Managing ourselves

Managing involves practice, experience, studies and even instinct. Managing others can be a delicate task, but managing ourselves can be even more difficult. Our emotions, actions and prejudices are things we need to understand and be able to deal with.

We all have different personalities and backgrounds, and both can influence how we act in each situation. But most of the time, we can not have the things we want or the way we want, and that is why we need to learn to manage ourselves. However, that does not mean it is an easy thing to do.

There are some attitudes we can do to help us on this journey. For example, self-assessments, as discussed many times in my blogs here, self-assessments are powerful tools. They can guide us in self-analysis, giving us the possibility to understand some behaviours and actions that we have and evaluate our learning processes. Another crucial action is to investigate our bias and see if we are supporting any kind of negative stereotypes and how they are potentially interfering with our interactions. From there, we can educate ourselves about different cultures and groups.

An additional method that is used in many companies is feedback. It can be done by your peers, managers and subordinates, and it will indicate how they feel about you. Your manners, your attitudes and your participation, if they feel that you let your emotions or personal beliefs get in the way of work or not, these assessments will give you a chance to recognize where you can improve. But the most important thing is that we maintain the desire to identify what we can ameliorate and act on it.