Self-Awareness 101 | Journey Principles Podcast 016

Welcome to the Journey Principles where we.

Show you how to go from stuck to unstoppable with life strategies that work.

Now here's your host and creator of.

The Transform youm Framework, Stephen Scoggins.

Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Journey of Principles. Here with you today to talk about influences and see how sharp they are. As a reminder, if this is your first time here, all of our content is designed to help you go from stuck to unstoppable in any area of your life.

And.

And sitting with me today is my co host and counterpart, Connor Kraft, director of connections with the Journey Principles. And we are here to help you win. So, Connor, what's going on, man? How you doing?

What's up, man? How you doing?

Good, man. It's been a long, long couple of weeks. We've been obviously like everybody else, working through the coronavirus and figuring, getting, gosh, what's the best way to explain it? Pivoting.

Well, hopefully by the time some of this airs, we are planning ahead in order to get you all this content. Hopefully some of it's not. The coronavirus isn't as big of a.

Deal, hopefully, but, well, you know, it's obviously. It's obviously something everybody should take seriously and take precautions and whatnot. I am hoping that by the time this is watched that we are officially kind of on the upswing and kind of out of that. Out of that darkness, if you will. But I'm curious, you know, it's open the show we're talking about self awareness. What does self awareness meant to you the last, gosh, two years? Because you've gone through a pretty substantial self awareness.

Well, I think self awareness is really important. I mean, obviously it's actually one of our three buckets. So we teach here at Transform youm that there are three core things you need to do if you want to build the life of your dreams. You need to map out a life you love. So you have to create a plan, essentially, you have to discover what drives you, which is, to me, just self awareness essentially is. Is what that is. And then the third thing you need to do is build better relationships. And those are the three things that really, if you focus on those three buckets, if you will, you're gonna achieve massive success in building, building the life you love. So self awareness is obviously a big piece of the puzzle. It's at least like 33%. And oftentimes when I hear you teaching people or taking people through the curriculum, self awareness is almost one of the first places you go. That and basically Gaining perspective around where they are and where they want to go. So I'd say it's pretty important. I'd say that self awareness is a very big one. I've heard a lot of influencers talk about it for years, so. Yeah.

So what have you learned from becoming more self aware? What are some of the things that you've learned to need to be addressed or overcome or.

Well.

I love personality tests. So I could tell you what my enneagram is. I could tell you about I am on Myers Briggs, I could tell you what I am on the disc profile. A number of different things that I think that as I've gone through the early phases of my career, you know, starting getting into business when I was 15 and 16, yeah, I didn't know anything about self awareness, personality styles, anything like that. I just thought that I was who I was and I kind of operated on autopilot without being very cognizant of like different rituals and routines and behaviors. Part of that was being a 15 or 16 year old, but I wasn't really aware of the things that I was doing that may hold me back or may push me forward. I was just kind of operating. But what started to happen was after I got a few years into my entrepreneurial business journey and I was studying successful people and I was reading Napoleon Hill and listening to Gary Vaynerchuk and Tom Bilyeu and all these podcasts, I kept hearing this term self awareness. And I was like, well, I guess it's a big thing that's necessary for success. So I went out, I took a bunch of personality tests and I was really happy with the results. Like, I really truthfully enjoy the process of learning more, just learning in general, but learning more about myself. So for me though, I noticed in terms of actual benefit, once I had taken those tests and read it, not only did I have the experience of, oh, that is me, it's like they literally wrote a book, book just about me. When you take your test and some of these personality test guys, you take them, you get your results, you're like, how have they been spying on me? It's crazy, but it's also very eye opening because you'll notice things that basically you maybe have been doing for a long time and you know that you do them, but they're traits and tendencies that you might not look at as like anything significant. But then you look at a personality test that says, oh, you're the type of person where you might talk over people. And I read that I'm like, oh, kind of do do that. And it says that's one of the biggest. I do that to you all the time, by the way. Sorry, sorry. Podcast listeners who have to deal with that. So my personality style is more prone to being overly aggressive, being it's high D personality type. And I do tend to talk over people. So I learned that that's a weakness. So now, even though I still struggle with it, I'm still working on that part. But now I know I identified and I can recognize that. Okay, that is a stumbling.

