12 Mar Going Beyond Self-awareness to Communicate, Connect, Get Along, and Influence Others

For the sake of convenience, we can divide people into four. Those who:
1. Don’t know their styles and preferences,
2. Know but don’t fully understand how these impact others,
3. Recognize the impacts but don’t want to make any changes, and
4. Know their styles and recognize their impacts on others, and then make adjustments according to the styles and preferences of others.

Which camp are you in? What about the people you interact with and lead? Whether we’re professionals, leaders, or entrepreneurs, we all need to be in the last group personally and empower our people to fall into that category.

Many of our leadership workshops and coaching programs involve taking one or more assessments.

For instance, whenever someone asks me to coach or mentor them to become a better leader at the level where they are and to go to the next level, one of my suggestions is taking at least one assessment relevant to the theme we’ll be working on before we start this rewarding journey. I want them to know themselves better and also for me to know them better so that I can adjust my style with theirs and also customize the program according to their styles, preferences, strengths, limitations, and the feedback they got from others who know them better than I do.

For example, in the current webinar I’m facilitating, participants took the DiSC assessment before the session.

If you and/or your team haven’t yet, I encourage you to take as many assessments as possible. However, self-awareness is the start of a protracted journey.

The hardest part for many people isn’t taking the assessments and knowing their styles and preferences and how they may impact—positively or negatively—the people they interact with, work with, and lead. The toughest is adjusting one’s styles and preferences to accommodate others with different styles and preferences.

Some struggle because adjusting their communication approaches to align with others depending on the latter’s styles and preferences makes them feel they’re inauthentic. In contrast, others consider making such individually tailored communication to accommodate others as if they’re treating people inequitably. These are pure excuses. You don’t need to change who you are, what you believe, or the content of your communication. You’re just packaging it according to the receivers.

Going through all these troubles is worth the effort. At the end of the day, our effectiveness is measured based on how effectively we communicate, connect, get along, and influence others, and we can’t achieve these without increasing our self-awareness; knowing how our style, preferences, and behaviors are impacting the people around us; and without making consistent efforts to improve our communication competencies according to the situation we find ourselves, the issues and people involved.

On this rewarding journey, if you need our support, reach out. We would love to design one-on-one coaching or workshops/webinars based on your (your team’s) needs and growth goals.