A Practice To Cultivate Your External Self-Awareness

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn about the science-backed practice that has not only changed my life but also the lives of countless people over the last two decades. This is something you can’t ignore if you want to achieve that great goal you identified for this year and write your new future.

It can be really easy for smart, fast-driven leaders today to not effectively engage their stakeholders and thereby miss influencing those they lead to execute great strategies.

Today’s leaders are required to possess external self-awareness.  External self-awareness is the ability to recognize and understand emotions in others and to use this ability to manage your behavior in your interactions and relationships. 

Take for example the group of leaders I got to speak to this week. They are in the center of a large company and charged with providing both short and long term solutions for the business. Here’s the catch—they come up with these brilliant strategies but are never the ones to put them into action. In order to carry out their proposed ideas, solutions, or strategies, they must engage and influence their stakeholders in such a way that their stakeholders are excited to bring that vision to life. 

What leaders need to know about external self-awareness and engaging stakeholders.

It isn’t the smartest individual, the one who executes the fastest, or the one with the best strategy who is most successful.  It’s the individual who has the self-awareness to engage others to follow them who comes up first. 

There’s a lot of research (including from Harvard Business Review) showing that our ability to recognize and regulate our own emotions—while also recognizing and empathizing with others’ emotions—is the #1 predictor of an individual’s success. 

Peter Drucker, a management consultant for over 50 years once said, “Leadership in the past was about strength. Leadership of the present is about smarts. And the leadership of the future is about managing energy.”  Peter was always accurate in his ability to predict management styles.

Today’s leaders must be interested in doing more than just bringing forth the best ideas, strategies, or plans. They must be able to manage the energy of those they lead and serve. 

What successful leaders know that others do not is that — it’s psychology before strategy — every time. 

Years ago, I worked in an organization where I was thrown into the deep end with some difficult clients. I was young and a lot of these people had no interest in accepting me as their leader.

I realized that in order for me to move them forward with whatever I needed to do, I had to address their psychology first. In other words, I had to be concerned with their thoughts, feelings, motivations, fears, worries, and hopes. 

If I didn’t I was never going to be able to get them to listen to me, follow me, or execute with me.

Emotional and social skills are 4x more important than talent and IQ when considering success.

Our ability to truly understand others and use that understanding to engage determines whether or not we’ll be successful. This goes beyond solutions, productivity, efficiency, and intelligence.

I’ve seen it play out time and time again with highly talented, brilliant individuals—engineers, business leaders, and PhDs of all kinds. Regardless of IQ, if they don’t have the skills to be aware of and regulate their own emotions, and the emotions of others, it doesn’t matter how smart they are. Their incredible ideas never come to life.

You must talk to the decision maker.

In order to influence others we must get familiar with the part of the brain that is the decision maker. If you want to be able to influence relationships, you must be able to talk to the primal brain.

Most of us are in the business of selling our ideas or wanting to add value. But the change we’re bringing — even if it’s really good — often is overwhelming to the primal brain. It labels these unknown situations as dangerous.  

If you move directly to sharing the strategy or deliverable without addressing the psychology—the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, motivations—of your stakeholder, client, friend, or child first, your solutions will be meaningless. You’ll miss out on fully engaging the individual.

How to do this?  

One way is to make them feel S.A.F.E. 

Status — Let them know regardless of differences in status, all are equal in value.  

Autonomy — That they have the autonomy to make their own decisions and will be given options. 

Friend vs. Foe — That you are on their side and on their team. 

Expectations  — And be clear of expectations.  An uncertain future is a dangerous one.

If any of these are left unaddressed in the mind of the stakeholder the primal brain will see the other individual in the interaction as a threat. The leader loses her effectiveness. 

The skill of truly successful leaders is their ability to understand their stakeholders’ worries, concerns, and fears.

A great place to begin: have the conversation that’s already going on in their head. In fact, say it out loud. 

You can use this tool and others I share in this episode to have more meaningful and positively influential interactions with your colleagues, stakeholders, clients, friends — even your children.   

I am confident you will see an improvement in your relationships and influence as a leader when you expand your external self-awareness using these practices. 

In this episode, I share:

• The role of external self-awareness and how it’s been proven to be 4x more important than skill, talent, or IQ when considering success
• A 3-step practice to engage even your most challenging stakeholders (including your kids) so they are excited to execute your best ideas
• How to handle conversations with the science of engagement by using the S.A.F.E. method

Resources and related episodes:

• Tune in to the previous episode, Your Mindset Management Practice for Higher Performance
• Listen to episode 106: Recognizing Your Self Protection Mechanism
• Check out the book Life is in the Transitions by Bruce Feiler
• If you’d like to be notified of when new podcast episodes are released, you can do so here: Playing Full Out
• Learn more about the Inside Out Method
• Connect with Rita on LinkedIn

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

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About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Neuroleadership Growth Code, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.