- How
am I showing up, really (1x this week)? Early in the week, set aside about 30 minutes to complete this Self-Assessment Handout to help you gain insight about how you show up. - “Stuff” that can get in the way of showing up (nightly, for the week). During your day each day this week, start to notice when you are in an interaction at work (IM, email, hallway conversation, or meeting), and you do one or more of the following:
- Agree or say yes when you don’t really mean it
- Don’t speak up in a meeting even though you have something to say
- Decide not to take an action because you worry you will “look stupid”
- Criticize an idea or say no without working a bit harder to come up with a solution
Each night this week, take 5 minutes to reflect on interactions earlier that day when any of the listed behaviors was present. Take a moment to write down what you noticed.
These behaviors tend to get in the way of or distract from showing up and contributing. They are often a sign that you might be hiding and a call to examine whether you could be more engaged in some way. Remember, the point isn’t that the behaviors discussed in this lesson are all bad, all the time; rather, the point is, you want to use awareness of how you show up to spend more time in the driver’s seat with regard to the choices you make about what you say, do, and believe.
Pro tip: if you find that it is difficult at day’s end to recall whether any of these behaviors was present earlier in the day, try more real-time support. Consider using your smart phone or watch here.
To do so, you can set it to beep/vibrate every hour; use the beep/vibration as a reminder to pause for just a moment to observe yourself in action. During that pause, run through the list above and ask yourself if you’ve been doing any of that in the past hour. A similar trick is to use random but frequent events (e.g., email notification, phone ringing, IM interruptions, stop signs, or red lights) as prompts to pause and gather your observations.