5. Building Daily Awareness Habits

Better phone habits create space

Welcome back. We've covered why self-awareness matters, your personal profile, and how your past influences your present leadership. Now it's time to get a little bit practical. How do you actually build self-awareness on a daily basis? Self-awareness isn't a destination, it's a practice you develop. So here we are with Chapter Five, Building Daily Awareness Habits. I know you're busy, but the busier you are, the more you need these practices. When we're in constant motion, we lose touch with ourselves. Let's start with something that I'm sure affects all of us: our phone habits. We need to create better phone habits.

Some things you can do to achieve this: don't go on your phone for the first or final 30 minutes of your day. I'm sure a lot of you are doing that, but really give it a go. You can set a screen time limit for social media apps so you don't just sit there doomscrolling for hours. And you can also trade in your extra phone time for newer habits like walking, meditating, or journaling. You might be wondering, why do my phone habits matter for leadership? Because self-awareness requires presence, and presence requires space.

Right now, I want you to take some time and think about your phone habits. How many times do you think you check it per day? And just imagine if you reclaimed just 30 minutes of that time for reflection. What would it make possible? Again, remember, you can go into your course workbook and find this exercise, so take some time and audit your phone habits. The next habit I want you to try is to lean on others. You don't have to walk this path alone. Get an accountability partner to do self-awareness work with. You could also consider therapy or coaching to help you uncover blind spots.

Journaling as your one core tool

Then finally, the last exercise here. If I could give you only one tool, if you were just going to do one thing for building self-awareness, it would be journaling. When you're thinking about journaling, you should ask yourself questions like, what patterns do I notice in my relationships? What beliefs about myself are limiting me? When do I feel most alive? What are my greatest strengths and weaknesses? This is a practice that can take just 30 seconds, but can change your entire day. Several times throughout your day, pause and ask, what am I feeling right now and why?

From doing that, you might discover something like you're anxious because you're not prepared, you're frustrated because boundaries are being crossed, or maybe you're overwhelmed because you've said yes to too many things. This awareness gives you choice. You can find more questions like this in the accompanying course guide. For example, what patterns do I notice in my reactions today? Where am I avoiding difficult conversations? When you're thinking about what questions you want to journal or ask yourself, choose questions that really resonate with you and write them down somewhere. You'll see them regularly to remind yourself, okay, now I need to do my little check-in. Where am I? How am I feeling? Why?

Asking for real external feedback

Remember, you need both the internal and external awareness that we've talked about. To capture that external awareness, here are some strategies for getting real feedback. You should ask specific questions instead of general ones. For example, this could be, what's one thing I could do to be more effective in meetings? Or, when do you see me at my best as a leader? Maybe, what's one thing I do that might be getting in my own way? For the next exercise, for that external feedback, think of three people who see you regularly in leadership situations.

For each person, write down one specific question you could ask them about your leadership impact. And really commit to asking one of these questions this week. Remember, change is all about action. It's important that you take the time to do these exercises and put them into practice so you will see these changes starting to occur in yourself. And remember, like I said, creating a habit of regular journaling is one of the best things you can do to cultivate self-awareness and to get your mindset on track.

Using the journaling guide

If you want some guidance about what to journal and a place to do it, you can use the journal guide. Again, this is available in your workbook for the course. You can also find it in Classroom under the resources section. This journaling guide has a bunch of different journaling prompts that you can go through, and they're organized by different categories like core patterns and triggers, beliefs, values and strengths, inner child work, and so on. You can read the different prompts and actually just go ahead and write your thoughts directly in that document. That way you can start building journaling habits so that you're doing it every day. I know for some of you, journaling is great.

Maybe you're already doing it today and you're excited to start it. I know for some of you, it might seem, ooh, do I really need to do that? It's not my thing. I would say use the journaling guide. Try some of the prompts. Just give it a try. Record your thoughts and see what kind of impact it has on yourself, your self reflection, and your leadership. Building self-awareness requires consistent practice. It requires action. The habits we've discussed aren't complicated, but they are powerful when they're done consistently. In our next chapter, we'll explore how to create self-aware organizations and lead teams that prioritize psychological safety and growth. Until next time.