Self-awareness and Self-development: Adaptation for Success in the Process of Leadership and Management

Humans have been enthralled with ourselves for a long time. Our attempts to understand ourselves are part of a lengthy tradition of inquiry that span through generations, societies, cultures and practices.

“know thy self” from the ancient Greek maxim, the term self-awareness has been researched and studied by psychologists and philosopher for the last century. Practitioners and researchers has long diffused self-awareness as both an underlying means of allaying psychological distress and the path of self-development for psychologically healthy individuals.

What is self-awareness?

The psychological study of self-awareness can be first traced back to 1972. Psychologists Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund’s coined the theory of self-awareness.

They proposed that;

“ When we focus our attention on ourselves, we evaluate and compare our current behaviour to our internal standards and values. We become self-conscious as objective evaluators of ourselves” (Jessie, 2020). In a nutshell, they view self-awareness as a major tool of self-control. In this state one actively identifies, processes and stores information about the self. The important distinction here is as follows; One can perceive and process stimuli from the environment without explicitly knowing that one is doing so. (Alain, 2011, p. 808). Furthermore, Trapnell, Campbell, Trudeau and Reich (1999; 1995, as cited in Anna, 2016) defined self-awareness as the “extent to which people are consciously aware of the internal states and their interactions or relationships with others.

A prominent definition of self-awareness was proposed by Daniel Goleman in his bestselling book “Emotional intelligence”. Daniel (2004, as cited in Jessie, 2020) defined self-awareness as “knowing one’s internal states, preferences, resources and intuitions”. However this definition places more weight on the ability to monitor our thoughts, emotions and our inner word as they emanate. According to Daniel (2004), self-awareness is the basic foundation to emotional intelligence.

How to become self-aware

• Asking for feedbacks from those around, “what” instead of why.
• Training and development.
• Practice mindfulness.
• Seeking, mentorship and support.

Benefits of self-awarenewss

• Monitoring and managing our emotions strengthens work and personal relationships.
• It enables us recognize our strengths and weaknesses, thereby improving our skills
• It helps us become a better leader by having an insight on how others perceive your behaviour.
• It helps become more proactive.
• Seeking out our true passion, thereby increases our work motivation.

What is continuous self-development?

By its nature, self-development is a continuous process. It is a process which involves the devotion of individuals to increase their knowledge and understanding throughout their careers. The idea of self-development depends on fundamental individual difference and characters which makes it a multi-faced and complex phenomenon.

The term self-development has a great deal of definition;

Psychologist Erikson (1982), spawn a theory of self-development based on part, on the work of Freud. However, he believed the personality continued to change overtime and was never truly finished. Erikson perspective of self-development gave credit to more social aspects, like the way we negotiate between our own base desires and what is socially accepted. In his view Moore (2009, as cited in Florian, 2012) states that “self-development is a glorious quest, it’s the desire to find your own freedom to connect with your own sense of worth, integrity and happiness to enjoy abundance.”(p. 28). Furthermore, Knudson (1996, as cited in Gararina et al, 2017) defines self-development as the “the differentiation aspect, distinguishing oneself from others and knowing one’s own mind and the attending aspect, developing a sense of connectedness with others. Alternatively, A Vipan (2010) refers “self-development to physical and psychological development that will help an individual to adjust with others, adapt to a given satisfaction and do better in situations that will generally bring positive experiences and subject situation” (p. 6).

In this context, the most specific definition of self-development is given by; Ustun (1998) states “in the general terms, as gaining information needed in a person’s working life acquiring new information and skills open to the change, learning for the sake of learning and maintaining all these knowledge, throughout one’s life (p. 207). However, self-development does not involve the acquisition of knowledge and skills, but also what is to be learnt, how and when.

Self-awareness and Self-development

Self-awareness is an in-depth study and affirmation on one’s own personality or individuality, meanwhile continuous self-development is the constant improvement of one’s ability. Moreover self-awareness is one of the cardinal steps towards self-development. An individual who is self-aware, is reality oriented and can process thought, feel and act accordingly in a way that will help realise and fulfil potentials to maximum possible extent.

Self-awareness is one of the attributes of emotional intelligence and a vital factor in achieving success. A critical mechanism in reaching higher level of job satisfaction. An Indicator of a great leader.

To become a successful leader, we must cultivate self-awareness. A valuable trait and also develop the ability to learn constantly. While it may not be likely to achieve total objectivity about oneself. There are certainly degrees of self-awareness. Although everyone has a basic ideas of who they are but not everyone is able to develop and to develop continuously.

In order to perfect management and leadership skills, we must develop self-awareness by knowing our personality, habits, emotions, strengths and weaknesses. On the other hand continuous self-development will help us develop our talents and potential, increase our self-knowledge and the vision of the person we want to become. This will be vital for us as a leader in the future as we will engage people with different view point, perceptions and beliefs because all this create the world around us.

Furthermore, as a manager or leader of a firm, in order to make a real impact, we need to be self-aware because self-awareness collaborate with the likelihood of success. Self-awareness and continuous development makes us better at our jobs. Thus, enhance our self-confidence. In addition, self-awareness and continuous self-development is salient factor in becoming a successful leader in today’s financially constraint, quality oriented, rapidly changing organization. With the rapid changes in nature of work, Job tasks are now organized around projects, executed in process terms , integration of technologies in the organization and the standard of performance becoming more intricate and challenging.

Conclusively, self-awareness is like an hidden treasure only continuous self-development can discover if as a manager or leader, these two are discovered and worked on, it leads to initiative ideas, creativity and productivity.