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Self-Awareness: How Women Of Color Can Leverage Emotional Intelligence To Level Up As Leaders

Forbes Coaches Council

Award-winning social worker. Cofounder/CINO at WorkLifeHealth.design, an executive-leadership coaching and social impact consulting firm.

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to recognize, understand and manage our own emotions and to recognize, understand and influence the emotions of others. Women of color (WOC) have always needed to be emotionally intelligent to survive and adapt in predominantly white spaces. We pay an emotional tax that expends energy in the form of emotional labor while experiencing the double-bind dilemma. However, how might we go beyond surviving to effectively leveraging EI to thrive?

In the first article of this series, I provided a broad overview of EI's domains and competencies. Because leadership begins with how you lead your life, who you are is how you lead. Knowing yourself starts with self-awareness—the foundation and first domain of EI—which is internal (knowledge of self) and external (knowledge of how others perceive you). Its single competency—emotional self-awareness—involves data-gathering, which allows you to listen to what your emotions may be telling you and what makes them matter.

Self-awareness is being in tune with yourself and knowing how you show up. Here's how to leverage it:

1. Get clear on knowing yourself.

It's essential to be clear on your core values, which can provide you with a sense of direction and purpose. Your core values serve as your North Star and can help you interpret your emotions in challenging situations so you can manage them more effectively. Also, it matters to be able to see yourself realistically, which means knowing your strengths and limitations and how to effectively leverage the former and mitigate the latter.

Avoid the trap of a rigid self-concept, which is how you can get in your own way, and don't overcorrect for how you think people may be experiencing you as a way to manage bias and stereotypes. This will take deliberate practice and reflection. How you manage yourself is key and affects your ability to influence effectively.

2. Be authentically yourself and cultivate a personal brand.

Knowing yourself well allows you to be authentic and have integrity. Authenticity is about being yourself and being human. To be human is to be vulnerable. That doesn’t mean full transparency about anything; boundaries are still important. Writer and social worker Brené Brown said, "Vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability. It's confession, manipulation, desperation, or shock and awe, but it's not vulnerability."

Moreover, don’t let authenticity be an excuse to keep you from leaving your comfort zone. Your sense of authenticity can adapt as you grow. Understandably, there may be environments where you can't fully be who you are (because it's not safe), but you can still be you. Modulate your authenticity as needed and never betray yourself. Authenticity isn't just about showing up genuinely for others, but also for yourself. Conformity doesn't lead to change. It reinforces the status quo. Be confident as yourself. Courage plus self-compassion equals healthy confidence. Turn adversity into advantage and differentiate with your strengths.

Your authenticity and integrity lend well to your personal brand in communicating who you are, what you stand for and the value you bring. It can incorporate your reputation and is about how you want people to think of you whether you're in the room or not. When you're in the room, your brand and your presence matter in how you are seen and experienced. To have presence—leadership presence—be present in the moment and express yourself with confidence and clarity.

3. Prioritize yourself and practice multidimensional self-care.

Want to be on the cutting edge of leadership? A good leadership strategy incorporates practicing a self-care lifestyle, which includes personal and professional development. To show up at your best, address wellness in terms of multidimensional self-care:

• Physical wellness (caring for your body)

• Emotional wellness (cultivating a greater sense of mental and emotional well-being)

• Spiritual wellness (authentic and meaningful connection to yourself, others and something even greater)

• Social wellness (developing meaningful social connections, a good support system and the ability to feel a sense of belonging)

• Intellectual wellness (learning, growing and being creative)

• Financial wellness (effective money management and economic decision-making)

• Environmental wellness (creating environments to better support well-being and safety)

• Occupational wellness (how work enriches your life)

Being well and healthy can give you longevity and the freedom to lead a productive life. By contrast, neglecting your self-care can lead you down a path of self-destruction. Overwork isn't necessary to be successful, but your wellness is. It's also unnecessary to be perfect. Perfectionism is how we torture ourselves when we think we're not good enough. But we are, in fact, more than good enough.

Especially for WOC, multidimensional self-care is an imperative, not a luxury, for building the necessary resilience to endure and help dismantle systems of oppression that have led to our experiences of structural violence, lateral violence and other manifestations of white supremacy. Writer and civil rights activist Audre Lorde said, "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."

4. Value yourself and know your value.

Your value is not defined alone by what you do for work, but rather by your own definition of success based on what matters most to you. In many workplaces, WOC recognize the bias that we have to prove ourselves time and again. We also know we're implicitly judged against traditional and outdated standards of what is considered leadership. For most people, it's normal to have feelings of self-doubt and be unsure of ourselves. However, our experiences of systemic racism and bias, including subtle acts of exclusion, serve to exacerbate our normal self-doubt, leading us to think and be told that we have imposter syndrome. We don't. Nothing breeds imposter syndrome more than the tired, old saying, "Fake it 'til you make it." Instead, take the authentic approach and face it 'til you ace it.

Self-awareness can help you understand your inherent worth outside of the white gaze, stereotypes and bias. Otherwise, if you don't know yourself well enough, other people will be the ones to define you. So who are you?


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