Posted by Nathalia Lopes on 02 Junho, 2021
Knowing and leading oneself is an arduous and unavoidable path for personal development and the exercise of leadership. There are no shortcuts to take! We can look for a diploma, techniques or external tools to improve our ability to manage people, processes and business. But none of this will have any effect if we don’t take a necessary dive into our own self, coming back to the surface with a deep understanding of who we are and what we want - and how it all affects our personal and professional lives.
Our personality, values and lifestyle have an impact on many facets of our work: the way we solve problems and make decisions, the willingness to innovate and take risks, the way we deal with conflict and change, the relationship with people and the attitude towards the market, among other dimensions.
It is our internal fabric (allied to the company’s culture) that explains, among other issues, the preference to build solutions and decisions individually or jointly. There is no absolutely right or wrong style; it depends on the context. But if you are responsible, for example, for developing an external partnership or leading an open innovation project, you will certainly need a lot of the ability to build agreements - which include negotiating, dealing with diversity, have clarity and empathy with the condition of the other and be flexible to adjust to the context and seek new solutions.
Negotiation techniques can be very useful. But they will be ineffective if they have not been accompanied by a high degree of awareness of their own emotions, values and ideas and an intentional effort to escape from the automatic, to overcome the impulse and the context and to seek, in the inner treasure of possibilities, the best way to act in each situation.
This path of knowledge and personal development must pass through 3 As:
The first A is self-awareness, being able to perceive and recognize your most recurrent attitudes and behaviors in each situation. Self-consciousness is about understanding what you do and how you behave. It seems simple, but many people do not even reach this first step and, surprises with the reaction of others, spend their lives saying "I did nothing".
The second A is self-knowledge: understanding what is behind what you do or say. To have self-knowledge is to perceive the invisible line that moves our way of thinking and acting; it is to understand how our actions and reactions are not only the result of the objective context, but are also influenced by our values, preferences, experiences, emotions and mechanisms of defense or personal affirmation.
Self-knowledge is a necessary mirror, but not always benevolent: it sometimes tells us, for example, that our irritation with a colleague or boss finds more explanations in ourselves than in the other person, as well as Carl Jung. Without this understanding, we may even change companies or teams, but we will carry the seed with us so that this problem may reappear in the future. Self-knowledge involves recognizing how we are affected in each situation and identifying why.
The third and final A is AUTONOMY. Here, autonomy does not mean independence or insubordination to the other, but the ability to govern oneself, to control one’s own impulses and escape from the autopilot. From awareness and knowledge about yourself (what you do and why), to have autonomy is to be able to choose between repeating a behavior or attitude that you consider appropriate or then adopting a new course of action. Autonomy is what takes us out of inertia ("I am like that") and puts us on the path of personal development ("I can be or do different").
Autonomy is a path of individual choice. It does not mean abandoning your personal style and preferences, but becoming a hostage neither of yourself nor of external circumstances. Autonomy isn’t always about doing what you want (the real world doesn’t work that way). It means recognizing how we and others are affected in every situation and intentionally adopting a healthier, more mature and balanced way of acting. This is also an emotional intelligence and an important way to be able to lead yourself, an indispensable step for those who plan to conquer the leadership of other people.
Source: http://beehavior.com.br/os-3-as-do-desenvolvimento-pessoal-e-da-lideranca/