VIDEO: Daily Habits for Improving Self-Awareness and Conversations

Here are two quick things you can do every day that are reported to improve our self-awareness at work



In today’s thought exercise video let’s talk about two quick things you can do at the end of each day that are reported to improve our self-awareness and improve the quality of our conversations with others.





First up we have the concept of a daily check-in as described in Insight by Tasha Eurich. 


Eurich suggests spending just five minutes a day reflecting on these questions with a goal of improving your self-awareness. The question are:


  1. What went well today?
  2. What didn't go well?
  3. What did I learn and how will I be smarter tomorrow?


How will this help you at work? Eurich gives on example of a study where, “call-centre trainees who took just a few minutes to reflect at the end of each day improved their performance an average of 23 percent.”


It’s hard to think that three little questions and like this and a mere five minutes can have such an impact. As she reminds us: 


“The answers you unearth need not be life-altering - quite often, even insights that seem insignificant at the time can help us improve incrementally. But if we can get just a bit more mindful each day, the sum total effect of these insights can be astonishing.”

-Tasha Eurich


The second possible daily practice put forward by Celeste Headlee in We Need to Talk is to make a habit of writing down what you do daily,


“Many productivity experts recommend making a habit out of writing down what you do every day. This gives you a sense of achievement and clears the mental to-do list from your head so you can focus on other things.”

- Celeste Headlee


The goal here is to clear your mental clutter so that you are more focused on the task at hand and the topic that is being discussed, thus improving the quality of your conversations.


This comes in handy in production because we are untangling this issue from that and helping to solve problems all on a daily basis without necessarily having the technical background to fully understand the issues at hand. 


We therefore need to be especially conscious of staying out of the weeds, or getting muddled by irrelevant details. We need to be good at picking out what information is most relevant for our teams and delivering it accurately and succinctly.






RESOURCES



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