Would you say you're more cognizant of it now?

Yeah, that's, that's. The point is since I got more self aware and took these tests, now I'm aware. So now that I'm aware of the things I need to work on, it's just a process of working on them and trying my best to practice listening and taking everything in. Part of the reason, you guys might not know, but if anyone out there is very adhd, you might understand me. The reason why I interrupt is not cause I want to interrupt. It's usually because I have a thought that I know will leave my brain if I don't get it out right then. And I struggle with that. So anyway, though I think all of us have different tendencies and personality styles and traits that can hinder us in some ways and can be advantageous. And it's very, very much in our self interest to identify what those traits are in ourselves so that we can look at ourselves objectively and almost work on ourselves like we're a mast piece in progress and just fix the areas we're not so happy with and obviously expand upon our strengths. I think it's good to know them.

Yeah, no, I think it's perfect. That's one of the reasons why I wanted to kind of hear your experience because a lot of times it's. Self awareness is one of those things that's often difficult to talk about in a 20 or 30 minute podcast or 20 or 10 minute video or something like that. Because self awareness is a continual process. I think there's, you know, we talked about the seven levels of life mastery. Self awareness can be through all seven levels.

Right. Even though it's technically level what, two?

Yeah. The heavy lifting is at the beginning phase, but continual self awareness is something you will do for the rest of your life. Most people when they start out on that journey are not aware of their self at all. Like they just taking me or leaving kind of thing. They're not really kind of focused on can their identity, can their self esteem, can their integrity, can their character, can all of that be improved upon and better?

Another thing is I just thought about this. So let's say I look at self awareness. I was just looking at it like it's who you are. Right. But what if you want to become somebody who's kind of different than how you see yourself today? Would you still say that one of the first steps to doing that is to become self aware on where you're at right now?

Yeah. Because there's several benefits to self awareness, but the top ones that come to mind are first of all, you become uniquely aware of your skills and your strengths. Right. What value you bring. Right. What value you can make to a team, what value you can make to a family, how you can position yourself. You also become uniquely aware to some of your struggles. You mentioned a minute ago about, hey look, I'm still working on this over talking thing, right? This being overly aggressive, being perceived as being someone who can be aloof or what you see what I'm saying? Those are different things that kind of raise up.

That's a really good example because there's a lot of personality traits that I have that are part of kind of the D personality from a disc perspective, but also part of my Myers Briggs. By Myers Briggs, I'm an entp.

Yeah.

Which is literally called the debater.

Yeah.

Now I don't know about you, but it's very difficult to be friends with somebody who always has to debate everything that you say.

Yeah.

And that's kind of how I'm wired.

Yeah.

It's literally my personality is what it's called.

Well, and see that's. I'm glad you actually mentioned that because that is how you're telling yourself you're wired.

Okay.

Right. So what I mean by that is that you may have natural tendencies to act and react in specific ways, but when you grow from immaturity to maturity, that awareness itself sets you up to build relationships rather than hinder the relationship.

And there's also such a thing, like if you look into the Myers Briggs, there's such a thing as a mature debater versus an immature debater, you know, so when you're earlier in the process and you're immature in your personality style, there's maturity and immaturity in both the disc and the Myers Briggs, by the way. But if you look into personality styles bit more. This is kind of, I don't want to say an advanced concept, but maybe more intermediate, but you'll notice that there's it's a spectrum still. It's not like all of the weaknesses are going to totally hold you back. There are people who are very well rounded because they have gone through this process of getting self aware. They've polished up their weaknesses so that it doesn't hold them back and hinder them and they've really, really ironed out their strengths so that they're a machine.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. And those are some of the things I think we have to think about. We have to kind of walk through those things. So there. I'm glad you mentioned the assessments because one of the best things you can possibly understand is a couple different areas. So one is tendencies and conflict resolution, how you deal and communicate with other people. Now, one of the tools that we use, that we even offer is the DISC personality profile, right? I went and it was so pivotal for me. I went to a live event years ago, had a good friend of mine who a guy who became a good friend of mine, teach me for the first time what DISC was and what DISC stood for and how I could apply it to my life and how it applies to my team and how it applies to my family. And it was instrumental in giving me better personal awareness of the things that I can improve upon. And I began putting things to work and began being seen in a more positive light when I was around each of those relationships. So that's pivotal one, number one. The second one is something we offer is the motivators. So seven value motivators. All right, so seven value systems that motivate much of your behavior, right? So if the DISC is how you do things, this would be the why you do things. Why are certain people motivated for an roi where certain other people are motivated to have more of an altruistic perspective? Why are certain people geared towards systems and processes in a slower pace? Why other people want to do a skyrocket, not worry about the details, right? Each of these different factors kind of placate and determine kind of how you're wired and how your DNA is kind of shaped up. I would say that there's no right or wrong. And I would also say that there are strengths and struggles, each one of those. And the idea of self awareness allows you to focus on operating in your strengths while letting other things happen. Employing other people, having other people, working with other people that can help you with your blind spots and your struggles. Okay, so those are two.

