As we progress on our journey of leadership development, it's useful to have a roadmap to guide our endeavors. So let's begin with the hierarchy of life skills, and in particular, self awareness which lies at its core. Overlaid on top of self awareness is goal setting and setting priorities and we discussed this in some detail in our last module and we'll come back to it later on in this specialization. You will recall from the last module that I talked about time management. I've taken the liberty here of substituting managing behavior for managing time. To re-emphasize the point, you can't manage time, you can only manage your behavior. Overlaid on top of these core elements is managing stress. How you use stress or deal with stress will have a significant impact on how effective your leadership is. We call this the hierarchy of life-management skills. I'm going to back and look at each of these in much more detail beginning with self awareness. So what is self awareness? It is that knowledge that we possess about ourselves that is essential for our growth. Why is this important to leaders? If you don't understand or have a good awareness of yourself, your attitudes, your motivations, then it's hard to make changes and adjustments that will improve your effectiveness. However, it's important to realize all of us like to receive positive information, but there is some information that we are resistant to hearing. In order to be effective, we need both categories. That information that is consistent with our self-image we readily accept. However, we tend to avoid that which isn't consistent with our self-image. We need both, and we're going to take a little time now to examine the concept of the sensitive line. What happens when we as individuals receive information that isn't consistent with our self-knowledge. We have some options. When we reach that line there may be a tendency to respond in an emotional way. Particularly when that information is not consistent with our own self-image. We may feel pressure or tension. We may respond with a stress response. We call the negative response to receiving information inconsistent with our self image the threat rigidity response. This may feel like stress, tension, your heart rate may go up, your breathing might have increase. But what I've experienced is that those leaders that are most effective are those that can push that sensitive line further and further out so that they are capable of receiving information that's not consistent with their self-image. Analyze that information and then act appropriately to validate invalidate it, and then adjust their own leadership development plans. So how do we develop and validate our self knowledge? What are the tools that are out there for us? Well, first of all we need to seek that information out, we need to seek it from others. Part of your assignment in this course is to ask for supplemental feedback from others who have seen you in a leadership role. Another way is to self-disclose and get feedback from others as you do that. Share information about yourself. In that vain, through this course and the remainder of our specialization together. I will share information about myself as a basis for comparison and also to share how I have adjusted my leadership development to accommodate various aspects of self awareness. The tools that are available to us are a variety of self assessments that are in the text. You've already received those and we will want to complete all of those before we proceed to the other lessons in this module. So what are the components of self-awareness that we'll be dealing with? Let's begin with core self evaluation. This is composed of several elements. But it all relates to self-esteem. It includes locus of control, self efficacy, and others that we're going to spend much more time talking about. What are your values? Your values will influence your behavior, and the way you make decisions. We'll spend some time in another module to talk about how you assess your values. How you learn new things is going to be important to your leadership development, so we'll spend a little bit of time talking about what is your learning style. How do you adjust to change? As was clear in our second module when we talked about the engineer of 2020. Change is inevitable in the engineering profession, not only is it inevitable but it will be rapid and increasing. We must have a way to adjust to change and adapt. How well do you deal with others? How do you tune in to the emotional level of your team, or the emotional state of others. Your ability to do that and adjust your behavior appropriately will be a key to your success as a leader.
