of this since we can’t really choose who our co-workers are… we’re kind of stuck with whomever’s there at the time.  This differs greatly in our personal lives.  We are, to some extent, stuck with family, however, we do have a great deal more control over those relationships, and who we choose to socialize with.  This makes understanding how, and why, we will/do react in specific ways even more important… we’re consciously choosing to be with these folks instead of being ‘forced’ to.

The same techniques teams use at work to improve themselves can be tweaked to help out in our personal lives.  Some ideas include:

• Regular Retrospectives - Make time each week to reflect on the week and any areas you want to improve.  How did certain conversations go?  Do you understand why you get easily annoyed at something?

• Focus Time - Set aside specific time to take a deeper dive on one area of yourself.  I find journaling is a great approach for this; something about writing things down helps get them out.

• Active Feedback - Find someone you trust to talk over what a blindspot might be or how to improve something.  This helps break down any mental preconceptions of yourself you have, but does require a lot of emotional trust in whomever you speak with.

This isn’t to say it’s easy… even admitting something to yourself (let alone someone else) about how you think/feel/act can be hard.  That said, it’s certainly worth it.  Getting a better handle on how you will behave in any given situation both makes you more effective and also reduces any surprises on your end.  Over time you’ll also learn more about yourself, in turn making future improvements a little bit easier.