It is hard to improve a performance you cannot see clearly. That is why raising self-awareness is the first step of any effective training. There are two ways to do it: through the emotional account of how your actions were received, and through objective figures. Here we show why mixing the two works better than either alone.
Self-awareness is an asset
Self-awareness is a clear and honest view of yourself: strengths and weaknesses, but also emotions and motivations. It is knowing what you are doing as you do it, and why. It is a skill, and like every skill it can be trained.
Knowing your own performance pays off in several ways. When you know your weaknesses, you know where to direct your effort. You can rely on people who complement you. You gain objectivity in your decisions. You become proactive rather than reactive, responding instead of reacting, and you raise your standards. And, as Daniel Goleman's work shows, self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence, which helps you understand the problems you face and how to solve them. The more self-aware a learner is, the faster and more efficient their training becomes.
Two steps: questions, then feedback
Stimulating self-awareness takes two consecutive steps. First, ask yourself good questions: what am I trying to achieve, what is working, what is slowing me down, what can I change. Second, get feedback on your actions from an honest mirror: friends, colleagues, managers. Feedback, positive or negative, is the most powerful way to realize the impact of your actions on others.
The trouble is that people rarely give it freely. It is not pleasant to hear or to deliver, and managers and colleagues do not always take the time. That is why practicing familiar conversations in a role play is such a good alternative: it makes you aware of how you interact and of your effect on others, and it delivers feedback on every single conversation.
The role of self-assessment
Before hearing how you really did, it is instructive to assess yourself. The questions fall into two kinds. Internal self-awareness is how you evaluate the impact of your own actions; external self-awareness is how clearly you see what others think of you.
After or during a simulated conversation, you are asked how the meeting went, how you interacted with the character, whether they understood your point, and whether and how you applied certain skills. The questions look simple, and that is the point. You have to think objectively about your performance and about how the other person perceived your approach, something we rarely do at work. You carry what you become aware of into the next conversation. And assessing yourself engages you more deeply in your own development.
From self-assessment to two kinds of feedback
Then comes feedback, in two forms.
Subjective feedback is the account of your interlocutor: their feelings and perception, colored by their personality and needs. In the popular model of hemispheric specialization, this is the kind of input associated with the right side of the brain: feelings, imagination, holistic thinking.
Objective feedback is a set of metrics and measurable data about your performance: results, scores, indicators. This is the input associated with the left side: logic, facts, analysis.
The neuroscience of hemispheres is more nuanced than the popular picture, but the practical lesson holds: receiving both kinds of feedback gives you a fuller view of your performance than either alone, and raises your awareness of your real level faster.
Combining emotion and metrics in a digital role play
Self-awareness, like any skill, needs regular practice to be maintained, because strengths, weaknesses and goals evolve with experience. A digital role play puts you in the real conditions of a familiar situation, so you can see whether you have the qualities and behaviors the task requires, and lets you repeat the practice that changes them. In a Skillgym session:
- you have one of your typical conversations with a character who has their own needs, personality and moods, in a safe environment;
- you assess your own performance on your behaviors, skills and approach;
- the character tells you, in first person, how they lived the conversation and what your approach did to them; the system knows this because the scenario determined the character's reactions, and it never analyzes you;
- you receive objective results: overall performance, objectives reached, skills and behaviors expressed in what you said, and your self-awareness score, computed from the distance between your self-assessment and the evaluation.
The character's account is always combined with the metrics, so that feeling and figures arrive together and give you a complete picture of your approach.
Conclusion
In adult learning, self-awareness is the key. Knowing your skills and motivations tells you what to improve and how. A digital role play lets you face as many situations as you want, assess yourself, hear how the other person lived it and read the numbers, in a safe space, as often as you like. The better you know yourself, the better you can focus on improving.