Let's Get Started: Building Self-Awareness

University System of Maryland and University of Maryland, College Park via edX

Go to class Write review

Details

Go to class

Provider

edX
Pricing

Free Online Course (Audit)
Languages

English
Certificate

$249.00 Certificate Available
Duration & workload

5 weeks, 2-3 hours a week
Sessions

On-Demand
Level

Beginner
Subtitles

English, Arabic, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Portuguese, Swahili, Telugu, Turkish, Chinese

A Best Course of All Time

Found in

Part of

Re-Imagining Leadership

Overview

Please note: the UMD Power Lab is an optional lab, highly recommended, and costs an additional fee. Please read the important statement at the bottom of the description

Great leaders are just ordinary people with the right skills at the right time. To become a great leader, however, you have to know yourself well. This means acknowledging and embracing your strengths. It also means understanding and learning to manage your weaknesses. It’s tougher than that sounds. How do you know what your strengths and weaknesses are? What are your core personality attributes? How do you make decisions? What’s your decision-making style? How do you know? How do you know accurately?

This certificate offers an extraordinary opportunity to spend some quality time with yourself to assess your current level of soft skills, clearly define your core self, and build soft skills which are essential to professional, not to mention life, success.

Knowing what you can change and what you can’t is invaluable knowledge. Stop investing in trying to change the unchangeable -- your traits -- and learn to work with them. Stop trying to change others’ traits, too. Learn to work with your strengths, build new skills and perfect existing ones. Then do the same for your team. To start, you must have self-awareness.

Within self-awareness are several dimensions essential for effective leadership::

emotional intelligence
personal values
cognitive style, how you think
orientation to change
core personality attributes

With the exception of core personality traits which are much less open to change, all other areas of self-awareness are open for development.

Verified learners can access the Power Lab to take self-assessments and receive confidential, benchmarked results. In this course, self-assessments include: core self-evaluation, core personality attributes, self-awareness, and cognitive style, how you make decisions.

From these assessments, verified learners can identify their current strengths and opportunities for growth. You can set goals for your own development with confidence. And, you will learn key practices for how to move from goal to action to strength.

Immediately useful takeaways from this course include enormous self-knowledge of your:

self-awareness and how to improve it
core personality attributes and benefits
thinking styles and how to deploy them
best practice management skills
personal SMART goals to develop
self-awareness
thinking styles
management skills

Verified learners who enroll in the Power Lab will have these additional takeaways:

know current level of self-awareness
know core personality attributes
know details of how you make decisions, thinking style
know current level of management skills
set SMART goals against benchmarked self-assessments for your personal development
Confidently deploy your current strengths

You’ll learn how self-awareness is the super Power Skill, the foundation of all other skills needed to be an effective leader.. They are the most sought-after skills by recruiters and hiring managers. Power skills are key to becoming a great leader.

Get the Models - Understand what self-awareness is including emotional intelligence, thinking styles, orientation to change, core self-evaluation, personal values. Understand the key skills within management and leadership.

Get Why It Matters - Understand the business case for self-awareness and its components and managerial/leadership skills.

Get the Data - Establish your personal baseline for self-awareness and its components as well as management and leadership skills.

Set the Goals - Set personal development goals for increasing self-awareness and managerial/leadership skills

Learn the Tools - Learn tools and techniques for how to build self-awareness and managerial/leadership skills.

Take Action - Build effective action plans to increase self-awareness and managerial/leadership skills

Make the Change - Practice new skills to increase your ability to act with self-awareness and improve your managerial/leadership skills

Get the Benefit - Be able to develop as a great leader able to create great culture: build positive workplaces where individuals flourish and organizations thrive

The UMD Power Lab includes a curated set of self-assessments offered at a discounted price paid separately from the edX content and certificate. These self-assessments are rigorously developed and cannot be supplemented with free versions that would mislead learners with poor-quality alternatives. The UMD Power Lab is optional but highly recommended for any verified learner in the course. It costs $89 per year and only needs to be purchased once per year for the entire suite of courses in the Re-Imagining Leadership Professional Certificate.

We've done everything we can to reduce these costs for you, and have built a free SMART Goals Mobile App to help you achieve your goals. Used together this forms a revolutionary design to coach learners at scale in leadership and power skills as a premium but low-cost experience above and beyond learning the course content and earning the edX certificate.

Syllabus

Week 1: The Key to Making Change: Self-Awareness

Introduction to Module
What is Self-Awareness
Why Does Self-Awareness Matter
Toolkit for Building Self-Awareness
The Big Ideas

Week 2: All about You: Thinking & Changing

Introduction to Module
Thinking Styles
Attitude towards Change
Putting It Together for Best Job Fit
The Big Ideas

Week 3: You as a Manager/Leader: What’s Your Baseline?

