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Mindful Leadership: Cultivating Awareness for Success

May 9, 2023

The importance of awareness cannot be overstated.

Having self-awareness gives us the power to influence outcomes, helps us become better decision-makers, and gives us more self-confidence. We can communicate with clarity and intention, which allows us to understand things from multiple perspectives. It frees us from assumptions or bias.

I want to target awareness today in three critical areas of our lives.

1. Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is the ability to focus on yourself and how your actions, thoughts, or emotions do or don't align with your internal standards.

2. Other's Awareness

Building on the foundation of self-awareness, other awareness involves the skill of observing, recognizing and understanding the basic wants, expectations and feelings that other people have. All interpersonal skills are enhanced through self-awareness and the ability to tune into and understand others. I have a fantastic tool I've used for years to help sort people in my life by examining the space they occupy and making the necessary adjustments required to level expectations and bring clarity to the relationships. If you're interested in checking out the tool, just email me, reggie@reggiebrock.com and ask for Sorting People, and I will send it to you free of charge.

3. Corporate Awareness

Corporate awareness is the understanding of the wider environment in which an organization operates and the impact your contribution as an individual provides. So let me ask you something. Is there a difference between awareness and knowledge, and why care? Awareness is perceiving, knowing, feeling, or being conscious of events, objects, thoughts, emotions or sensory patterns. Knowledge is facts, information and skills acquired through experiences or education, the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. Learning to navigate between feeling and fact, emotions to conscious reality flattens our decision-making processes, therefore, eliminating the extremes.

I want to share with you three manifestations of yourself for what I call your blend:

1. You in the Past

It's all the things that you have done or that you have happened to you.

2. You in the Present

Gifts belonging to the now for enrichment of yourself and others.

3. You in the Future

The furthest thing from most of our minds is the future, but it's something that's critical for us to keep our eye on.

These three versions work in concert to form the final version of our life, which is our legacy. You can only leave what you have lived. Your legacy is being written. It's a living document, a story yet to be finalized. Remember, you can only leave what you have lived. You can't have today without yesterday. You cannot have tomorrow without yesterday and today.

So the big question today is, which version sucks up the most of your resources? Once we gain clarity surrounding self-awareness, we will be profoundly more interpersonal with others and corporately responsible, and over time gradually become more advanced in our thinking and our behavior. This is a sign of leadership that attracts followers.