Just being aware of certain blind spots. Like, okay, a perfect example, okay, I am aware that I have a tendency to Interrupt. Okay. Because of that, because of that awareness though, I can now that can obviously cause a lot of distress in relationships, but I can go to them and say, hey, I'm sorry. I know this is something that I struggle with. I want you to know I'm not coming from a place of trying to be a D I c k. ITunes love you. I'm not coming from that place. And, and, and I can explain myself and say, hey, this is something I struggle with. I'm working on it. And I feel like that person would give you a little bit more grace. Yeah. They understand. Yeah.

Because you're being open.

You're being open. You're being self aware rather than just operating like that. And you know, and I'm not saying use it as an excuse. I'm just saying I'm trying to say that like that awareness can help you because even if you have this weakness that you're like, oh, I don't even know if I'm gonna be able to overcome that and be just being aware that the weakness is there allows you to navigate around it.

Yeah. I mean even some of the, the interesting thing is even some of the, the parts and pieces, you know, some of these tools have been around for a while in a variety of capacities. Variety, different places at a variety of depth. Our stuff has to be very in depth. Okay. You can, there are free disk assessments and stuff you can get on the web and stuff like that. Many of them are surpress view. They're like a summary and kind of deal. Like I believe in giving people enough information about themselves to make sure they can make better decisions about themselves. Right. But even though some of these tools have been out there for some time, most of the population has never taken any of them. Or if they've taken one.

Right.

They haven't taken a true picture, meaning they haven't taken a combination tool like the peak performance tool that we have, for example.

Well, and I. That's the thing is I told you guys how. I said how I. Well, gone through a lot of them. I'd recommend going through several. There's several that are free online. There's also several that are paid. In my experience, a lot of the paid ones are better than the free ones. However, there's a lot of good free ones. If you want to get surface level, we don't offer anything with Myers Briggs, so would it be cool if I plugged a Myers Briggs source? So if you guys go to 16personalities.com when you get a chance, that's my favorite Myers Briggs Test, it's free. It takes like 15 minutes. So there are 16 personalities. If you want to learn more about the Myers Briggs, just Google it. But that's a great website and resource. And then also on the flip side, my other favorite one is the disc values and tendencies assessment. And that's something that we offer here. You can get access through our content. So we'll put a link in the show notes, the link in the YouTube description, or you can just go to journeyprinciples.com resources on that page there are three eBooks. Under the one that says Discover what drives you. Download that and inside there will be a link to do this for free. The reason I said maybe do it that way is because there's a possibility that at some point in time we will start charging for this. Because this report is.

Well, we used to charge almost 100 bucks for it.

Well, we should. I mean it's.

Well, we normally would, I think just I wanted to make sure that we at least get our normal listeners kind of get.

What I'm thinking we're gonna do is we are going to come up with a really, really awesome self awareness mini course.

Yeah.

And we're gonna bundle it and we're gonna offer that for a very affordable price.

Yeah. I mean that's what we got.

But if you, but if you right now want to get access to just the test, check the show notes, we'll throw it in there for free just for a limited time. You can access that and then in addition to that, check out 16 personalities for Matt.

