Self-Management Guide: From Unaware to Self-Aware Leadership

My success as a team leader has come down to one essential ingredient, having people around me willing to risk being offensive in the pursuit of giving me honest and precise feedback on how I appear to them. Much of our strengths as leaders stem from a deep understanding of ourselves and the ability to use that understanding to be a better person and leader.

Self-management is the ability to control one’s reactions, thoughts, and emotions and is highly beneficial in effective leadership. It can only be achieved through self-awareness, a deeply introspective process that entails the evaluation of one’s strengths, weaknesses, and patterns of behavior.

While self-aware leadership is crucial in effective leadership, it is also helpful in maintaining mental health, building meaningful interpersonal relationships, and personal growth. It may entail a long, arduous process, but it’s definitely worth the work. Read on to learn more about self-awareness and self-management in leadership.

Can You Self-Manage Without Self-Awareness?

You can’t self-manage without self-awareness. Self-awareness is the foundation of self-management because it requires the reflective process of looking into yourself and analyzing how you feel or behave the way you do and why.

Trying to self-manage without working on self-awareness is much like trying to drive a car without first learning how to drive. You may be able to turn the engine on and even go a few miles, but you won’t be able to do so without crashing into other cars, a building, or people in the process.

You may be able to do self-management techniques, but you won’t do them for very long or effectively. Unless you understand yourself, no self-management technique will be effective.

How To Develop Self-Management

To be an effective leader means being able to master yourself and respond to both inner struggles and external factors in such a way that will build up, not tear down. I have seen plenty of leaders who have broken down, lashed out at others, or completely shut down in the face of a crisis; maybe so have you?

Developing self-management takes incredible commitment and a deep level of introspection. You must be self-aware, discover your strengths and weaknesses, motivate yourself, ensure that tasks are aligned with your goals, and maintain a habit of self-evaluation. 

The following are some ways I have used to improve my self-management; I recommend you try some of them out:

Discover Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Self-awareness requires knowledge of your own identity. If you want to be self-aware, you must be comfortable asking yourself questions like “Who am I?” or “Why do I do what I do?” 

These probing questions help us understand our identity and what motivates us, where we find purpose and meaning, and how we feel most fulfilled.

You would think these would be beneficial only in maintaining self-esteem, but that’s not the case. Knowing who you are—and who you are not—enables you to take on roles and tasks that you know you’re built for. You no longer have to force yourself to fit a mold that wasn’t made for you and makes you feel insufficient or not good enough.

I once ran a 100-mile mountain marathon in the cold winter of Sweden; I wanted to see how far I could go and where my limit was. After 34 hours of consecutive running, I finished the race fatigued, in pain, and physically broken down. I had just finished my first-ever ultra marathon.

But I never found the answer to my question. The problem with succeeding is that it doesn’t tell you much about your limits, only about what you can do.

This is when I fully understood the power of failing; failing gives you more answers than succeeding. I tell you this to show you how important it is to take risks, fail, and learn from them.

Part of understanding your identity is knowing your strengths and weaknesses. In a team setting, this helps you figure out where you fit in. If project management is your strong suit and keeping members motivated is a weakness, focus your energy on doing what you know, you’ll succeed at and delegate tasks where others will.

Keep Yourself Motivated

Managing a team is hard work. Sometimes, there will be more downs than ups, and through these changing seasons, you have to be able to motivate yourself as well as your team to keep going or to do better.

This would be even harder if self-motivation depended on some kind of inspiration. While inspiration is great, it’s often fleeting.

What you need is something more stable, in fact, something that you can almost command. To develop self-motivation, remind yourself of the value that your work brings to yourself and your team. Figure out what drives you and put it front and center of your work routine.

What motivates you depends entirely on you. It can be short-term, like a promotion, or long-term, such as building a name in your chosen industry or line of work. It can even be an intrinsic motivation, such as the positive feeling you get because you love what you’re doing.

The most successful team leaders I have met tend to use all of those motivators in synergy. This gives them an almost endless source of energy toward their goals.

Understanding what makes you go the extra mile is crucial, especially when you’re leading a team through times of crisis.

When you’re motivated and driven, your passion will naturally rub off on those around you, creating an environment where people expect themselves to perform at their 100 percent without being forced to.

Set Risky and Well-Aligned Goals

Ask yourself: “What do I want to accomplish? Who do I want to become?”

These questions will help drive you in the right direction and set your priorities straight. It can also help you figure out whether what you want to do is worth pursuing or not.

A goal worthy of your time should invoke a sense of fear, anxiety, and doubt. If not, you are aiming way too low!

Observing the feelings that arise when you think about the goal will help determine if your tasks align with your purpose. Does it feel right? Does it align with who you want to be?

You can also do the New York Times test; if your goal was published in the newspaper, how would you feel? Proud or ashamed?

Many people find themselves unmotivated and frustrated because they feel like however hard they work, their efforts never seem to be enough. The key is chopping those huge goals down to smaller day-to-day tasks that can be ticked off your to-do list. 

This way, you’ll see just how much you’re able to accomplish and keep yourself focused on what needs to be done.

You may find that you’ve taken on far too much work that turns out to be completely unnecessary, which will then give you the opportunity to realign, drop what you must, and focus on what will help you achieve your goal.

Evaluate Yourself

Developing self-management takes commitment, not just because it’s not natural in most of us but also because it requires a great deal of self-reflection and evaluation.

