Your emotional awareness or acumen is key to developing your leadership identity in role. In particular, it addresses your capacity to deal with the unknown and with the uncertain, often complex situations that require new, higher level thinking and action.

Developing insight into this awareness is an invaluable pointer for helping you comprehend what is happening to you – not some while later but as it happens, in the heat of the action.

This full awareness is a vital attribute to leadership. It allows you to exercise – in the moment – adult choice about what to do next. You are put back in control and are able to act responsibly.

Contrast this with a less aware response: you forfeit much of your potential and become a victim to your pre-programming. You repeat past patterns of engagement and, as a result, the scene may play out in familiar, but ineffective and possibly quite damaging ways.

Leadership Insight creates emotional awareness in relation to your leadership identity. It identifies your normal, reflexive emotional patterns, both those that drive you to be good at what you do and those that trigger you negatively. This awareness helps you understand how and why the patterns formed. It makes you acutely aware how some of these patterns, today, sabotage you in your day-to-day interactions and how they are likely to elicit negative responses in others. The more you can bring this awareness to bear, in the critical moment, the more you are able to behave as an adult with full responsibility for your actions.

This takes practice. But it is an invaluable characteristic for anyone in a leadership or a co-creative ‘followership’ role.