How to Use Curiosity and Compassion to Become a Self-Awareness Champion

Do you want to improve relationships at your organization and change the way you show up for your team? It all starts with self-awareness . . . and “self-awareness champion” Zovig Garboushian is ready to help.

With years of experience in brand marketing, management consulting, and leadership development, Zovig now puts her passion and experience to use at Boldness Ablaze, a boutique professional firm that helps leaders overcome personal limitations and find authentic success. She recently came onto the Mindfulness Manufacturing podcast to talk more about the importance of self-awareness and share some of her best tips for how leaders can use skills like curiosity and compassion to improve their self-awareness and how they show up for themselves and their organization.

The Role of Self-Awareness

In her episode, Zovig defines self-awareness as the ever-changing relationship you have with yourself, as well as the key to having the kind of life you want for yourself.
By developing your self-awareness, you can learn to:

Recognize when something in your life is incongruent with what you want for yourself
Behave in more natural ways
Add value to the world in your own unique way
Form stronger connections in both your professional and personal life

Even in an industry like manufacturing, where it may often feel like there’s no time for feelings, developing your self-awareness plays a key role in shaping how you show up every day.

How to Become a Self-Awareness Champion

Tip #1: Take a Pause
In manufacturing, it can feel impossible to take some time for yourself. However, allowing yourself moments of pause goes a long way toward improving your self-awareness. Throughout your day, take small moments to pause and reflect on your behavior, interactions, and if you’re showing up in a way that feels right for you. These pauses don’t have to be big—even a thirty second pause to take a breath and collect your thoughts is enough.

Tip #2: Observe Your Behavior
Similarly, pay attention to your behavior and emotions. Are your shoulders tensed? Are you feeling anxious about an upcoming presentation, or dread the thought of checking your email inbox? By paying attention to your own behavior, you can notice if something feels incongruent with what you want for yourself. If you’re in-tune with your own behavior, you can use it to show up with intentionality and have a greater impact.

Tip #3: Practice Self-Care
If you want to be self-aware, you need to attend to yourself. This means practicing self-care, in whatever form works for you! Self-care doesn’t necessarily mean taking a day off to go to spa. It might be something as simple as meditating in the morning, allowing yourself some white space in your daily schedule, or taking a walk around your plant to check in with yourself and your team. Through practicing self-care, you can improve the way you show up for yourself . . . and this will positively impact how you show up for others.

Bonus Tip: It Takes Courage
Practicing self-awareness takes courage! At first, it might feel strange to practice self-awareness, especially in manufacturing. But by following Zovig’s tips above and treating yourself with compassion and curiosity, you can find new ways to develop your self-awareness, improve your impact, and present the best version of yourself.

Learn More on the Podcast

To learn more about self-awareness with Zovig Garboushian, listen to her episode of Mindfulness Manufacturing here.

Mindfulness Manufacturing

Our show is about providing listeners with real stories that come from a place of experience, transparency, and authenticity. Most importantly it’s about what we learn from these stories and applying Mindfulness in our everyday work and personal lives.
Our intention is to create an environment where people can learn through open honest discussions on how we apply Mindfulness. Although our experiences and stories come from time in a manufacturing environment hence the title “Mindfulness Manufacturing”, we still see our discussions and topics relatable to any organization or profession.

When a mistake occurs on the plant floor, your mind might jump to one question: who caused this issue, and should I write them up for their mistake? But there’s a more productive approach you could be taking—and in this episode of Mindfulness Manufacturing, guest Dr. Jake Mazulewicz breaks it all down!

With a background as a firefighter, EMT, and military paratrooper, Jake knows the challenges of high-hazard industries, and works with organizations to reduce errors and create safer, more reliable workplace environments. In this episode, Jake shares why you can’t procedularize everything, including the way you handle errors and accidents, and offers great insights and stories about how to use connection and curiosity to improve safety, address errors, and strengthen your organization.

3:35 – Procedures and policies are the work that is imagined, and on the floor is how the work actually gets done

4:19 – The work as-done is almost always radically different than the work as-imagined

5:20 – Even when you have standards and people show up wanting to do a good job, you can still see issues that need to be addressed

6:44 – There will always be areas that absolutely need to have procedures in place

8:02 – There are also adaptive jobs, which leans less into procedures and more intro troubleshooting and tacit human knowledge

10:56 – In an ideal environment, both mechanistic and adaptive models are used and respected and needed

12:11 – There are four levels, ranging from strict procedurals to looser guidelines that show what to do, but not how to do it

15:36 – Tacit knowledge gets shared through conversations

16:22 – A way to share important information is to have frontline experts record videos sharing their insights to problems, especially those that are not covered in procedures

19:44 – Through conversation and connection, more knowledge is shared

21:58 – Debriefing also plays a central role

23:45 – If you have strong discipline, you’ll find more freedom

25:31 – In most situations, errors are signals, not defects

27:07 – When an error occurs, be curious and find the deeper cause of the problem

Connect with Jake Mazulewicz

Find him on Linkedin

Visit his website