In recent years there have been a lot of articles and studies regarding self-awareness. Much research claims that helping employees become more self-aware contributes to improving their productivity, performance and satisfaction not just in the work place but in all aspects of their life.

So what is self-awareness? In layman terms self-awareness is when we:

Reach a psychological state in which we are aware of our traits, feelings, motivations and behaviour

Being able to be more self-aware of these aspects of ourselves helps us to understand the way we behave and then think about how this may impact different areas of our lives. Its helps us to indicate where our strengths and weaknesses lie, in turn we can then use these to our advantage or develop coping mechanisms for dealing with the latter to improve the efficiency in which we complete a task.

So how can you raise your self-awareness?

There are many ways in which you can increase your employees and your own self-awareness but I believe there are three main ways that this can be easily achieved.

• Take assessments and psychometric personality tests.

Doing personality tests and other assessments can help you to be more aware of your traits and also what your motivations and drives are. Even just reinforcing what you already know about yourself can help to raise your self-awareness.

• Request 360 degree feedback

Receiving feedback from others is a great way to develop your self-awareness especially in a 360 capacity where your colleagues, clients and direct reports are able to anonymously review you. Enabling your reviewees to answer honestly and candidly in a safe environment, giving you a better understanding of your strength and weaknesses.

• Speak with a coach

Speaking with a qualified coach with a background in raising people's self-awareness and using these to help enhance your strengths and develop your weaknesses. This allows you to improve your self-awareness and discuss with a professional ways in which you can use your motivation, traits and behaviour to enhance yourself.



I recently completed our new competency based self-assessment MyStrength. It threw up some interesting themes and made me more self-aware of my own strengths indicating that for me my main strength was Enabling Openness. This got me thinking how I myself could apply this in my role and how I am already using it without realising. Firstly I went back and looked at the personality tests I completed when I first joined Getfeedback to see if there was a similarity with my personality profile and the definition of Enabling Openness. I noticed straight away a key link within Dimensions I had a high preference for being communicative, supportive and consultative. Clearly from both assessments for myself working in an environment where I can work with a wide network of clients and colleagues, providing support for projects and ensuring that the ideas and needs of our clients are meet are important to me. Development wise I need to continue being open with clients about my thoughts and ideas so that they also feel at ease discussing their opinions and clarify on these so that I am able to understand their perspective.

Overall for myself being more self-aware has led to me realising that I am in a job and role where the behaviours and strengths I have are not just benefiting my role but also satisfying my motivation of supporting people (our wonderful clients) in turn increasing my job satisfaction.

If you want to discuss using psychometrics or our new MyStrength tool to raise the self-awareness of your team or yourself then give us a call on 01491 845 536 of email info@getfeedback.net.