In this journey of deeper, more meaningful and impacting self-awareness, we have looked at a lot of the components of the real us. We have examined motives, influencers in our lives, patterns of behavior, projections and emotional composition.  Not the run of the mill, “look at yourself” kind of self-awareness.  This dive has been deep and hopefully, meaningful in seeing a truer you and seeing how the world sees you as well.

To round out our view of self, there are just a few more to examine.

Your Identifiers

The labels you attach when someone asks what you do or who you are can be quite telling. Do you self-identify with work? Do you have to add a title to the answer? Take a close look at how you respond and what that might say about yourself and project to others. Some of the most common self-identifiers include the need to use title or the brand name of the workplace because they add artificial prestige. The healthier choice is to focus your identification on either life role or your purpose.

Your Judgements

Judgements are a complex set of thoughts that become labels for others and ourselves. They can be as simple as a passing thought about a fellow driver’s ability to navigate traffic or as complex as a near-medical diagnosis. Examining how we judge others gives us some great perspective on how we judge ourselves as well. Are we overly harsh or critical of our performance and life? Do we create false expectations for based on our internal judgements?  Do we use judgments of others to make ourselves feel good?

Authenticity

The buzz word of  2016 and 2017 is authenticity. Unfortunately, many people use the label of authentic to be an ass. Authenticity is not about living outside the boundaries of society and human respect as some people will use it for, but rather a congruence with personal core values and beliefs. Does being authentic give you permission to curse inappropriately, treat others poorly and be harsh when delivering feedback (think about telling your wife how a dress looks)? Of course, it should not. Being authentic means keeping your behavior consistent with your true beliefs and values. If you speak love, you should project love. If you profess forgiveness, that is what your behaviors should reveal to others. Authentic means consistent and means not running away from the filters and rules of a decent humanity.

Conclusion

Not every piece of self-awareness is pleasant to examine. Sometimes it can be downright painful to reflect and know yourself on a deeper level. This deeper, and authentic view of yourself can now lead to the significant and lasting changes that you desire. Quite simply, you can’t fix or move the dial until you know the starting point.

And now you have a much clearer understanding of the real you.

Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years.   He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.

He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.

Saved a big piece for near the end.

Your emotions drive your attitudes and beliefs. Your attitudes and beliefs drive your behavior. Quite simply, if you want to achieve lasting change, you must look deep into you’re your emotional composition.

Emotions and Physical Energy are Connected

Another pretty easy visual. When you are in a higher emotional state (joyous, happy, satisfied), your physical energy is higher. You have the energy to execute your ideas and drive your passion. Conversely, when your emotional composition is lower (anger, frustration, grief), your physical energy is lacking.
This is an important barometer to keep in mind as we continue to take a look at your emotions. Listen to your body’s energy.

Most Common Emotional Frame

Healthy humans have ups and downs in their daily emotional composition. There are times of joy, times of satisfaction, times of overwhelming and periods of dark. All part of a normal day on the planet. Not every moment is butterflies and mugging selfies as Facebook would have us believe.

But within the fluidity of human emotion comes a common resting spot. That is a place where, over time, people’s emotional composition comes to settle. This is the spot that both you and I seek to understand. This becomes the emotional baseline that can then be used for prescriptive actions to improve overall emotional health.

It’s Not What You Think

When asked, most people will respond with a higher level of emotional composition than accurate at the time. This is due to a couple of factors including lack of emotional awareness and the desire to project a better state of emotional health to others and the outside world. In my experience, most people will respond to the query about emotional composition with where they would like to be instead of where they are at.

So, to get to your real emotional composition, some tracking is needed. My encouragement is to look at your most common emotional composition over 30 days. Also note your emotional high and low points for each day as well.

The Reconciliation to the Truth

As you track your own view of emotional composition, ask a friend, significant other or trusted team member to give you the same information daily. Ask her or him where they think you are at and note that as well.

As the above equation is true that emotions drive behaviors, your behaviors are tattletale of your emotional composition. The feedback from a trusted source is based on your behavior they observe. Your tone, your body language, how you approach situations. Even if you overcompensate with trying to be happy. You cannot escape what your behaviors tell others. Frustrated tone come from a frustrated person.

Now with 30 days of your own observations and 30 days of feedback from a valued and trusted source, you can see your most common spot. Hopefully over 30 days of self-examination you were also able to be more self-honest with your typical emotional state as well.

Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years.   He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.

He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.

