Actionable Self-Awareness

I believe self awareness is about honest assessment of where you are currently. It is not a box or ceiling for your personal growth, and certainly not an excuse matrix. Instead, self-awareness is a framework for customizing and optimizing your next course of action. Self-awareness helps you construct a purpose that is compelling and actionable for you personally. I’m looking at self awareness as a tool for assessing ROI. What I mean is that there may be one job that I could put in a certain amount of effort to learn it, and go from a skill level 1 to skill level 5. In another job, investing the same amount of effort yields a skill level increase from 3 to 9. I don’t believe that you should put yourself in a box based on anyone’s, even your own, perception of who you are, but I think that there is such a thing as practicing intuition about what efforts will be the most profitable and sustainable for you personally. The caveat to that thought is, action trumps perfection. What I mean is that self awareness is not an excuse to not shoot but an intuition that guides an imperfect shot a little closer to the ideal target.

I picked up the 1 thru 10 analogy from an older Ask Gary Vee episode on YouTube. Tony Robbins made a similar point using the three business personalities described by Michael Gerber in ‘The E-Myth’. These three are 1.) the people who are gifted at doing the work itself, 2.) people who are gifted at managing, and 3.) those who are wired as entrepreneurs. Robbins commented, “You can do all three, but what’s it going to do to your quality of life?” He followed with the question, “Which one fulfills you the most?”

I think the type of work that fulfills a person is also the type of work that a persons loses themself in. My own personal hunch is that, ironically, one key to actionable self-awareness is to take an inventory of the things that cause you to spontaneously lose self-consciousness. Take inventory of what those things are for you, in order to start positioning yourself to do more of those things.

P.S.
For the Tony Robbins clip I mentioned, check out the content that Evan Carmichael has compiled on YouTube. Also, there’s a great episode of the AskGaryVee Show featuring Simon Sinek. Partially, I mention it because Gary and Simon get in a mini debate about talent and potential.