Absolutely. Totally. A couple of things I want to hit on. So first of all is your heart's desire, what you call it's. Each one of us has a deeper yearning. Okay. So for example, some people want to be seen as important, which means they have a deep yearning tied to appearance. Okay. Really, how they're perceived by the public is a primary driver in some of the ways in which they conduct themselves and behavior. In other words, they can be deeply offended if they're put in a. To look like they're put in a bad light. Wow. Right.

I think I have a decent amount of that one actually.

Yeah, you probably do. Another one's authority. These are people who enjoy authority. Some would even say power.

I like that one too.

Right. And then the third one is actually impact. So these are people that want to have a deep valuable impact to others lives. So we don't have the assessment just yet to kind of show this off as something we're building to kind of help you but as soon as we get that, we'll help you do that. So when Connor's talking about the ultimate self, the ultimate self awareness tool there, I'm doing my best to put all this together in one place at one time. So when you get done, you really.

By the way, guys, depending on when you watch this, when that is live, we'll actually put a link to that course or that mini course or whatever you can go buy in the description. Yeah, I'm going to try to convince him to sell it for under 10 bucks. So we'll see what I could do. But that would be awesome.

All right, the next thing is the sphere of genius. That's what I refer to as comfort zones. These are things that you're naturally accustomed to and enjoy. So one is community. Okay. So community events, one is service. Right. And another one's also going to be leadership. Right. Are you naturally geared to be a leader? Right. These are comfort zones. Right. So again, this is not something we have in a tool today, but we will have it in the near future.

Yes.

Right. So we've talked about tendencies, communication styles, conflict resolutions, drives and motivators, your deepest heart's desire, what you're operating in, your sphere of genius, if you will, your comfort zones, each of those make up a part of who you are. Okay. The best thing you can do is to get self aware to the best of your ability in all these different pieces. Because once you have these tools, it's important to grab a highlighter and an ink pen and circle the things that you do really well. You can build a strengths list. Okay. And highlight some other things that maybe you want to get an improvement on. Right. Once you have that visibility now, you can start to operating a lot more of your strengths and you can start to build a plan or strategy, as we like to call it, a life mastery strategy, as we like to call it, on how to overcome and or backfill a lot of those blind spots and struggles.

Right. You just have to get the information exactly.

You know, true foundation. Alright, so if you think about this, self awareness is the foundation that every single skyscraper is built on.

Wow.

Right? You cannot build a skyscraper without knowing who you are, why you're here and what you need to do about it. And you won't get there unless you take the time to really uncover who you are. Right.

And I'm not talking also say empire. You don't have to say empire.

Skyscraper.

Skyscraper.

It's figurative. Yeah, right. You know what I'm saying? So these are the types of Things that kind of go into that I can do. I remember one of the biggest mistakes I ever made is I had a young lady working for me. This is before I actually became self aware or even had a level of self awareness again. Self awareness is a continued journey.

In the last podcast where we talked about influences which I believe also play a part in your.

Yeah, absolutely.

As well.

Absolutely.

I think that's a big part. Matter of fact, in that course. We should probably do something on that.

But for sure, he's trying to give everything away, which is not a bad thing.

I just want to pack you.

We're going to help as much as we possibly can. Yes, I promise. Right. But when I was, when Natalie worked for me, I. Unfortunately her and her husband were. We weren't single parents, but they were getting by and they were working hard. Natalie was a great team member. We had recently decided to offer a profit sharing program that we had at the time. Now, that profit sharing program that we had at the time was a strong program, but it had a pretty major requirement, which was they had to go through what was then called Financial Peace University, something that our friends at Ramsey Solutions have. Because if I was going to give money away to my team that would normally go into my retained earnings or my, my future retirement, if you will. Right. If I was going to do that, I wanted to make sure they had the best chance of making sure that was good.

So you basically just want to make sure that they weren't going to go out to the club every week.

Well, I mean the reality is once you turn the money over, they're going to what they're going to do with it. But I wanted to set them up for success.

Everything about by giving them the knowledge.

