The Top 3 Self-Awareness Tools for Performance

Aristotle once said 'Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom' and I agree that our most significant opportunity for growth lies in understanding ourselves. Understanding our natural patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving allows us to build awareness and make conscious decisions about our responses. Without self-awareness we tend to operate on auto pilot, experiencing a sense that things happen to us and in some instances we feel that our life isn't in our control.

So how do we develop self-awareness? How do we understand our psychology - who we are, how we behave and why? One of the best places to start is through personality or performance assessments, such as Myers Briggs, DISC, Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI), CliftonStrengths, Hogans Personality Inventory - the list is endless. 

Here are the top three self-awareness tools I recommend to start with and the value of each framework. 

1. The Four Birds:
   • This framework is a simplified model of DISC, identifying your extent of assertiveness and whether you tend to be more task or people focused.
   • Easiest framework to understand for yourself and to apply to others. The use of birds helps to create a visual cue for the qualities of each type.
   • Helps you to understand your own communication preferences, how you lead a group and how you contribute to a team, as well as the preferences for others and how you can adapt your communication style.
2. 16 Personalities (an adaptation of Myers Briggs)
   
   • Valuable free tool to understand yourself on a deeper level with an expansion to one of 16 types rather than one of four, with the measurement of five different dichotomies (introversion-extraversion, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling, judging-prospecting and assertiveness-turbulence).
   • Significant amount of resources available for understanding yourself in the context of your strengths and weaknesses in the context of career, relationships, friendships and family.
   • Challenging to apply to others and a little inflexible in its approach since each archetype receives the exact same report, however able to strengthen insights of self.
3. CliftonStrengths
   • Most sophisticated and individualised performance tool available at a reasonable price, utilising 34 themes to identify where your greatest potential lies based on the way you naturally think, feel and behave.  
   • I love this tool because of how personalised it is. Rather than receiving a generic report, everyone's report is different based on their 34 themes. For context, the chance of another person having the same top 5 themes as you in order is over 1 in 34 million!
   • While the report is based on positive psychology (and is subsequently more empowering than basic strengths and weaknesses), it also recognises that our greatest areas of strength can be the source of our biggest blind spots. The report provides strategies for strengthening your greatest themes and how to overcome blind spots so you can consciously apply the right strength at the right time in any given context.  

Some important things to keep in mind:

• Personality and performance frameworks are not designed to box you in or tell you who you are, they are simply prompts or tools that can help you to gain a greater insight into who you are. Only you know what is true for you. 
• There is no better or worse when it comes to any of the different types, groupings or themes. All personality types and themes can be applied effectively in order to achieve your goals. They are not designed to tell you what you can do, they are designed to provide insight on how you operate.  
• Everyone is unique. For example, how one ENFP operates within the world will be different to another ENFP as a result of different amplitudes of each dichotomy as well as differing values, culture, education and experiences. 
• Everyone multi-dimensional. There are many aspects that make you, you. How you engage socially with your closest friends may be different to how you engage in a team at work with a clear goal and higher pressure. They key is understanding who you naturally are in each of these contexts and how you can improve your engagement and contribution accordingly. 

Building self-awareness is an ongoing process since both our environment and ourselves are constantly changing. Self-awareness never ends, it's not an outcome to achieve. We must to frequently reflect on our performance in order to continue to grow and improve. 

While these are my personal favourite tools for self-awareness and performance, it's imperative that you find the tools that work for you. There is no right or wrong when it comes to building out your toolkit, it's about finding the tools that are the easiest for you to understand and apply, and that provide the greatest insights for your ongoing growth. 

Feel free to hit me up and share your favourite self-awareness tools and why. What have been your greatest insights about the way you naturally think, feel and behave? How have you been able to productively apply what you have learned? 

I could talk about these tools for days, so if you have any questions at all, please feel free to reach out.