I am fascinated by self-awareness. Self-awareness is critical in our workplaces because, without it, we can become stuck in unhelpful patterns of learned behaviour that dramatically affect the people around us.
When in a stressful situation, our brain may try to help, by giving us a set of instructions on how to react automatically. This comes from our limbic brain - our emotional reptilian brain. Sometimes these instructions (patterns) are unhelpful.
Think of a situation, where someone questions your authority or work – what is your response?
You might feel under stress. Your emotional brain may take over. It may then offer you some instructions which you take on automatically.
So what does that look like? Defensiveness? Withdrawal? Blame? Ruminate? This is your reactive subconscious brain taking over.
This is part of human nature, and unless we start working on our self-awareness, we get stuck in these dysfunctional patterns.
So, let me tell you a story.
At the age of 20, I was controlling, action-oriented, fast-paced, and hated being told what to do. Anyone relate?
I was working on my family's farm over shearing and we had two university students helping us. The students, from Sydney were undertaking farm work experience for their degree. It was their third day; we were drenching and jetting sheep and Dad had just put me in charge for the afternoon while he went mustering.
We were penning the sheep, it was hot and dusty; the sheep weren’t running and we were getting behind. The dogs stopped barking, and the students were standing around watching me. Instead of calmly communicating how they could help, I started getting frustrated, and angry that these students didn’t understand the urgency.
My reaction? I began running around faster, exaggerating everything I was doing, busting myself trying to yard the sheep up. This was my way of communicating to the students to hurry up. As you can imagine, the passive-aggressiveness didn’t work and the situation continued to spiral. I was more enraged as time went on. One of the student's drench gun broke – I snatched the drench gun and stormed over to the workbench. The students sat on the fence watching me fix it. My reaction? More passive-aggressiveness, I remember feeling so angry. Not thinking clearly, I cut myself with my pocket knife as I tried to fix the drench tube. A few swear words were left in the air, as I stormed out of the sheep yards, bursting with anger.
I ran into my dad, who asked what had happened. I angrily explained that the students were sitting around watching me and that I accidentally cut myself because I was so angry.
After some time out, a debrief with dad, and a lesson learned on communication, I went back to drenching.
Reading this, you must be thinking, 'Wow, that passive-aggressive response was so unreasonable and unnecessary', and that's because it was. Feeling stressed and not in control, my limbic brain gave me the instructions, automatically responding with passive-aggressive behaviour which finally resulted in me fleeing the scenario and two very confused and uncomfortable students.
It is such a brilliant skill to understand when this part of the brain is trying to take over. When you learn this, you can reject the instructions from your limbic brain. This allows you to be proactive and intentional and break behavioural patterns. This is a lifelong process of learning and is such an important skill for all of us.
Building self-awareness is critical, especially within the workplace. When our leaders have greater self-awareness at work, we have happier, more engaged, and safer workplaces. I am inspired to empower people to grow their emotional intelligence because when a person is self-aware, there is a huge ripple effect on the people around them, the relationships they cultivate, and the workplaces they are part of.
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