And having them go to this course right now. What I, what I, what I didn't really kind of think through and I didn't think about is Natalie approached me and she said, hey, I'm curious. My husband and I can't really attend that the thing because during those hours one of us has to watch the child. Can we participate in profit sharing without doing it? And I look and I just, I was moving boxes. I wasn't really thinking. I just looked at her and I said no. Turned around, stopped and kept moving boxes. Out of the corner of my ear I hear sniffles of crying and I'm like, whoa, whoa. And I turned around and she's like in tears. And I'm like, whoa, whoa. What just happened? What just happened? Like, she's like, well, we really could use the money like we're trying to dig ourselves out of debt. We're trying to do this like we could really use the money. And I'm like, okay, I think there's been a misunderstanding. Because what I didn't tell her that I should have told her because I wasn't self aware. I just replied out of instinct, not out of thought. Wink, wink, don't do that. Right. Is that we had already planned on providing at least a low level of childcare for any of our team members that had children that needed to attend, but didn't have the case to do that. That would have solved both of our problems. Right. All I did was answer her question, can you have profit sharing without going through financial peace? And I was like, no. I said, no, you can. But apparently my natural predisposition was one of boldness and directness. Now she was what would refer to as what we refer to in the disc profile as a high S which are not naturally geared towards responding well to directness and boldness.

And that's another thing. I'm glad you hit on it. Your personality style is gonna play a huge role in how you interact with others from both a relational and a business standpoint. Which that's actually, if I had to say what the biggest lesson that I learned, it actually wasn't anything about me. The biggest thing for me with self awareness in this personality test stuff was in learning how my personality style operates and how these other personality styles do as well. My ability to lead and my ability to work with and collaborate with people has drastically improved. Because one of the cool things that's in some of these tests, specifically the one we offer here, is it'll actually, it'll not only show you what your personality style is, but it'll also show you how your personality style interacts with all the other personality styles. So it'll make you better at interacting with other people. So like I said, I know that for a D, which is Steven is a D as well. It's difficult to communicate with someone who is a high S without typically either hurting their feelings unintentionally by being overly direct or so, which is kind of what he's talking about. But I just wanted to.

Yeah, I mean, you gotta. There are certain personality traits that either hinder or help relationships. And as you grow in maturity, a lot of the things that used to hinder now become help. That's why you see me listening a whole lot more with a lot more people and not just offering my 2 cents and not just offering my Opinion. Right. By gaining perspective from other people and their opinion, you actually show them value. That was something I learned through this personality assessment.

And you learn more, so it really helps both of you.

Exactly. You can make better decisions. You know, the reality is you can't amplify the best of you until you understand what is inside of you or what makes you up. Like, you can't get there.

Right.

Which is. Again, I mentioned the whole thing about the skyscraper thing, Empire, whatever you want to call. Right. Self awareness is the foundation in which all of life mastery is built on. Okay. Which is why you can't do anything with life mastery. You can't fix any area of your life. You can't do any of that stuff until after you have a certain level of self awareness that you can use to leverage for your future, period.

And that's why you put it as, like, step two.

Yeah. It's a big step.

It's one of the first steps. It's like the actually first two. It's the first actionable step unless we're wrong. And it's step three. But I believe it's two. It's the first actionable step out of our seven steps to life mastery, which is basically the entire life mastery journey, from stuck to unstoppable to master of your life.

That's right.

Has basically been distilled into seven steps. We have whiteboard lessons on it. Go check it out. It's on our YouTube channel. We also did a podcast on it, episode two.

But step two in that journey of the seven steps is basically before everything else is self awareness. The only thing that comes before that is deciding to change.

Yeah.

Or stepping up to the call. So that's. That's really powerful. It really speaks to how important it is to really, really take this step and take it very seriously.

Absolutely. You know, I want to go ahead and wrap up the show. We're running out of time here. In a few minutes. But a couple different things. You may have guessed this by now. Right. But self awareness is kind of a big deal.

Right.

Okay. Some of these tools that we share are kind of a big deal. Right. That's why we're. There's so much of a big deal. That's why we've offered to do some of them, a few of them for free for a limited time. Right. It's because you need to get started understanding who you are so you can actually get kind of get moving to where you're supposed to go. Right. And until you take the step, it's just not going to happen. Right. It's a huge part of going from stuck to unstoppable, period. So it's important to kind of make sure we go there. I want to show you that this is so important whether you're a person of faith or not.

