The Master Skill

The All Blacks call self-awareness the master skill. Clarity on who you are and who you want to be is a starting point. Advancing forward requires self-awareness. The ability to be aware of your emotional state, your surroundings, other people, and the feelings that you have. Your feelings are messages to the brain. Self-awareness allows you to recognize the message and puts you in a position to respond. It's the first step in transforming your identity, and it is the source of our deliberate actions.

What does self-awareness mean to you?

For me, self-awareness encompasses how you are feeling in any given moment, in the environment that you're in, the current situation, with the company that you're keeping, and the pressures that you're having with your peers, your colleagues, etc. Self-awareness is the state of being self-aware, being able to observe without judgement and see something for what it is with openness and honesty. Learning that feelings were messages to my brain and that they're not necessarily right or wrong, they're just an instinctual interpretation of what you perceive as happening in that moment has been very liberating.

I often describe it as an out-of-body experience where you are able to observe yourself from outside of yourself, like watching a movie, and also observe how a given situation or moment in time is making you feel. You can see your body's reactions as feelings travel with a message to your brain. Self-awareness and self-observation are the beginning of self-improvement.

Think about situations that put you under pressure. In training, I have had people do 10 push-ups, then a 30-second plank followed by 1 minute wall sit, all while discussing a topic. These exercises quickly stimulate internal mental dialogue. In a previous blog, I gave the example of someone telling you that your hair was green versus saying you were lazy. We also did a 30-second exercise listing 5 great things about yourself. Your internal dialogue is often driven by feelings. These may be discomfort, embarrassment, joy, frustration to name a few. Acknowledging these and utilising the ‘gap’ between the feeling and your response lets you see the story pressure elicits for you. It is not what happens to you that matters as much as what you tell yourself about what is happening. Your interpretation will drive your response. This is why it is ‘the’ master skill. When you can see it for what it is, you are then in a position to choose your response.

Is this a skill you need to work on? How well do you use the ‘gap’ in your mental processing? Is it time you mastered this skill?