It is my honor to introduce mindfulness speaker and author of the highly acclaimed book, the mindfulness edge, Matt Tenny.

I'd like to start off with a question for you. That's okay. The question is, if there was one skill that you could develop, that affected positively had a positive impact on at least 90% of your results, maybe closer to 100% of your results? Would you agree with me that that would developing that skill would be a pretty good use of your time?

Now, imagine that in order to develop this skill, you didn't need to add anything to your schedule, you could just change the way that you do things that you're already doing every day, anyhow. Now, it almost sounds too good to be true, right?

Well, there is such a skill, it is the skill of self awareness. So self awareness is the most critical skill for leaders to develop. And for any human for that matter. It because it's a meta skill that affects every essentially every aspect of leadership. And I have never met a leader who disagrees with this. However, I meet very few people who intentionally trained to develop and improve their self awareness on a daily basis. And I used to wonder why that is. And I, I've done some research, and I think I've come up with a couple good answers for this. One is that probably the most likely answer is that many people just simply don't know that there are proven tools for intentionally training and improving self awareness. Also, even if you do know, as I'm sure we're all aware, breaking old habits and developing new ones is really hard. Right. But I think probably the biggest obstacle is that many people already think that they're self aware, and that there's no room to improve in that area.

Right. In fact, the one of the leading researchers in self awareness in that field is an organizational psychologist named Dr. Tasha Urich. And she's assessed hundreds, probably 1000s of people at this point, on their self awareness. And I'm just going to I'm curious what you think here, on average, as a percentage, or out of every 100 people? How many people would you guess self report as being either somewhat or very self aware? What do you think out of 190 70?

Yes, the answer is 95%. Hopefully weren't looking at the screen, because I just gave away the punchline there. How many people do you think actually are? Oh, my gosh, how did you know that? Roughly 10 to 15%. So the vast majority of us are going around deluding ourselves most of the time. Now, what I'd like to do with the short time here that we have this morning, is share some simple but proven tools for systematically training to improve self awareness in a way that doesn't require you to add anything to your schedule.

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