Projections are those things we put out into the world that allow others to judge us and, more importantly, dictate how they interact with us. They are a moderately complex set of behaviors that include body language, tone, physical appearance and the words that come out our mouths. The importance of projections is in that these are the most easily correctable piece of personal behavior and they have tremendous influence over how the world sees you and chooses to relate to you.

Your projections are your magnet for other people and situations. Simply put, you will receive from others what you choose to project. Unfortunately, personal projections are also a common blind spot among adults. Many people just don’t know what they are projecting to others and what those signals are attracting.

The balance of this article will look at some common projections and offer some tips to tuning them without sacrificing the core of you.

Super Serious Dude (Labeled without Gender Deference)
This was my wakeup call in the early 90’s when a team member gave me the nickname of “stomper” because of my tendency to walk fast and move with a sense of purpose through the office. What I was projecting was high urgency, high self-importance and little regard for anything around me. This one is found in verbal and tone responses when interrupted and you always project a hurried approach or overly share about how busy you are or how important the work that you are doing. Simple fix on this one is to lighten up and slow down. A gentle reminder that the world does not rotate around you and your project can also be useful.

Flippant Soul
Everything is a joke. Every response starts with laughter. Chuckles lead even the most serious of conversations. Smart ass comments are ever-present. Nothing is taken seriously.

Fun is great and everyone should have as much as possible but sometimes we need to arch our backs at be focused and serious. Not every situation is bubble-blowing giggle worthy. Learn when to be serious and when your comments and projection is too much for the situation.

Spiritually Smug
One projection set that is becoming more prevalent and common is spiritual smugness. It is certainly awesome that you found God (more accurately God found you) and you now have inner peace, detachment and total enlightenment. Awesome. Now stop judging the rest of us and sharing your path. Your path is yours, not ours and the constant pointing out of either your peace and happiness or our failure to find it will not serve you well in connecting with others.

Quiet, Aloof and Genius
One of a couple of unfair projections, quiet is often misjudged as aloof or even arrogant. Again, not fair but what you are projecting will determine what you receive back from others. You may be legitimately quiet and introverted but the world sees it differently. The same with really smart people (an affliction I have never had to deal with). They are seen as unapproachable because of vocabulary or command of a subject in a very directive tone. Learn to be more open, outgoing when around people and keep some of your genius in the garage.

Flirt and Charm
The line between good manners, charm and being overly flirtatious is thin. This one too is unfair in most cases and there are different standards (unfairly so) for women and men. Much of this is wrapped in non-verbal signals such as walk, leaning in during conversations and in tone. Again, the point of knowing this projection is to allow us to connect more solidly and genuinely with people and not based on projections we don’t desire to have in our lives.

Bitter Pill
Everything is wrong, everything is bad and the world is an ugly, ugly place. This projection, usually through a combination of verbal and tone signals is very distancing of others. No one wants to be around the person that sees nothing good in the world. Find the some good in things and share it and learn how to park your criticality.

Invisible Transparency
Transparent is great. It really is. It is awesome to be a genuine person, flaws and all. But there are those people that over disclose to the point that they have nothing left to share to anyone. They have told the whole story, names included, to anyone that will listen. We all have that over-disclosing friend and commonly that is one we tend to avoid. Keep some boundaries on what you share with others to maintain respect and credibility.

You Are What You Wear
Not everyone wears Prada but the harsh truth is that people judge us by our appearance and that judgement will affect connections and relationships with others. Wear booty shorts and see what you attract. This is not to say we must be dressed to the nines in all situations but we should be aware that our outer appearance will indeed dictate many of the responses and reactions we receive from other people. And to be intellectually honest, we do it to others as well.

Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years.   He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.

He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.

Patterns are those recurring events in our lives and in the business world that create similar, if not exactly the same outcomes.  Patterns are also one of the more difficult pieces of self-awareness for people and closely connected to the Law of Attraction.  The bottom line is that you will continue to attract exactly what your continued patterns dictate until they are identified and managed.

Business Patterns

The reoccurring patterns in our business life are the easiest to spot and recognize because they have metrics associated with them.  Measurable elements like revenue, jobs created, time in business and customer satisfaction provide great insight into successful (and the opposite) business patterns.  Another common business pattern is a “feast or famine” cycle that happens within a great many industries.  Examine closely these patterns of successful business operation and learn to replicate those key factors in all jobs and businesses.  If it worked well and created the success you desired, do it again.  And again.  Team member turnover is also a good one to look at to see if the patterns you create are healthy or not.

