Harnessing Awareness: The Key to Conscious Leadership
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Discover how busy leaders can cultivate enhanced awareness amidst daily pressures. Learn straightforward practices to gain critical insights, sharpen decision-making, and reduce stress.
The Importance of Awareness in Leadership
With so many competing priorities vying for our attention, adding an awareness practice can seem like an unrealistic goal. Or worse, a burden — just one more thing to add to the to-do list.
Even when we set out to integrate being more present into our days, that intention often gets pushed to the back burner while we strategize company growth and put out real-world fires.
But if we aspire to be highly effective conscious leaders, being aware is not simply a nice-to-have; it is a must-have that needs to be prioritized.
The Benefits of Being Aware
Cultivating awareness has great payoffs and there are so many ways that conscious leaders leverage awareness.
Being aware enables us to pay attention to key things we normally might not notice. It allows us to be fully present and engaged in any situation at hand. And the benefits of being aware are compounding in nature.
Awareness opens up our senses, allows us to perceive situations in a much deeper way, and offers insight into how we can better handle whatever comes up.
Awareness is what allows us to notice things like the subtle cues our customers are sending, the changing moods of our teams, the impactful hidden or underlying meaning in conversations.
Oftentimes, this is critical information essential to our decision-making and action taking.
Becoming more aware is straight forward: it’s the act of being present to “what is”. It incorporates being aware of what’s going on around us and within us, tuned in to our own emotions and motives (and those of others).
So, how can we insert more conscious awareness into our day without a lot of additional effort or time-consuming practices?
Practicing Being More Aware with Our Busy Schedules
While awareness is a fairly simple concept, it’s not always the easiest thing to remember to do when our days are demanding. It does take discipline and practice, but over time, it becomes second nature.
Being aware is very much a real-time practice that can be accomplished anywhere, while we’re doing anything.
The key to practicing awareness within a busy schedule is simply to take a moment to stop, breathe slowly and deeply, and “tune in” — taking a moment to check in with what we’re experiencing.
This can include noticing what we’re feeling physically and emotionally, observing our thinking, sensing any pressure we may be feeling, listening to what our intuition might be telling us. We can also open up to what we sense is going on in those around us.
Once we get the hang of what this is like, we can incorporate being present, aware throughout our workday. We’ll notice much more when we’re walking down the hallway, sitting in a meeting, having conversations. We’ll pick up a lot more “data” as our awareness expands.
Awareness: A Time, Energy, and Stress Saver
As our presence and curiosity grows, we gain a far more comprehensive view of what’s really going on in our companies.
And that insight gained offers a greater chance of avoiding costly pitfalls and missteps we might not have seen; and to make far better informed, wise decisions.
Therefore, being aware can save time, energy, money, reduce stress on ourselves and those around us.
Even when it feels like we don’t have an extra moment and we’re under pressure to perform or respond, being aware helps us to pause and consider not just a bigger picture, but a much clearer picture.
And the moments we take to broaden our awareness now may well save us days or months of time, energy and stress in the long run.
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