The next edition of Beyond English Fluency is here.
Where has the time gone?
March has already been a very hectic and exciting month.
If you are new, Beyond English Fluency dives into topics and shares strategies around communication that go beyond language.
Every other Wednesday (twice per month), I share a theme related to communication that goes into depth about one theme, strategy or idea. Whether you are a non-native English speaking professional or consider yourself a native looking to excel in your communication- you’ll find a strategy that you can apply to your own situation.
The strategy I am sharing with you today is all about building self-awareness in communication and how this can impact our confidence.
Having self-awareness means you have a clear perception or understanding of your personality, behaviours, emotions, your strengths, weaknesses and any habits you have picked up throughout your life.
When you have a high level of self-awareness you are able to better understand how you affect other people, how they perceive you and how you can manage your responses.
Self-awareness has countless proven benefits, in higher performance, leadership and building better relationships.
Higher levels of self-awareness can make us more proactive, boost our acceptance, and encourage positive self-development, it can build our self-esteem and lead us to better decision making. Building your self-awareness can also make us better at our jobs, our communication and our overall well-being.
I recently interviewed Jamie McKinney, an incredible Professional Development Coach and Best Selling Author, who empowers women to build their confidence, or as Jamie likes to say, build their ‘confidence currency’.
You can listen to the episode here.
We didn’t specifically mention this, but many of the strategies we spoke about in the episode relate to self-awareness and having an understanding of where you are currently at, and where you want to go. A lot of it comes down to our mindset.
This is another reason why the idea of ‘faking it till you make it’ doesn’t sit well with either of us!
I should also mention that self-awareness is a skill, just like confidence, and while it’s quite a process to learn how to be self-aware, once you reach it, it can help you achieve many goals and ultimately success.
Understanding that all skills can be developed can be very empowering!
When you take charge of your own thinking, you can monitor and evaluate your own ways of building skills, whether that’s to become a better leader, language learner, or communicator.
Just before I go any further, here is a quick definition.
Metacognition = awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes.
Self-awareness = Conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives, and desires.
Self-awareness also relates to our ability to monitor our thoughts, emotions, and actions and how they might align or not with who we are and who we want to be.
If you want to get ahead, there is plenty of research that points to building your metacognitive skills.
A lot of research has been carried out on metacognition, not only in linguistics and education, but in design as well as neuroscience, psychology and developmental psychology.
A metacognitive strategy can be used to build your language skills, or confidence, as well as guide or regulate your own learning. So really, these strategies can be applied to any skill that you want to learn.
Self-awareness is crucial in our communication.
Self-awareness plays a critical role because it helps us to become more efficient at focusing on what we still need to learn. Most of the time we operate on autopilot. We say something without thinking about the consequences. We might say something and the words coming out of our mouths do not match our body language. We might use language that is too direct, or our register is too informal, or our message isn’t clear to our audience.
When you build self-awareness, you can adjust this and begin to monitor your performance.
Metacognition is closely related to the concept of mindfulness in social psychology and intercultural communication.
What this means is that when we speak with people from other countries, it’s important to play close attention to the situation you are speaking in and the cultural assumptions you might have.
Mindfulness and self-awareness in a language is when you are aware of the patterns of the language, you are aware of the speaker, the situation and what might be considered appropriate language for the situation and listener.
When it comes to communication, we are adjusting our communication all the time. Depending on who we are speaking to and the relationship we have with that person or people, we change our style of communication, our language. We usually do this without thinking much about it (which can cause some problems!).
Building our self-awareness means we can be less judgemental and free of assumptions, we are aware of our actions and how we might offend or upset someone. It is self-awareness that can allow us to understand the other’s frame of reference.
Why might you want to implement metacognitive strategies?
Wait, so I have to think about thinking?!
Pretty much.
When you implement metacognitive strategies you are likely to learn more efficiently, more effectively and therefore make more progress.
The incredible thing is, all students, regardless of their age, background or achievement level, benefit from the use of metacognitive strategies. When I talk about empowering learners, this is a great example.
I want to share one way of doing that when it comes to building self-awareness and building your confidence in communication.
Firstly it’s all about learning self-regulating strategies.
Self-regulating refers to monitoring your progress. It can also relate to just one task that you might have to do.
You need to choose an area you want to improve. Usually when I ask non-native English Speakers:
‘What is your weakness in English communication’
They don’t have a lot of trouble answering this.
If I were to ask you: ‘When it comes to building your confidence in communication or in English, what area do you think you need to focus on?
Are you able to come up with something?
Most likely.
But when I ask ‘What are your strengths in communication?’ – It could be a little more challenging to answer.
I am going to share how you can assess and monitor your language and communication skills.
Let’s use speaking proficiency as an example. To make it even more specific, let’s say you want to assess and improve your speaking abilities when it comes to delivering business presentations.
The first step, is to plan and set a goal and have a strategy to do it.
This is where self-awareness comes in. You need to ask yourself questions around your current abilities.
I get it…
You might be thinking, shouldn’t I just practice? Isn’t this wasting my time to think about how I think or my current presentation abilities?
Ultimately by doing this, you are going to become more efficient with your time and effort.
When it comes to improving your presentation skills you might want to ask yourself:
- Have I presented before? What experience do I have?
- When is the presentation happening and how much time do I need to prepare for it?
- How much focus will I need?
- What are my current strengths?
- What are my weaknesses?
- What is one thing I can focus on to improve?
- How can I assess my learning?
Next, you can monitor your mistakes.
I understand that doing this alone isn’t always the easiest. If you can work with a teacher, a coach, a mentor or a professional who is able to point out your mistakes then it will be easier for you to monitor them.
If you want to increase your metacognitive knowledge, it helps to do so by focusing on specific tasks. We can only really raise our metacognitive knowledge as a result of reflecting and building our awareness.
A lot of this relates to being self-reflective which is why I love to share self-reflective tasks in my own programmes and teaching.
I encourage you to try this. Ask yourself questions like:
‘What was a better way to explain myself?’
‘Was I clear in my argument?’
Reflect on your performance and write about it.
Think about what worked for you, and what didn’t. You can reflect on the strategy that you used. Even if you were in a difficult situation, or you felt awkward in the presentation, what can you learn from the experience?
Reflecting and monitoring your performance is going to build your confidence in communication.
Finally, no matter what strategy you choose to focus on, you want it to be challenge enough but not so difficult that you struggle to apply it.
Let me know your thoughts about this strategy. I love to hear from you!
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If you would like to build your communication confidence in English then check out my free guide to build your confidence today.
Do you have any additional questions? Feel free to reach out and send me a message. I’m happy to help.
