Self-Awareness is having a realistic assessment of the world, knowing who you are and how you fit into that world. It is developing a view of the yourself that reflects your core values, preferences, priorities, strengths, and weaknesses. Being aware of these of yourself can help you figure out what you want, know your gifts and talents are, and enable you to navigate effectively through life. The first step of developing self-awareness is to look within yourself and acknowledge your own social identities, those given to you at birth as well as those that you have chosen. These also include the core value that you hold, which lead you in making leadership decisions. Our social identities impact the lens through which we see and experience the world creating implicit biases that influence our decision-making. By recognizing our implicit biases, we can challenge them to give us a more realistic and open-minded perspective of the worked and the people we encounter.

Building self-confidence gives us the courage we need to pursue our dreams and achieve our goals. Unfortunately, insecurities about our self-worth and negative thoughts about ourselves can lead to the Impostor Syndrome, which deters us from reaching our goals and clouds our self-awareness. Acknowledging these insecurities and negative thoughts is an essential step in reframing the way we think about ourselves. Reframing our thoughts and engaging in positive self-talk can help us build the confidence we need to embrace our strengths and imrpive on our weaknesses. Mindful meditation is another powerful strategy to build confidence, assisting you to acknowledge when you are having negative thoughts and feelings and to focus on relaxing your mind and body in order to to proceed with assurance.

To become an effective leader, you must possess a high level of self-awareness. But how can you get a clear sense of yourself? Developing insight will allow you to gain an accurate and deep, intuitive understanding of yourself, your mental and emotional processes, values, biases, and the framework built by your experiences. Leaders that are self-aware are confident and authentic. Authenticity comes from finding your own style and way of leading. Authentic leaders follow a leadership philosophy based on their core values. They make life decisions that reflect their values and experience by doing their jobs without compromising those values. A major obstacle to authenticity is a strong need to maintain a certain image. Letting go of the limits or expectations of how you need to appear and revealing your personality and humanness is a sign of being an authentic leader.

Change is inevitable. Sometimes it's our choice to make a change, and other times the change is thrust upon us, and occasionally, change is required to recover from our mistakes. In each of these scenarios, learning agility is essential. Learning agility is an ongoing, overlapping process that is both an approach and a skill, the willingness, and the ability to learn from experience. Two essential components of learning agility are adaptability and resiliency. Both are needed to navigate change and recover from failures. They help us move forward by determining areas we need to improve and creating development plans to achieve those goals.

Learning agility can be used to learn and process new information quickly, work through problems that are unfamiliar or appears impossible to solve, and juggle multiple tasks in fast-paced work environments. Learning agility is less about what you know and more about what you can learn through problem-solving. Implementing problem-solving strategies helps you better clarify problems, identify goals, and generate alternative solutions. Another misconception of learning agility is that you can magically get everything done at once. When in reality, no one can successfully multitask. Leaning agility teaches us to access and prioritize our tasks to have realistic deadlines with successful outcomes.

To become a learning agile leader, you must be willing to accept new roles, pursue new opportunities, advocate for the unusual, and risk failing. Making any decision always involves some degree of risk. However, avoiding risk usually means that you're missing an opportunity. Some leaders are perfectly content to accept the status quo and remain safe within their comfort zone. Learning agile leaders are prepared to take risks because they are focused more on the experience and less on the possible outcomes. But how can you manage risk effectively and ensure that the rewards outweigh the risk when constantly faced with ambiguity? First, recognize the there is no best decision. Then seek the option that is the least emotionally biased and consists of a strong contingency plan.

At the heart of effective communication is the exchange of information that results in shared meaning. Effective leaders ensure that their messages are being understood and that they are understanding and responding appropriately to the messages of others. For true communication to occur, you need to listen on 3 levels in order to interpret the facts, feelings and values being communicated by the speaker. Truly listening to understand requires you to suspend judgment. Give the speaker the opportunity to express themselves in a safe place without interruption, where they know that you are actively trying to understand their unique perspective. They need to know that you care about their problems and ideas and are listening with an open mind. Nonverbal communication is the transfer of information through body language,facila expressions, gestures, posture, eye contact, and more. Effective leadership requires being highly attuned to these nonverbal communication spheres.

Our minds like to make up stories that make sense to us in order to explain a situation or behavior we observe. If we want to build strong, trusting relationships, it is important to avoid reacting to our non-verified assumptions. Instead, we can use our communication skills by asking powerful questions to reassess a situation; this challenges the story we’ve created and broadens our perspective. It will help unblock our way of thinking when we are feeling stuck and bring forth new ways of thinking that can inspire new ideas. Knowing your boss's communication preferences—and not assuming they're the same as yours—is critical for building an effective working relationship. One way to challenge your assumptions is by investigating how your boss goes about solving problems.

Leaders at all levels need to become adept at building strong professional relationships with their managers, direct reports, and other stakeholders throughout their organizations. Communication is much more complicated than just knowing the mechanics of sending and receiving information, and a great deal of information is communicated through behaviors and actions. Leaders must ensure that their behaviors and actions align with verbal and written communication to develop and maintain these professional relationships. Leaders are also responsible for clarifying the organization's vision, inspiring commitment, and focusing on work to fulfill that vision. To do this, leaders have to communicate their vision effectively. Elevator speeches and powerful stories are ways to achieve a stronger connection and commitment to the organization's vision.