Conversely, a pattern of failure in business or becoming bored with a job or function in a matter of a brief period can be telling.  Even in times of success, the pattern that led to past failures should be examined.  Why did the past business ventures fail?  Why were you bored and jumped from industry to industry?  Look for both points of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in job functions and look closely at why past entries into business failed.  One that I have seen over the past 20 years is entrepreneurs that burn through partners and employees like some people change shirts.  This is most certainly something to examine and reflect upon.

Personal Habit Patterns

Also, relatively easy to spot but much harder to manage or change, personal habit patterns are often rooted deeply in behavior, belief and emotion.  In some cases, they also carry chemical dependency and social needs as well.

Successful patterns are those in which you CONSISTENTLY take care of yourself through exercise, diet, activity, learning, saving, investing, healing and growth.  Meditating and jogging two days in a row does not a successful pattern make.  Harmful patterns are those in which the continued behavior creates ill effects on health or your even your financial position.

Some other personal patterns to consider as you become more and more self-aware include trusting (overly skeptical or overly trusting), use of money, managing time, reactions to pressure situations, and how we choose to react in negative emotions (hate, revenge).

Relationship Patterns

Now the examination of our patterns begins to get tougher.  All of us have had friends and acquaintances that share how their three failed marriages, six subsequent relationships and the kind of people they are attracting are all the fault of those other people.  The truth is that we attract the people in our lives based on the patterns we live and our external projections.  If you are attracting awesome, healthy people in your life and they stay connected to you for an extended period of time (sometimes forever), keep doing what you are doing and identify some of your great projections you are putting out there.  Create a mirror of your behavior to attract the kind of relationships, both personal and professional, you want in your life.

Oppositely, if you are not attracting quality, long-term relationships (this even applies at work), look at what you are projecting and why the wrong people migrate to you.  Some people are just a bug light for chaos, cheapened interactions and short-term, toxic encounters.  As my father told me, “you catch what you go fishing for”.

Blame, Justification and the River in Egypt

The evil demon that prevents the self-awareness of our patterns is the three-headed monster of blame, justification and denial.  Each block us from seeing how we create our own patterns and more importantly, how we can change them.  Work on not attributing your patterns to others, explaining them away and denying that they exist.  The painful truth is that we create our own patterns by action or inaction and it is up to us to identify them and make changes when needed.

Changing Patterns

The great news is that no pattern in our lives or work is cemented in cosmic code and all of them can be changed.  The first step is obviously to identify both the short-term and long-term patterns that serve us well and those that need to be changed.  Note the good.  All patterns have some good associated with them and some are all good stuff.  By noting what is good, we can reproduce the quality outcomes and relationships we want to have in our lives.

Bad patterns are not changed in whole and only addressed in the behavioral (sometimes very small) pieces that create them.  You can’t just change a bad pattern of broken marriages and relationships by saying so, you need to look at the individual behaviors that caused the dysfunction and tackle them individually and over time.  I think my dad would call that “changing bait”.

You will also want to track your changes and patterns (did someone mention journaling?) to see your results and provide yourself with the reinforcement needed to create new and great patterns in your life.

Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years.   He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.

He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.

The people in our lives have tremendous power and influence with us.  Their thoughts matter.  Their opinions matter.  Their approval matters.

Understanding how each of those people influence our choices, decisions and how we ultimately can live out our purpose is another powerful step on the road to real self-awareness.  We hope that the people closest to us and who have a high degree of influence over our choices have our best interests at heart but, sadly, that is not always the case.  It is only through examination that we can see what our influencers have for motivations and desired outcomes for us and in turn, allow us to manage who we allow to influence our actions.

We have used this type of activity for years when working with one of the key leadership competencies, relationship power and external management, and it works extremely well for examining our influencers more closely.

The Core Influencer

Draw a dot or small circle at the center of a piece of paper.  This is you.  The highest degree of influence that should occur in your decisions, choices, actions and behavior is you.  You are, or should be the center of your influence universe.

This is where you and I must learn to trust our own judgment, values and choices.  Stop being so anxious to share each choice set and decision in your life with others seeking their approval or opinion.  If it works for you, you feel right about it, it fits your core values and is congruent with your purpose; go with it.  The opinions and what others would do is extremely less important than many of us think.

Over-solicitation of input is a sign of low self-esteem and projected in either a lack of confidence or a false bravado of courage.  True trust of your own choices and decisions is quiet and does not seek lots of input nor require a puffing public proclamation.

Tier One

Next draw a small circle outside of the you dot or circle.  This is your closest sphere of influencers and the people that you have allowed the strongest voice in your life.  This population should be small.  The more people you allow significant voice and influence, the greater confusion, second guessing and poor choices you will make.