If you want to grow in this aspect, you have to be unafraid to look deep into yourself and ask hard questions, like “Why do I blow up in front of my team so often?” or “Why does this person make me so mad?”

Self-evaluation can be a vast, vague concept, making it sound intimidating to do. But in essence, all it is is analyzing your feelings and actions in relation to how you lead or manage a team.

Here are tips on how evaluation can be done:

• Set a time. Set a regular schedule and stick to it. It shouldn’t be any random time or whenever you feel like doing it, or else you’ll hardly ever do it.
• Write down your thoughts. Create a structure for your evaluation and ensure that you can look back at how you’ve done in the past to see your progress by recording your evaluation in a journal. Send me an email, and I will respond with a copy of the google forms journal I use.
• Organize your evaluation. Every person is complex, so to ensure that your evaluation has focus, make sure that you specify which aspects of yourself you’re evaluating, whether that be interpersonal relationships or leadership style.
• Be honest with yourself. It’s natural to want to justify every negative thing we notice in ourselves. But in order to improve, we have to be honest in the way we assess ourselves. 
• Be patient with your progress. There may be specific areas that you struggle with the most or where you feel like you don’t make any progress. Be patient with the process instead of dwelling on any feelings of frustration.
• Be respectful to yourself. As much as it’s important to be honest (especially about the things you need to work on), it’s also important to be kind to yourself. Be as gracious to yourself as you try to be to others. Start with being kind to you. Treat yourself as someone you like.

Take Care of Yourself

Self-aware leadership is not all about managing yourself in order to be a great leader to others. It also means being in a good mental state, so you get to enjoy your life and become at peace with yourself.

Many people focus so much on being self-aware leaders in service of others they neglect how much it’s also about benefiting themselves. Great leaders are never martyrs; great leaders make sure they are equally valuable to the team as everyone else.

Studies have shown that people who don’t speak up for themselves and always put others’ needs before their own tend to become bitter.

You can’t be a good, productive leader unless you’re in a good state. It’s hard and almost impossible to put on a healthy attitude when deep inside, you’re bitter, angry, and unhappy. What’s inside will eventually boil over.

Your team is expecting you to operate at high capacity in service of them and the goal, so don’t forget to take care of your well-being.

Here are ways you can prioritize your well-being and take care of yourself:

• Take a break when you need to. There will surely be days when you need to push yourself to perform, even when all you want is to sleep for days. But you have to listen to your body and rest when you know that your mental health is being sacrificed.
• Take care of your health. Exercise every day, eat your veggies and protein, and get 7-8 hours of sleep. It sounds pretty basic, but most people neglect to do these, and they pay for it by performing poorly, getting seriously ill, or burning out.
• Develop your relationships. No one is an island. So true. You need people who will lend an ear when you need to vent about a stressful situation at work. A good support system will see you through many crises.
• Make time for leisure. Work should not be your everything. Do things that you genuinely enjoy, and that add positive excitement to your life!

What Are Some Examples of Effective Self-Management Techniques?

Self-management is hard work and takes a lot of discipline, but it all starts with self-awareness. A self-aware person will be observant of how they spend their time. This will allow them to employ a series of self-management strategies or techniques.

Some examples of effective self-management techniques are time management, stress management, and critical decision-making. These include focusing on one task at a time, understanding your emotions, and relying on data for making decisions.

These self-management techniques will help you become a happier, more effective leader.

Time Management

They say you can’t actually manage time; you can only be wise with how you spend it. And part of being wise with your time is making sure that you don’t waste it.

A simple way to do that is to plan your “must dos” and schedule them the first thing in the morning —including those that you do outside of work or for leisure.

Every morning I journal my three “must dos” for the day, and I start picking them off one by one. I don’t do anything else until I have finished them; after all, they are the most important tasks of the day.

This means that if I get interrupted by an emergency or for some reason I can’t continue, at least I will have spent “the most of my time” on “the most important tasks.”

One very common mistake that people make is multitasking so much. It may sound counterproductive, but often, focusing on one task at a time will actually make you perform better.

Actually, the brain can’t do two things at a time; it can only switch between tasks faster or slower. This switching has a “reset cost.” Every time you restart to finish that email, your brain has to go back and remember what the email was about; this takes time and reduces efficiency.

Stress Management

Know your triggers and give yourself time to manage your emotions before they escalate. If you need to take a break or take things slowly, then allow yourself to do that.

Most of us wait until we can’t handle the stress anymore. The better thing to do is work in such a way as to avoid as much stress as possible.

A great tip is to have someone or something reminding you to do a “check-up” from time to time during the day. A check-up is a quick pause where you rate your stress level on a scale from 1-10; you then give a few seconds of thought to your inner dialogue and realign those thought patterns with a more useful mindset if needed.

The reminder can be anything from a randomly set alarm clock or wearing your watch on the other wrist, and every time you notice it, you do a check-up.

Decision-Making

Problem-solving and decision-making skills are necessary for an effective leader. These can be developed by using reliable data and critical thinking when making a decision. Instead of making blind guesses, use logical thinking and consider the pros and cons of each option.

It is worth developing the skill of knowing when to make intuitive decisions and when you need to stop and think. A book that changed my life and especially my decisions making process is thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman!

The main focus of this book is to explore how our decisions making process as humans are inaccurate and significantly flawed. But also how we can improve it by being self-aware and understanding the sign of a complex decision-making environment.

Conclusion

Self-management takes a lot of determination and hard work, but it is absolutely crucial if you want to be an effective leader who is able to influence a team—not coerce them—to keep working on themselves too.