On the Self-Awareness Superhighway, January '24
Reflections Newsletter: Looking Back to Go Forward
👋🏼 Welcome
Hello and welcome to the first Reflection’s Newsletter of ‘24. It’s been a great start to the year with podcasts releases, podcast interviews, book editing and workshop proposals coming in from all angles. Bodes well for a superbly exciting year. I also got back to some self-care and more movement this month. I was delighted to find a TaiChi beginners class in walking distance, starting this month. I hope your month has been a positive start to the year and you’ve been able to plan and do all the things you wanted. Read on for news from The Knowing Self Knowing Others Podcast, some hints and tips on how to develop your self-aware leadership and a big announcement about The Self-Awareness Superhighway!
🎙️The Knowing Self Knowing Others Podcast
In January I was joined by Anna Zannides talking about life-crossroads, mindfulness and living authentically, Serena Low talking about introversion and the superpowers of quiet warriors, Steve Barker talking about his experience in the military and audacious leadership and Lynn Turner talking about her 39 years in the NHS seeing the shift to compassionate leadership, impacting both staff wellbeing and patient recovery.
💡 Top Tips to Build Your Self-Awareness
Humility is the second direction of my self-awareness compass. There are 5 top tips on how you can embrace humility to build your self-awareness:
Stay Teachable: Foster a willingness to learn regardless of what you know and the skills you have. Whatever your length of service and experience in the world of work, there’s always something new on the horizon, different people coming along with different ideas and technology driving the need for new skills. Embrace them and take the opportunity to grow.
Encourage Others to Shine: Humble leaders raise others up, nurturing and encouraging them to discover their skills and abilities. Create an environment where team members feel safe to admit their mistakes and contribute openly, whilst also fostering a culture of growth and collaboration.
Admit Mistakes Proactively: Follow the example of leaders who admit their mistakes openly and demonstrate vulnerability. Proactively acknowledging your errors before someone else points them out builds a reputation for humility, creates a supportive team environment, and models the behaviour you want to see in others.
Value Humility: Develop a culture in your team where humility is valued. Show people that you are impressed by their awareness and openness and grateful for their candour and courage. The more humility is valued and seen to be valued, the more we create psychological safety in our workplaces.
Connect Humility to Confidence: Understand that humility is not a sign of weakness but a strength that opens the door to learning. Humble leaders, like
says, listen to critics, accept that they don't have all the answers, and recognise the importance of asking the right questions. Listen to my conversation with Jon here
📒The Self-Awareness Superhighway
The Front: The final front cover of Superhighway is just a few steps from finalisation. I just love it and I hope you will too. It retains my usual yellow, black and grey branding with a new and additional ‘pew-pew’ of colour zing for a little bit of added pizzazz. It’s going to look amazing on your coffee table!
The Middle: January has been proof reader month and whilst that work has been going on, I’ve had some pre-meets with the book’s Formatter ready for formatting-February. I’ve also been setting up an account with IngramSpark and Kindle Direct Publishing, who will be the distributors and sellers. What a learning curve!!
I’m so pleased to be able to share with you (before anyone else) a big announcement…. drum roll please……
The Journal!: Yes! There will be a companion journal available to buy with the book: The Self-Awareness Superhighway: Reflections Journal. You heard it here first!! This has been a labour of love and a tool that’s been tested by the few and loved by the many. I’m very excited to share it with you. My Book and Journal will be available to buy as a bundle.
🎁Referrer Rewards
As a way of saying thank you to subscribers who share my newsletter, I’m offering you an opportunity to collect rewards that stack up to tangible gifts! For referrals that convert in to subscribers you could receive a copy of my book, journal or even some air time on my podcast. Your support is valued and I’d love to say thank you!
📖Book Review - Not the End of the World
I know!! This wasn’t the book I said I was going to review! ‘Language is Leadership’ is still by my bed waiting to be finished and I’ll share that review with you next month. I was asked to review this book, ‘Not the End of the World’ by Hannah Ritchie for another publication, so I thought I’d share my reflections with you.
It’s a totally different take on global sustainability. Instead of a blinkered micro view of doom and gloom that usually causes people to get up from their chairs and out on to the streets with placards and banners, this book takes a more considered, wise, macro approach. Hannah Ritchie takes a zoomed-out statistical view of global development and in doing so, is able to demonstrate the incredible progress that’s been made by humans over the decades and centuries. With that in mind, she proposes how we can improve our global-caretaking efforts setting out the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ across air, land and sea.
I like her no-nonsense approach and acknowledgment that the arguments of politicians and nations is generally driven by ego and money, neither of which will keep our air clean and our water drinkable. It’s well written, accessible, with a good balance of data and statistics, and narrative and story. My greatest concern, though, is that you have to read it all. If sections of this book are read in isolation and out of context they could be misinterpreted as saying ‘we’re doing really well’, and that could lead to deductions of ‘we don’t need to worry about it’. This book’s message needs careful socialisation so that the global warming deniers and the couldn’t-care-less-ers hear what she’s actually trying to say: we absolutely need to worry, but about different things!!
This is definitely a book I would recommend, especially to logical and lateral thinkers who haven’t up until now, known very much about global sustainability.
🔭Forward View
What’s coming up in February? We’ll have Gabriella Braun and Kristen Lisanti joining me on the podcast.
I have 5 podcast recording sessions in the diary and I’ll also be joining Amanda Wagg on The Leadership Insights Podcast. At the end of the month I’ll be joining a team in NHS Scotland for a self-aware leadership learning session, which will be great fun! It’s also Random Acts of Kindness day on Saturday 17th Feb! make sure you plan how you’re going to be giving back to your friends, family and community on that day!
Here are some interesting articles you might also want to read….
The Legend of Miyamoto Musashi, Fluidity -not fixation- is the Way of life from
Why your Leadership team needs a candid self-assessment from
Any Intelligent Emotions? from
Looking forward to having you on my learning journey!
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Nia is an expert leader who talks the talk and walks the walk. She is an academically awarded thought leader in self-aware leadership and practices self-aware leadership every single day in her role as a Director in a Children’s Charity.
Thanks for the mention Nia :)
Thank you Nia for the mention!! It’s a pleasure! ! 🙏❤️