Great athletes, top performers, successful solopreneurs, and award-winning actors all have one thing in common: self-awareness. They know their strengths and build on them, and they recognise their weaknesses and work on them or ask for external help to mitigate them. The result is constant self-improvement. The better you know yourself, the more tools and resources you have at your disposal to be productive and achieve your targets. If you know why you struggle to do the things you want to and are aware of your blind spots, you are better equipped to take control and implement effective measures to help you reach your goals.
How well do you know yourself? My guess is not as well as you think. When I joined Apple as a Business Manager in 2012 in Hong Kong, I realised I didn’t know myself as well as I thought I did. As part of my onboarding journey, I had to do a self-assessment exercise. I was asked to pick sixty-nine competency cards from a thick pack, read each one and its detailed description, and sort them into three piles: skilled, unskilled, and neutral. It was part of the Korn Ferry Lominger assessment. Each card represented a skill, also called competencies, such as managing vision and purpose, conflict management, drive for results, compassion, motivation, and many others across different categories.
As I started to flick through the brown pack, I read each card carefully and placed it in the respective pile according to my subjective assessment. When I finished the exercise, the blocks of cards looked visibly uneven. Most cards ended up in the skilled or neutral pile, while only a few were part of the unskilled one. I was comfortable selecting my areas of strength: things like learning agility and motivating others were skills that had made me successful in my previous roles throughout my career. I was also comfortable rating myself as neutral on skills where I didn’t excel or hadn’t had a chance to prove myself, such as technical skills. Where I really struggled, and it turns out most people do, was identifying my areas of weakness, or in the Apple language, opportunities. I was unable to clearly point out the things that I was not good at. I couldn’t see my blind spots, my lack of self-awareness, or perhaps it was my ego getting in the way.
Self-awareness is an underrated skill but a critical one for unlocking your potential and developing yourself. It starts with knowing yourself at the most basic level of nature (biological self-awareness) and understanding your preferred operating mechanism for dealing with situations, both positive and negative (cognitive and emotional self-awareness). We all have a default mindset conditioned by our personality, DNA, culture, and preferences.
Are you an introvert or an extrovert?
Are you a thinker or a doer?
Do you thrive in structure or in flexibility?
Are you analytical or intuitive?
Do you need external motivation, or are you self-driven?
Are you risk-prone or risk-averse?
Do you prefer strategy or tactics?
While the list is endless, and you can take multiple tests to obtain your personality profile, the key question at the core of self-awareness is, What do you need to be at your best? Most people don’t pause to reflect on these questions and take the comfortable path of borrowing proven frameworks from successful productivity gurus, hoping it will work for them and deliver results. However, unless you are genetically wired the same way and have a personality twin, how will someone’s life manual work for you?
Nothing epic was ever born within the confines of copy-pasted frameworks and borrowed guidebooks. Successful people found success because they kept experimenting until they discovered the recipe that worked for them, and they wrote their own manual, one page at a time. I recently saw a tweet from a social media icon explaining his morning routine. He said he spends twenty minutes in the sauna, eats four eggs for breakfast, and starts his day at 9 am after having done some meditation, exercising, and journaling. If I followed his routine, I would probably be dead by now, likely depressed and definitely bankrupt. What I like about his routine, though, is that it’s uniquely his, and it works for him based on his personality, preferences, and lifestyle.
When I asked my business collaborator and friend, Melanie Staunton, CEO of Communicate, about her insights and tips to fight procrastination, she talked about conducting a “personal audit”. She said it’s key to analyse your habits and understand where your time goes so that you are aware of how you spend it (or waste it) and, more importantly, how you want to spend it. For her, much of the traditional advice about productivity doesn’t apply: She’s not a morning person and never schedules her first meetings before 10 am, as that’s when she starts to feel mentally focused and sharp. She likes to challenge conventional rules and test and experiment with new ways of working rather than adopting mass market advice. While for the high-demanding tasks, she prefers to be at home in her office, she often takes her laptop outdoors and finds it relaxing and inspiring to sit by the pool or a café while doing creative work. The change of scenery helps boost her creativity and reduce the stress and mental blockage that often come from being locked inside the same room for hours, looking at a screen.
Mel said she’s a big fan of the old-school handwritten journal. “If it’s in my diary, it’s going to happen,” she explained, pointing at her black leather diary. As a business owner, she juggles client meetings with workshop design and presentations, accounting, business development, and more. Having a clear process to meet deadlines is key. Her final tip is to separate work from private life so that she has time to reset and prevent work from taking over the rest of her life, leading to burnout.
Your best self is not a copy-paste of someone else; it’s an elevated version of yourself. A routine might work wonders for some, but just like with a suit, if you want a perfect fit, you have to customise it and tailor it to fit your measurements.
Analyse your current work routine and identify what you need to change in order to increase productivity. Use the filters of self-awareness, proactivity, and processes to guide you in designing your ideal routine.
Think about your land and what it needs to be green and fertile. It’s not just about watering it but watering it smartly.
Excerpted with permission from The Anti-Procrastinator: How Self-Awareness Can Change Your Life and Get You What You Want, Veronica Llorca-Smith, Penguin South-East Asia.
