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Chapter
1
Journey Into Self-Awareness
“Know Thyself.”
~ Socrates
McGraw-Hill/Irwin
Copyright © 2009 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. 1-2
Chapter Objectives
• Determine your strengths and understand
how they can guide you in personal and
professional choices.
• Figure out what motivates you in order to find
personal and professional success.
• Assess your limitations and develop a plan
for improving those areas.
• Gain understanding and insight into your
personality, attitudes, and behaviors.
• Identify the biases you have the preclude your
understanding and appreciating others.
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What is Self-awareness?
• Knowing your:
– Motivations
– Preferences
– Personality
• Understanding how these factors influence
your:
– Judgment
– Decisions
– Interactions with other people
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Benefits of Self-awareness
• Understanding yourself in relation to others.
• Developing and implementing a sound selfimprovement program.
• Setting appropriate life and career goals.
• Developing relationships with others.
• Understanding the value of diversity.
• Managing others effectively.
• Increasing productivity.
• Increasing your ability to contribute to
organizations, your community, and family.
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Importance to Managers
• Managers who are self-aware:
– Tend to be superior performers.
– Have a greater understanding of others.
– Can relate to or empathize with co-workers.
– Tend to be more trusted.
– Tend to be perceived as being competent.
– Are able to reduce the potential for conflict.
– Are more likely to be open to feedback.
– Are able to create trusting and productive
work environments.
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Lack of Self-awareness
• Lack of self-awareness can
lead to:
– Poor decisions
– Unrealistic notions of
one’s competencies
– Career derailment
“The greatest of faults, I
should say, is to be
conscious of none.”
Thomas Carlyle Scottish author,
essayist, and historian
(1795–1881)
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How to Gain Self-awareness
• Recognize your weaknesses,
strengths, biases, attitudes,
values, and perceptions
• Enhance your self-awareness:
“There are three
things extremely
hard: steel, a
diamond, and to
know one’s self.”
Benjamin Franklin
– Analyze your own experiences
– Look at yourself through the eyes
of others
– Self-disclosure
– Acquire diverse experiences
– Increase your emotional
intelligence
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Means for Obtaining Self-awareness
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Self-analysis
• Examine yourself as an object in an
experience or event.
• Step back and observe the positive or negative
impact.
• Not always an easy process.
• Begins with reflection on and exploration of
thoughts and feelings associated with affective
events.
• Become more effective by implementing new
behavioral and cognitive changes.
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Behavior
• Influenced by our:
– Feelings
– Judgments
Behavior is the way
in which we conduct
ourselves–the way in
which we act.
– Beliefs
– Motivations
– Needs
– Experience
– Opinions of others
• Patterns develop through:
– Reactions to events
– Actions over a period of time
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Behavior (continued)
• Behavior consists of four components:
– Motivation
– Modes of thinking
– Modes of acting
– Modes of interacting
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Personality
• The “Big Five” Model
– Extroversion
– Agreeableness
– Emotional stability
– Conscientiousness
Personality describes
the relatively stable set
of characteristics,
tendencies, and
temperaments that have
been formed by heredity
and by social, cultural,
and environmental
factors.
– Openness to experience
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Self-monitoring
• It is many times studied in
conjunction with the five broad
factors of personality.
• By being aware of the role of selfmonitoring you can:
– Assess your own behaviors and
attitudes.
– Diagnose which elements you are
satisfied with.
– Identify and develop plans for
addressing those aspects you
want to change.
Self-monitoring
is the tendency
to adjust our
behavior relative
to the changing
demands of
social situations.
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Attitudes
• Determined by the emotions we
choose to act on.
• Vary from situation to situation.
• Derived from parents, teachers,
peers, society, and our own
experiences.
• Easier to influence and change
than our behaviors or values.
• Can have an impact on our
professional and personal
relationships.
Attitudes are
evaluative
statements or
“learned
predispositions to
respond to an
object, person or
idea in a
favorable or
unfavorable way.”
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Perceptions
• Person-specific
• May not always be
consistent with reality
• Important to be aware of
ours and others
• Influenced by many factors
• Tend to be formed based on
our biases
Perception
describes the
process by which
individuals gather
sensory information
and assign meaning
to it.
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Perceptions Diagram
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Perception Filters
•
•
•
•
•
Stereotyping
Selective perception
Projection
Expectations
Interest
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Attribution Theory
• Attributions or judgments are based
on our personal observation or
evaluation of the situation.
• Future decisions and behaviors are
based more on our perception of why
something happened rather than on
the actual outcome.
• Attribution to controllable factors
tends to be a stronger indicator of
future behavior than on uncontrollable
factors.
The attribution
theory
demonstrates that
individuals tend to
determine that
behavior is caused
by a particular
characteristic or
event.
• Greatly affected by personal biases:
– Self-serving bias
– Fundamental attribution error
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Others’ Perceptions
• “Social mirror” – understanding how others
view us, and also understanding how we are
shaped by others’ opinions of us.
– Based on our memory of how others have
reacted toward us or treated us.
• Learning to read accurately how others see us
enhances our “self-maps,” our images and
judgments of ourselves.
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Self-disclosure
• Sharing your thoughts, feelings, and ideas with
others
• Key factor in improving self-awareness
• Clarifies your perceptions
– Verify your own beliefs
– Affirm your self-concept
– Validate data received from an objective
source
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Diverse Experiences
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Living or studying in a foreign country
Learning a new language
Traveling
Reading books on new subjects
Acquiring broad work experience
Facing a life-threatening illness
Experiencing divorce
Overcoming a personal problem
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Summary
• Self-awareness is an essential skill for
developing personally and professionally.
• A high degree of self-awareness allows you to
capitalize on your strengths and develop
plans for improving or compensating for your
limitations.
• Part of being self-aware is being able to monitor
and change your behavior.
• Concentrating on self-improvement
demonstrates to others your willingness to learn
and grow, increasing the likelihood of being able
to develop close relationships and success in a
profession.
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