Self-awareness and entrepreneurship

1. Why Self-Awareness is the New
Leadership Skill
By Alicia Morga
Alicia Morga © 2011

2. Ancient Proverb:
If you meet three
jerks in one day,
you’re the jerk.
Yes, often we are the source of our own
problems. I never quite grasped this until I
became an entrepreneur.

3. There is no training when you
become an entrepreneur. One day
you were an employee and the next
you’re the boss. And unfortunately,
the title doesn’t change who you are.

4. The big difference though is that now the
spotlight is on you. Every quirk, insecurity,
mood, facial expression, style, choice,
becomes the focus of a group of people. All
eyes are on you. All the time.
Alicia Morga © 2011

5. The best analogy really is it’s a lot
like being a parent. Your baby or
toddler absorbs everything you do,
looks to you for guidance and tests
the heck out of you. That’s exactly
what employees do.
Which is all to say, as the leader,
who you are has an effect on
others.
So if you want your employees,
children or even your environment
to reflect the best of you, you need
to become self-aware.

6. What is self-awareness?
Daniel Goleman, author of the
books Emotional Intelligence and
Social Intelligence, defines self-
awareness as the ability to
identify, express and manage
your emotions.
Which seems easy enough, except it
isn’t.
I’ll give you an example from my
own life.
Mudtown.com by Brenden Clawson and Greg Bigoni

7. I took first place in my kindergarten
classroom spelling bee and won a paper
mache Popeye.
I was over the moon with excitement.
My foster mother took this picture and
right after warned me ,
“Don’t get too big for your britches.”

8. This is how I felt.

9. What I learned in that moment was it was not okay to have feelings.
Statements like these
You’re So Emotional
were subtle messages that dishonored or
ignored my feelings.
Many children grow up learning the same
Shake it off lessons. That it’s not okay to feel or it’s only
okay to feel certain things, like only women
can be sad or only men can be angry.
My Popeye experience linked for me that
achievement was okay but it definitely
Be a good girl wasn’t okay to feel anything about it.
And so like many an over-achiever before
Big girls don’t cry me,

10. I pushed down my feelings and
went out and achieved a lot.
Little did I know that while we’re
trained to tamp down our
emotions, it’s an illusion, because
emotions don’t go away unless
addressed.

11. In fact, it wasn’t until I became an
entrepreneur, that I learned I was
angry.
This, according to Carole Robin, a
lecturer at the Stanford Graduate
School of Business in organizational
behavior, is not unusual.
She teaches future business leaders
in a class called Interpersonal
Dynamics, and many have the same
problem.
When asked how they feel, most
respond, “I don’t know.”

12. That’s because our ability to be in
touch with and express our feelings is
slowly socialized out of us.
Carole gives the example of a toddler
who bumps his head: the mother
rushes to him and says, “You’re okay.
You’re okay.”
We’re told to be okay even if
we’re not.
Then we enter school and we’re told
to be rational and not emotional.
Later in the workplace, we’re trained
to put on armor.
So over time, our ability to even
access emotion gets thwarted; in her
words, “our emotional muscles
atrophy.”

13. For me, the stress of entrepreneurship
began to expose the weaknesses in my
emotional foundation.
I was having a ton of feelings but because I
had learned to suppress them they began
to leak out.
They affected my ability to communicate
cleanly, my ability to pay attention to my
gut, and even how I viewed situations.
They affected my ability to lead.
If you’re not aware of your emotions you
can’t manage them and when you don’t
manage your emotions they manifest
themselves in all manner of unintended
results.

14. So I got a CEO coach and the first thing
she taught me was to respect my
feelings.
It was okay to be angry. Turns out
anger is wise.
I learned that all my feelings are valid
and when you start there, you can relax
enough to dig into why you’re feeling
what you’re feeling and then choose
how you’re going to express and manage
your emotions.
The process is self-awareness. How do
you become more self-aware? You need
to first learn 3 key skills.

15. First, learn to listen to your body.
Often your body will be communicating
something you haven’t let your consciousness
know about.
Check your throat, stomach, and back. What
do you feel in these areas when something
goes right? What about when something
goes wrong?
When you talk about a particular subject do
your shoulders scrunch up around your ears?
These are physical signs pointing you to how
you’re really experiencing something.

16. Second, get in touch with your feelings.
Not sure how you feel? Start by regularly asking
yourself – how do I feel? You can use an iPhone
app to remind you.
Even if you can’t answer the question clearly,
the very act of asking is an act of mindfulness.
Asking will start to bring emotions to the
forefront of your consciousness where it will be
easier to identify them and then deal with them.

17. Third, check your thoughts.
Thoughts and feelings can be easily mixed
I feel up. How do you tell the difference?
that you If you can substitute "I am" for "I feel", you
have expressed a feeling. If you can
substitute "I think" for "I feel", you have
are not expressed a thought or a judgment.
paying Said another way, when "feel" is followed
by "that," "like," or "as" you are most likely
attention expressing an opinion or thought, not
feelings.
to me. For example, saying "I feel that you are not
paying attention" is an observation, not a
feeling.

18. Once you’ve identified a thought, it’s
important to question it.
Is it true? Is it helping?
Doing this will help you to detach
yourself a bit from your thoughts and
recognize that thoughts come and go.
You’ll have the space to get to know
your thoughts and explore what
they’re about.

19. Learning and practicing self-awareness
can help you lead not only a company,
but also a life.
Knowing who you are helps you to better
understand what you want and knowing
what you want makes it far more likely
you’ll get it.
You only have to get out of your own
way.

20. www.AliciaMorga.com
@AliciaMorga
www.gottaFeeling.com
Alicia Morga © 2011