This is something that kind of jumped out at me in some of my private time. It says, then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. John 8:32. Right. There is certain inalienable truths and principles that do build fruit that can take you from literally anywhere. The most difficult of upbringings in past to some of the most prosperous futures. Right. There have been many influencers that have done it long before I ever kind of got. Ever kind of started working with stuff. Right. Long before that. You've got to get clear on who you are. Right. And the question we always get is how?

Clarity is power.

Clarity is power. Clarity is power. The question we get most often is how. Right. We're gonna go ahead and like, to Connor's point, we're gonna put the in the show notes a way to take the assessment.

So we have as many different resources as possible. We'll throw them in there.

You are more than welcome to check out some of the stuff Connor's already mentioned because again, it's important that you get the principle of self awareness more so than you're getting stuff from us that's more important to us. Right. Once you take the assessment, take the time to study your assessment and reflect. Okay. There was an old joke that Chris Locruto told me one time that basically said that he had a guy come up to him after he took an assessment and the guy said, well, that's 90% me. And then he kind of handed it off to his wife. And she's reading through it. She goes, oh, no, you're the other 10% too. Right. So be honest with yourself. None of us are perfect. We're not expecting you to be. And you shouldn't expect yourself to be.

Well, and it can be hard to do that sometimes. As you probably saw a couple podcasts ago, we went through Mindset and we did an exercise where he basically had me rate on a scale of 1 to 10, which mindset traits I thought I exhibited. And I was mostly right about myself. I was probably about like 80 to 85% accurate, maybe a little bit more, but there was about 10% of the things that I was. He had to go, I'm pretty sure you're a little bit off on that one.

That's right.

And so it's important to have an.

Outside perspective, for sure, for sure. But after you do that, so take the assessment, reflect, acknowledge what you're good at. Acknowledge where you need to improve upon. Nothing wrong with that. No harm, no foul, no one gets hurt. Right? So take the time to do that. After that.

Commit to just maturing that level.

Maturing that level.

What do you mean, commit? I mean, if you already know that you're not a great communicator because you have a tendency to over talk people or not to listen, the way to mature, that is to intentionally begin to go into conversations looking for ways to listen. Like some of the things that I used to do, two things, I used to give all the credit away, even if I did it, okay? Because I wanted to eliminate any perception of conceited arrogance, okay. Rather than taking credit for something that I did well, all right? Because a lot of times you're forgetting all the other people that helped you do it, to be honest. Right? So I began giving credit away and then it became who I was. Now I'm not focused on like how much of a.

An influencer I am. You've asked me before, man, we're going to make you famous. I'm like, I don't need to be famous. I need to be impactful. I need to make an impact.

And I go, in order to be impactful, you got to impact a lot of lives. You don't technically have to, but how are you going to reach a lot of lives?

In many ways, I've already achieved my earlier goals. My kids, you, my daughter, all these kinds of different things. So. But that being said, maturity comes from improving on the things you're not good at intentionally and not being mad about it, not being hateful about it, right? If you're a bad communicator, you're a bad communicator. Work on it, right? Seriously, like, there's nothing wrong with that, right?

If you're not good at making decisions, don't condemn yourself.

Not at all.

You're struggling with.

Not at all.

Don't.

Not at all. So hopefully this has given you some kind of perspective on how important self awareness is, some practical steps to kind of figure it out, and different ways in which you can start to kind of work on it. If you've got questions. Questionsjourneyprinciples.com always, it doesn't matter what you ask, even if it's about this, about self awareness, some of the assessments, we're happy to help you any way we can. Journeyprinciples.com resources for some of the resources we talked about, Connor will make sure that some of the other things are actually in the show notes as well for your benefit. And in the meantime, just know we're here for you. We're here to support you. We're here to help you win, and we can't wait to see you on the mountaintop of your choice. Until then, take care. We'll talk to you again on the external principles. See ya. I'll see you in the next video. And please, if you don't mind and you enjoyed the Life Mastery content we're building, consider hitting the subscribe button and also hitting the bell so you'll be the first to get notified anytime we release new content.