This little band must be beyond reproach.  The motives of this group must be purely for your best interest, connect completely with your core values and understand your purpose and personal vision.  Any doubt about a motive or the reason for the connection and that person does not belong in your inner circle of influence.  This group will also be static over time as well and the members will not change much.  Who was a trusted inner circle member ten years ago is likely to remain if you are correctly vetting these relationships.

Tiers Two and Three

The second layer of your relationships and relationship strength is where you may solicit some input over unimportant things and certainly not on life-altering matters.  These people are not know well enough to understand their motives in offering you advice and they certainly don’t know your purpose, passions or core values much more than a cursory level.  These people are friends, relatives and business associates but not the deeply connected ones and some may have expertise in an area but not universally to influence major choices of yours.

By the time you start looking at the third ring on your paper you are now looking mostly at acquaintances or those you are friendly with but not really friends.  If you welcome influence from this population you are doing nothing more than conducting a poll or shopping for an answer that you want to hear.

General Influencer Rules

When you really look deeply into the people you allow influence you need to make sure those people provide you with genuine truth and not just what they think you want to hear.  People that share the good and bad in a forthright manner should have a permanent place as your influencer.  Those that simply agree with you or don’t call you on your crap should be shown a place in an outer circle.

Likewise, if an influencer is trying to curry favor or wants something from you, they have no real influencer value.  Think about those people who offer hollow compliments related to appearance or those that come across too gushing about some achievement of yours.  Nice, absolutely but no value as an influencer.

The final general though about an influencer is the most controversial.  Many times those personally closest (spouse, significant other, new boyfriend, parent) are not the best influencers because they lack the objectivity to be completely honest and their motives are tainted by their close relationship with you.

Take some time over the next few days and see who you allow high degrees of influence in your life and if they should be in that position.  But most importantly, make sure the highest degree of influence always rests with you.

Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years.   He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.

He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.

Motivations and motives are a complex set of thoughts and emotions that drive significant parts of our behavior.  When understood and correctly managed, this can lead to powerful changes in our lives and work.  It is a great starting point for a significant upgrade to our self-awareness.

As with just about everything else in life, there are great motivations and motives and poor ones.  The purpose of this article is to encourage the examination of what motives are driving your behaviors and responses.

Motive of Love and Enjoyment

The best motive of all is when love or pure unbridled enjoyment drive behaviors or responses.  I have a buddy that loves baseball.  He eats, sleeps, talks and plays baseball.  It is his point of love, enjoyment and passion.  Each time he talks about it, it is driven by his love for the game.  Similarly, a parent’s interaction with their child is often driven by a motive of love.  Not to say that each interaction is enjoyable but it is driven by the love of the best interest for that child.  Love and enjoyment based motivations will produce the best results, behaviors and ultimate success.  When this motive drives your behavior, it will be obvious to all around you through your displayed demeanor and projected energy.  You will light up a room with this motivation.

Motive of Care and Assistance

My mind immediately recalls Mother Teresa when thinking about this motivation and motive set.  No one more selfless and egoless in her pursuit of caring for others probably exited in modern times.  This is a motivation that has a dark and evil twin that will appear below and comes up a lot in discussions and work on becoming a giving person.  This motive should be examined anytime you volunteer or donate or offer care and assistance to others.  Are you doing it to truly help or to shine favor upon yourself?  Likewise in the workplace, when assistance is offered without any strings attached or expectation of even appreciation, the motivation is coming from the right spot.

Motive of Support

Very similar to care and assistance, support offered without judgment and any expectation is coming from a great spot.  When that supporting ear turns judgmental, gossiping and used against someone, that motivation is now quite polluted.

Motive of Survival

Dr. Abraham Maslow taught the best and most lasting lessons related to this motive.  The need to feed oneself trumps all other needs.  Almost primitive in its view, it produces a me first behavior and often times leads to unethical actions or sacrificing people (and love/enjoyment motivations) for self-preservation.  Although this motive must be present in some form, it should be subordinated for the greater good of a love or care for others motivation with the understanding that basic needs will be provided when motives are aligned.  This motive can become part of a company culture and sacrifice doing the right thing or superior customer service for survival motivations of layoffs or worse.

Motive of Attention

This motivation appears a great deal in social media and even takes the form of people playing the role of victim or even making up victim status (gentle reminder:  you signed that “bad” deal for the car with your eyes wide open and conscious).  This motivation also appears many times under the guise of giving or support when the real motive is to draw personal attention to the act.  Children are great models of this motive in both good and bad behavior and adults will often do something outrageous just for the attention value.  There is some great sociological work being done right now about the incredible rise in people getting tattoos (yes I have some too) and why they do it.

