Bestselling author and leadership expert Michael Bunting shares top tips on mastering the art of self-awareness which is key to personal and professional success.
Fast brain, slow brain:
The fast brain engages the parts of the brain that act impulsively, habitually and with short term comfort in mind. The slow brain, on the other hand, engages parts of the brain that enable us to act with intention and awareness before our fast brain reflex response takes over. To shift from our fast to our slow brain, we need to have clear intentions and deliberately choose our values and responses, rather than being held hostage by habitual responses formed in our past.
Find your growth edge:
Between our comfort zone and our terror zone is what we call the growth edge. We can become comfortable in patterns that don’t serve us. So, in order to grow again, we first must disrupt our sense of order and move outside of our comfort zone to build a new, more functional order.
Know your values:
Values are far more than ‘yawn worthy’ statements on a website. They represent an invitation to grow towards more functional order in our lives and organisations. When applied with self-regulation and internal honesty, they are living, breathing forces that direct our behaviour for our own happiness and that of others. Are your values a living practice? What practices do you use and what actions do you take daily to align with what you stand for? If you need to think about it, then it’s probably not operational in your life.
Commit to action:
It’s pointless to choose values without a daily commitment to deliberately cultivating that value in action. It’s the daily commitment that gives you the opportunity to notice your habitual fast brain patterns, to then to engage the slow brain by consciously regulating out of those patterns into a more values congruent, self-aware state.
