Often, your job as an accountant or finance professional may have you focused on things like financial trends, market regulations, or heavy stakeholder demands. But that’s not the only thing that contributes to a successful career. Understanding your strengths, weaknesses, and other traits can be enlightening and game-changing. The ability to figure these things out is called self-awareness.
With this blog post, we aim to help you learn how to improve your own self-awareness. We’ll also help you to understand how being self-aware can help you to navigate your career challenges and build a successful career as an accountant or finance professional.
Importance of Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is a hugely important skill, yet a very underestimated one. We need to understand ourselves well from the inside as well as from the outside to be able to operate effectively on our own and with others.
The word skill is important. This is great news! Self-awareness is something we can learn to do and can be improved further with more attention and practice.
Here are some of the benefits of developing self-awareness:
- Enhanced communication
- Better decision-making skills
- Improved work relationships
- Higher levels of happiness
- More confidence
- Better job satisfaction
- Enhanced leadership skills
- Better overall perspective
- Being better able to manage and regulate your emotions
8 Ways Accountants and Finance Professionals Can Improve Their Self-Awareness
I know you’re thinking, “self-awareness sounds useful, but how can I accomplish it?” Let’s get down to business. Here are some useful tips:
Acknowledgement that we are all a work-in-progress
Some of us are already pretty self-aware, and others are less so. But there are always new perspectives and reactions to learn that can be useful to us if we’re open. We can only see ourselves through our own eyes, and there are almost always some blind spots! Being open and curious to learn will be a useful starting point.
Self-reflection—before and after a situation (as well as observing ourselves while we are in a situation)
Being able to pause and try to see the situation and how we operate within it will be useful. We can do this both from the 1st party perspective (through our own eyes) as well as “disassociated” through others’ eyes as a 3rd party.
Get feedback from others we trust to see any blind spots we may have
Receiving feedback can give us a fresh perspective or can validate what we’ve always surmised from our own self-reflection. Hearing the same or similar feedback from others can also make it more valid or believable, especially if we’re in doubt or in denial.
It can also be useful to receive feedback from people over time, especially in areas where we’re trying to make progress.
Observe yourself in different situations
We don’t always show up in the same way: we can act differently in different situations, or with different people. Imagine how you act with people you know really well versus complete strangers. Think about how you act in a formal professional situation versus an informal social setting. Recognising these different “parts” of us, and how we naturally, unconsciously show up can be useful if we’re trying to show up in a certain way in case we want to borrow or adapt our approach in different situations.
Observe others to learn what / what not to do
In a similar way, observing how others show up can be useful. What are they doing? What do we like to see or experience from their approach? What don’t we like? How does it make you feel? What can we adopt or adapt within our own behaviour to align with how we want to show up and be perceived by others?
Step out of your comfort zone and learn what happens about ourselves
Similar to observing ourselves in different situations, it can also be useful to compare ourselves when we’re in our comfort zones to when we step out beyond them. This could be trying something new, going to a new place, testing our skills in different ways, or even meeting some new people. We naturally can feel uncomfortable and look for ways to avoid these situations, yet we can discover some interesting things about ourselves by stepping out of the norm. And we might even enjoy it too!
Journaling
Journaling can be interesting as it’s a way of capturing what’s circling around in our heads and putting it down on paper. This can be interesting to understand our conscious (and unconscious) thoughts and to start to make some sense of them. Or maybe not so much sense!
Complete profiling assessments to learn more about ourselves
In addition to the methods listed above, there are also some additional ways in which to take an extra leap forward in terms of understanding ourselves via using profiling tools.
For example, we can understand our Motivations through Motivational Maps and Personality and our Preferences and Communication Styles through Insights Discovery. If you’re interested in learning more about either of these for you or your team, book a Career Discussion.
