In Episode 10 of Series 1, I was delighted to be joined by Matt Stone, J.D. where we talked about self aware leadership and squishy, messy humans. Here are my Top Takeaways from our discussion…
Relationships are dynamic. Within relationships, we’re always moving closer or moving further apart. Relationship are never in stasis and they are never static We need to appreciate that we dance with each other and are always in motion. We should never view relationships as still and take them for granted. We’re all squishy, complicated and come with our own flavour and dance to different tunes.
None of us are as self aware as we think we are! Limited internal and external self-awareness is always a part of team breakdown. When a team is at risk of breaking down and there’s a lack of trust and poor communication the self awarenss of an individual or individuals is always one of the causative factors.
Trust is core to relationships. Whether we’re talking about a marriage or a business relationship, there are commonalities to making a relationship good. Trust is at the core of relationships and all kinds of relationships need trust to be effective.
Denial feeds the problem. Taking stock, recognising problems and taking responsibility moves you from denial to acceptance of the existence of a problem. Once you’ve accepted its existence, you have to take 100% responsibility for your 50% of the relationship. When you’re willing to take responsibility we have a chance of working out what both of us can do to fix the problem.
Self awareness gives you choices. When we understand our range of behaviour, we give ourselves a range of choices of how we want to behave in a given situation – so we get to respond not just react. This is what I call the regulation layer of self awareness – when we pay attention to how others want to dance, we then have a choice of how we want to dance with them. To tango or not to tango, that is the question!
To listen to Series 1, Episode 10 click here