Jakarta, 4 December 2024 — If awareness is key, how to expand it in everyday work and life? It’s a challenge in three parts. 

Story 

It happened in antiquity. And it continues today. Sages, gurus, and modern-day researchers have said that awareness is key to leadership. So how do you expand your awareness as a leader in preparation for the new year? How to grow your leadership with more awareness and reap the benefits that you have heard about? Where to start now?

First, to provide some context, we know that curiosity and inquiry help us to drive our leadership development. Curiosity and inquiry need our minds to be open rather than closed with stress. In other words, to have our parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activated.  For more about the PNS and the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), read our article here. 

In Grow3Leaders, our international community of practice, expanding awareness is our focus this month. It’s one of the twelve effective leadership behaviors we practice and share learning experiences about. In fact, our leadership guide on awareness is the longest of all the twelve guides. There is much to learn and practice about expanding our awareness!

Challenge 

For this article, let’s break down how to expand awareness into three practical contexts, that is, what you will practice daily, weekly, and quarterly. Daily means working on your awareness in the moment, at least several times a day, using simple models like the Three Worlds  Awareness model, and simple breathing techniques you can apply anywhere and any time. This is part of what we call Leadership Hygiene. Daily reflection is also part of this, for example by celebrating your three daily wins. Activating or reactivating your PNS is key to this daily practice.

Practicing to expand your awareness every week is also essential for leaders. This involves a series of short practices for every day of the week, including finding inspiration, co-creating a weekly result, managing time better, expanding your conversations, getting results, framing or reframing your experiences, and celebrating your progress and achievements. To help leaders build such a routine, we created The LEADweek Challenge. With everyone in your Collab having their PNS activated, the results will come faster and with more fun. After three weeks of daily practice, you will be off to a solid start.

Expanding your awareness dramatically over a quarter has lots of further benefits. Consistently working together as colleagues with your PNS activated makes deeper transformation possible, sustained with behavior change. To make this happen, we have created a challenge for you to, collaboratively, drive a positive change together in your workplace using three effective leadership behaviors. It’s The Workplace Challenge. Using a process driven by curiosity, inquiry, and continually expanding your awareness, you will achieve more than you thought possible, provided that you all keep on track with the weekly tasks, which are integrated with your work.

Question

So, you see, there are plenty of challenges for you to take up. And there are more, both shorter and longer. To take your awareness and transformation to another level, we have created our marathon of leadership challenges, the Trusted Leaders Challenge, which allows you to work on each of the twelve effective leadership behaviors, for a full year. Note that each of our leadership challenges is taken with a Collab of three workplace colleagues you invite to join you.

Research, including on the 70-20-10 rule of leadership development, has shown that leadership grows and awareness expands when we take on challenges. Structured learning, including reading this article, only contributes 10% to our leadership growth. Consistent practice and collaboration add 70% and 20%, respectively. That’s where you’ll see the difference in getting to 100%. You can experience this in our one-to-one Leader in Transition Program and in the challenges we host in our Grow3Leaders Community of Practice.

My question for you this week is: how will you expand your leadership this month, in preparation for the next year? Let us know what challenges appeal to you, and set up a free strategy call to discuss what you want your leadership to look and feel like in the next year. Leadership doesn’t grow automatically, and neither does expanding your awareness. Practice makes progress.