Having self-awareness means knowing yourself and recognizing how your strengths and weaknesses make you who you are. Highly self-aware people also know how others see them and are quick to read the cues and reactions of others that tell them how they are showing up. Perhaps no other quality defines talent as well as self-awareness.
Exploring the gap between who you are and who you want to be is an exercise of personal growth and development. Aspiring to be more tomorrow than you are today is the badge of self-improvement all good leaders carry with them every day. But the journey towards a better you always begins with an accurate assessment of where you stand today.
Toward that end, we commonly look to the adjectives and verbs others use to describe and define us. An honest assessment begins with the words you believe about yourself.
Of the many descriptors in your head, narrowing the list helps to clarify what you really believe about yourself. A great exercise is to land on the one word that best captures the essence of who you are.
How would you describe yourself in one word?
Adjectives like friendly, introspective, dependable, resourceful or passionate might come to mind. Occasionally, the word is a persona or role and not an adjective or verb. Words like caregiver, mentor, coach, teacher, actor or leader might be the best word to portray who you are.
Your ability to land on a single word without confusion or indecision likely reflects the depth of your self-awareness. This is why using this question in job interviews is so revealing. Not only do interviewers learn about who people believe themselves to be, the question also examines whether the candidate knows themselves well enough to land on a determined answer.
But before using it to explore who job candidates are, ask and answer the question yourself. Compare your answer with colleagues and friends. Ask them to complete the same exercise. You are likely to learn a lot about yourself and others. The ancient Greeks emphasized that knowing yourself is the beginning of wisdom. A single word that describes you is a good start.
