Our ability to understand how our personality predisposes us to behave in a particular way and appreciation of our differentiating right behaviours from the wrong behaviours that we indulge in which, hampers our actual achievements or becomes a key critical contributor to our success.
It is important that each one of us should have a good life coach. But more valuable than that is our ability to first observe and thereafter organize our own mental processes that lead to effective functioning. This not only leads us to self-awareness but it also helps us to think ahead of time before we start becoming trigger happy and act. That way you will be influenced to self-reflect more on the required constructive behaviours rather than over-valuing your inherent destructive behaviours.
Psychology has four clearly defined states of behaviours that determines a unique combination for each individual that identifies various contributing factors that make-up for success and failures. They are :
'Conscious Competence'....ability of People to monitor their own attitudes, feelings and thoughts thus regulating and guiding their own conscious behaviour. Here we are aware of our competencies, appreciate it and consciously work towards improving the same. To appreciate Conscious Competence, one needs to understand the following 3 related competencies...
'Conscious Incompetence'.... Here we are aware of our Incompetence but we make no effort to correct or improve it. Say if a professional does not reflect the competence of 'Entrepreneurial Risk Taking' and has periodically been given feed-back of the same, by his Manager. Yet when he in put in-charge of a new Project, he tends neither to create an environment that encourages within his team innovation and risk taking nor is he willing to put his own career at risk when necessary to support entrepreneurial challenges of that assignment. This is so despite knowledge of its own short-coming. This is 'Conscious Incompetence' and leads to failure as a leader.
'Unconscious Competence'.. These are skills and competences that inherently/naturally come to one without the incumbent having to invest Conscious his time or effort for the same. It is like a special talent or a gift, the kind of stuff that 'Prodigal Sons' are acclaimed to be made-up of. One sees such competence reflected say in areas of 'Building Organizational Relationships'. Some fail in building such organizational relationships despite all kinds of conscious efforts by others who are naturally born into it. They easily cultivate a broad net work of relationships to exchange ideas and be able to rally support. They relate well to 360° of their relationships and are able to adapt their interpersonal style to match the style of others.
'Unconscious Incompetence'.. The kind of Incompetence that an individual is oblivious of. They are like the 'blind spots' in the Ingham and Luft's 'JOHARI' windows. All leaders, in their minds believe that they Inspire Trust. Whilst most may, few certainly cannot. Though they believe otherwise of themselves, they are unable to establish open, candid and trusting relationships within a group nor are they able to walk their talk. Thus such leaders are unable to behave in accordance with their expressed beliefs and commitments. They not only don't realise this, they believe otherwise of themselves. This is Unconscious Incompetence.
Whether Conscious or Unconscious, most of us have a personality style that requires on going fine tuning to reach out to its full levels of efficiency and gain value from its full potential.
Rationalizing and defending this does not help. It is necessary that each one of us should indulge in real time assessment of our Conscious and Unconscious character traits. We then need to identify : ° the Success Traits and ° the Counterproductive Traits which are anchored to the effectiveness of the job we do.
Thence can we proceed to systematically rewrite the new recipe of our choice.