Self-Awareness and Regulation

Objectives of Self-Awareness and Regulation

• Explain the importance of self-awareness and regulation
• Discuss how their practice helps show a capacity for leadership
• Analyze situations in which self-awareness and regulation play a significant role in leadership
• Resolve to practice self-awareness and self-regulation to further develop leadership capacity

Introduction to Personal Leadership and Competence

• This module introduces personal leadership and competence
• Self-awareness and self-regulation are foundations for realizing leadership

Self-Awareness and Regulation in the Modern Workplace

• Technical skills are secondary to the ability to learn on the job
• Communication skills, adaptability, creativity, responsiveness, personal management, motivation, contributorship, social skills, and leadership potentials are desirable traits

Foundations of Management Skills: Self-Awareness

• Awareness is having or showing a realization, perception, or knowledge of a concept, situation, circumstance, or person
• Self-awareness allows people to recognize their place and role in the world
• It enables expression of thoughts and behaviors based on this recognition

Self-Awareness Questions

• Consider these questions to assess your self-awareness:
• Do you listen or talk more during conversations?
• Do you ask others how they feel or assume feelings based on yourself?
• Do you think about how your actions affect others or are you confident others are fine with how you handle them?
• Are you aware of social cues, or do you focus on yourself?
• Can you admit when you're wrong and apologize, or do you blame others?

Theories of Self-Awareness

• Developmental Theory (Jean Piaget, 1896-1980):
• Assumes child's thinking changes at specific developmental stages
• Focuses on:
• Assimilation
• Accommodation
• Growing up influences a child's capacity to understand the world
• Children cannot do particular tasks until psychologically mature enough
• Development Theory is considered inaccurate
• Cognitive Development (Andreas Demetriou, 1950-)
• Combination of empirical evidence from Piaget's theory and aspects of psychometrics and cognitive theory
• Focuses on:
• Functional Levels of Organization
• Core Processes
• Mental Operations
• Knowledge and Beliefs
• Aims to describe and explain intellectual development
• Includes individual differences in the rate and direction of intellectual development
• Considers cognitive mechanisms underlying development, and the actual differences between changes
• This theory is considered to be a more accurate application

Areas of Self-Awareness and their Importance

• Key areas include
• Personality
• Values
• Habits
• Needs
• Emotions
• Understanding these areas helps you gain competency and insights for holistic personal development

Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

• Identifies five levels of needs
• Physiological: breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion
• Safety: security of body, employment, resources, morality, family, health, property
• Love/belonging: friendship, family, sexual intimacy
• Esteem: self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others, respect by others
• Self-actualization: morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem-solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts

Competency Areas Benefiting from Practicing Self-Awareness

• Benefits include
• Skills development
• Performance
• Intuitive decision-making
• Stress management
• Motivation
• Leadership
• Developing healthy self-awareness is critical for other skills needed for leadership competencies

"The Animal In You" Activity

• In this activity, The Animal in you can do anything he/she chooses
• If you were an Animal what would you be?
• Describe your own unique talent and potential
• What do you love to do and dream you will be?
• Express your dreams and self through a fantastic animal

Practicing Self-Awareness: The Johari Window

• The Johari Window accurately illustrates the process of Practicing self-awareness requires reflection
• It is designed with four (4) quadrants
• The Model assigns specific 'selves' or personas to each quadrant:
• Q1 – Public Self
• What is openly shared
• Open for discussion
• Q2 – Private Self
• Some things just cannot be shared
• There is a feeling of vulnerability attached to the fear of disclosing information considered "secret" and trust needs to be established
• Q3 - Blind Self
• Constitutes characteristics other people say they notice about us but of which we are not aware of
• May or may not be conscious about how actions affect others
• Q4 - Undiscovered Self
• An aspect of the 'self' often discovered by both (or either) the person (and/or) others much later
• Disclosure often requires deeper levels of trust
• The quadrants define aspects of an individuals personality based on how personal attributes (strengths and weaknesses) are disclosed, made known, or perceived by others
• Objectively filled out, it provides a holistic understanding of oneself

Self-Regulation

• Self-regulation is where awareness of certain behavior leads to self-policing action or the capacity to alter behavior
• It determines how to choose and how to respond to situations, circumstances, events, or people

Theories of Self-Regulation

• Social Learning Theory (Albert Bandura, 1925-)
• Focuses on learning that occurs within a social context
• States that the environment has an effect on modeling
• Individuals identify an "ideal" and patterns their behaviors after them
• Attention, Retention and Motor reproduction are needed for modeling to become successful
• observation, imitation, and modeling are key components to this theory
• Social Learning is considered the bridge between cognitive and behaviorist theories
• Self-Determination Theory (Edward Deci & Richard Ryan)
• Assumes people have psychological needs for self-motivation and personality integration
• Three needs:
• Competence
• Relatedness
• Autonomy
• It's a sense of freedom to do what is interesting, personally important, and vitalizing

Phases of Self-Regulation

• Forethought / Pre-action or Setting Standards and Goals
• Sets the stage for action
• Maps tasks
• Performance Control
• Uses processes and strategies to reach success
• Self-Reflection
• Reflection after performance
• Outcomes are compared to goals set in the forethought phase

Aspects of Self-Regulation

• Setting standards and goals
• Self-observation
• Systematic monitoring of own performance
• Self-judge
• Systematic comparison of actual performance set against goals
• Self-reaction
• Personal process of evaluation that takes places during the activity

Methods of Self-Regulation

• Identifying behavior patterns Creating positive reinforcement with small, possibly periodic, and reasonable rewards
• Consciously observing the frequency or intensity of particular behavior, and correction in the event that wrong behavior is demonstrated
• Challenging ourselves by criticizing negative behavior and reinforcing positive ones & challenging defeatist attitudes
• Changing our reaction or response patterns

Practicing Self-Regulation

• Learning to identify specific positive or negative behavior
• Consciously watching for cues, actions, or stimuli that trigger them
• Change response patterns to stress and other triggers
• Correct ourself consciously and challenge defeatist attitudes

Application of Self-Regulation

• How do self-awareness and self-regulation help me develop leadership competencies?
• What's in it for me? (WIIFM)
• How can self-awareness and self-regulation help me go about developing my leadership potentials?
• What are performance pitfalls or behavior should I be watching out for?
• Why are self-awareness and self-regulation considered desirable competencies?