Motive of Embarrassment

The motive to embarrass and need to be right (below) are very closely related.  The embarrassment motive will often show up in sarcastic remarks and cutting-edge humor that is designed to make someone else embarrassed or feel badly.  Take a look at the impact of your words and actions and use good reaction avoidance to cure this motivation.

Motive of Superiority

Like with embarrassment, this motive has a winner and loser.  Since social media as burst into our reality, this motivation has become significantly more public.  A simple test on this motive is to reflect about why being right is so important.  Great judgment will lead you to understand that being right is not nearly as important as allowing others to be right and to choose the spots for being right carefully.

Motive of Revenge

The darkest of all the motives and one driven by pure fear is revenge.  Similar to embarrassment as a motive but with deeper behavioral impact.  When someone is driven by the motive of revenge, it becomes blinding and fear feeding to the point of losing rationality in thought and judgment.  The behaviors driven by revenge are not always the highly open tire slashing variety.  Many of the revenge motive driven behaviors are covert and include gossip, spreading lies and working to undermine the success of others.

None of us, certainly me included, can ever have total purity of motivations and driving motives.  But what we can do is add some significant thought to why we are doing something and what our motives are behind them.  When we know that the motives are solid, we should continue those behaviors.  Conversely, when those motivations are not good or even dark, we need to step back and cease those behaviors and repair the damage when possible.

Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years.   He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.

He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.

Over the past few years, our practice of working with individuals and groups has made a significant shift for the better.

The incorporation of heavy doses of self-awareness followed by changes in thoughts and emotional composition has produced lasting and sustained impact in the competencies and skills needed for success.  More simply, thoughts and emotions drive action.  Action creates results and success.  Actions and behaviors can be modified in a short timeframe but long-term change comes when core parts of you make a move towards the better.  Personal awareness and understanding is also the starting point for greater mindfulness, enhanced effectiveness as a leader and your own happiness and satisfaction.  This series is going to be devoted to the natural first step in making those long term changes and that is to understand yourself on a deep and core level.  It is only then, that you can redirect some things in your life to achieve greater and more desired results.

A huge reason in committing these practices to a series of articles (and probably some podcasts are coming as well)  is that we have seen other coaches talk about self-awareness without providing the tools to really unlock this power.  To say know yourself is not nearly enough.  A roadmap of how to do it in a significant and meaningful way is needed.  Without that, the command to be self-aware can be frustrating and meaningless.

The coming installments in this series will focus on the what and how to of:

Awareness IMPACT-Motivations

Understanding why you are doing something and if that motivation is really consistent with core values and beliefs.  Motivations can be solid and even pure or they can be designed to hurt and harm.  Many people mask their motivations or are unaware of them entirely.

Awareness IMPACT-Your Influencers

Your inner circle of those that influence your emotions, beliefs and ultimately, your behavior are important.  Understanding why people are connected with you and who you allow influence over you is a nice place of examination.  This also relates closely to motivation as you will now look at the motivations of others (warning:  not all are good).

Awareness IMPACT-Life Patterns

Short-term patterns are easy enough to spot and change.  The more difficult challenge is to look at long-term recurring patterns and learn to replicate the awesome while eliminating the bad ones.  Are their sustained pieces of success showing up for you that can be replicated?  Are there patterns of failed marriages, businesses and relationships that need to be eliminated?  Is there a pattern of sameness?  All are either changeable or repeatable based on your desired outcome.  Think for a minute about the people with multiple failed businesses or marriages that always blame someone else but not look at the long-term pattern for answers.

Awareness IMPACT-Projections

Related to patterns, what you project to others has a significant influence on the world around you and what you achieve.  Your kids become the easiest example because of the degree of influence you have with them.  Your team members are another.  Project positive and successful things and that will be what occurs around you.  Project dysfunction and sadly, that is what will return to you.  Don’t be shocked when your team (or kids) turn out exactly like you.

Awareness IMPACT-Your Purpose

Discovering why you are here may be the final piece of great personal awareness.  We are not built to just pay bills and plan our funeral.  Understanding, and then connecting to, your greater purpose and calling will drive your success greatly.

Awareness IMPACT-Emotions

Your emotions drive your attitude and your attitude drives your behavior.  That simple.  A customer/friend asked me to help him with his verbal tone a few days ago.  His issue is not his tone but the emotional composition driving his tone.

Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years.   He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.

He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.