Today on Design Life we answer another listener question, this time about self awareness as a designer. Our listener wants to know how to build and improve upon self awareness in a design role - asking a question like this in itself shows self awareness! Reflecting on and understanding our strengths and weaknesses is a big part of being a great designer and in this episode we chat about how we are cultivating the skill of self awareness as we progress in our design careers.
Self awareness grows as you develop within your career. The more experience you have, the more comfortable and inspired you might feel by the challenge of overcoming a weakness. It is almost impossible to grow if you are not aware of your weaknesses. If you are not aware of them, you won’t be working on improving them. Self awareness can help you to progress towards new opportunities, if you can use it to show that you’re aware of both your strengths and the areas you need to improve within your skillset.
Self awareness will help you to get better at identifying your strengths and your weaknesses. Then you can decide whether your weakness is a skill you want, or need, to improve or is it something you should accept is not within your skillset so you can delegate or collaborate with others who do have the skill.
You might know the phrase ‘comparison is the thief of joy’ but when it comes to self awareness it can be useful to use comparison as a tool to identify areas that you might choose to work on.
04.06 – Self awareness
07.24 – Our listener’s question
12.58 – Why building self awareness is important
15.34 – What skills we’re working on right now
22.20 – Strengths and weaknesses we haven’t been aware of