Introduction to Module
What are Management/Leadership Skills?
Why Do They Matter?
What’s Your Baseline?
The Big Ideas

Week 4: Setting Goals & Making Plans

Introduction to Module
How & Why to Set Goals
How & Why to Set Plans
Setting Your Goals and Plans
The Big Ideas

Week 5: The Big Ideas & Segue to Let’s Get Personal: Working with Personality Type

Introduction to Module
The Big Ideas from Let’s Get Started: You First
Your Goals & Action Plans: Making It Happen
The Great Tools from Let’s Get Started: You First
The Big Ideas

Taught by

Jocelyn S. Davis

Reviews

4.5 rating, based on 61 Class Central reviews

4.7 rating at edX based on 7 ratings

Start your review of Let's Get Started: Building Self-Awareness

Saumya Singh

0smSocial-emotional self-awareness means having the ability to understand your thoughts, emotions, and values, as well as knowing how those factors influence your behavior. Added to this understanding is the capacity to open-mindedly and realistical…

0smSocial-emotional self-awareness means having the ability to understand your thoughts, emotions, and values, as well as knowing how those factors influence your behavior. Added to this understanding is the capacity to open-mindedly and realistically assess your strengths and weaknesses while maintaining your confidence, drive, and desire to grow.

The World Health Organization recognizes self-awareness as one of ten life skills that promote well-being across all cultures. The other skills include:

Empathy

Critical thinking

Creative thinking

Responsible decision-making

Problem-solving

Effective communication

Interpersonal relationships

Coping with stress

Coping with emotions

To be self-aware is to follow the first Delphic maxim of ancient Greece: “know thyself.”

Teaching Self-Awareness

Learning to be self-aware isn’t easy, even for adults, which can make teaching self-awareness to students daunting.

Some teachers might also wonder when redirecting students, is this self-awareness or self-efficacy? Teaching self-efficacy is, in a way, part of teaching self-awareness in the classroom.

To be self-aware, you must be able to:

Identify your emotions. Your students need to be able to identify their feelings. Learning the difference between frustration and anger will help students navigate their emotions. By recognizing the link between their feelings, thoughts, and actions, they can then address these feelings and react to them appropriately.

See yourself honestly. Teaching your students to look at themselves honestly can help them respond to compliments, feedback, and criticism openly and earnestly. This sense of self will teach them to see and acknowledge both the positive and negative things in their nature.

Recognize your strengths and weaknesses. Your students’ ability to see themselves, acknowledge their shortcomings, and embrace their strengths is a great confidence booster. Knowing that it’s okay to admit they’re wrong or don’t understand something sets them up for growth. Acknowledging aptitude also builds confidence.

Work toward growth. All of these skills lead students to self-efficacy. They understand that self-work and growth are positive activities that result in healthy, happy people with a drive to achieve.
Anonymous

Excellent course. So far, I have completed two other courses from the Re-Imagining Leadership Professional Certificate. I found these courses full of great knowledge, delivered in excellent way. Though I liked the course a lot but unfortunately ha…

Excellent course. So far, I have completed two other courses from the Re-Imagining Leadership Professional Certificate. I found these courses full of great knowledge, delivered in excellent way.

Though I liked the course a lot but unfortunately have to deduct 4 points for following:

1 point deducted) I wish there were more and advanced level practical examples from work and personal lives of leaders (no need for famous people but experienced ones).

1 point deducted ) Other thing is cost of course, it is very expensive for people from developing countries where currency is sometime 200 time weaker than US Dollars. I wish there were some discount options for people from developing countries.

2 points deducted) UMD power lab can be purchased only through PayPal, which is shame because in developing countries, PayPal is not available. There should be option to purchase UMD power lab with debit / credit card

If above limitations weren't there, I would have given full five stars to this course
Anonymous

The course effectively taught concepts involving how to be a more self-aware leader. Action plans to change leadership style according to core self-evaluation contain helpful suggestions and recommendations toward adapting to current marketplace where individuals are subject to constant change and must take charge of their own development. I found the section on cognitive style to ring particularly true, especially in regard to person: job fit, and the need to have different thinking styles on productive teams.
Keerthana Ellappan

Very interesting course.I remember when I first visited the main page of edX, my very first impression was that I’ve just entered a university website. I guess this is what they were going for, seeing that they offer “professional, university-level courses”.

I actually really liked the page - it’s really short and simple, contains only the necessary features and avoids any trivial information or annoying popups. I could immediately see the sections of all of the different courses to choose from, the search bar, the partner list - everything right in front of me.
Anonymous

Very interesting course.I remember when I first visited the main page of edX, my very first impression was that I’ve just entered a university website. I guess this is what they were going for, seeing that they offer “professional, university-level courses”.

I actually really liked the page - it’s really short and simple, contains only the necessary features and avoids any trivial information or annoying popups. I could immediately see the sections of all of the different courses to choose from, the search bar, the partner list - everything right in front of me.
Anonymous

I enjoyed to learn about the different cognitive styles and LoC. The emphasis on leadership is in my view overdone. If all of us are leaders, then we lead what or whom? I have come across many people in their early thirties who claimed to have been VP, CEO or what not - all the while interviewing with me for the position of a key account manager or support manager. The message I am taking away from this is surely not the one intended. Almost none said they worked great as part of a team or enjoyed seeing a group project come to fruition. I realized after the umpth time I have to live with lots of quite young people all wanting to be leaders. On the job, all I can say is they have quite a long way to go.
Anonymous

Great leaders are just ordinary people with the right skills at the right time. To become a great leader, however, you have to know yourself well. This means acknowledging and embracing your strengths. It also means understanding and learning to man…

Great leaders are just ordinary people with the right skills at the right time. To become a great leader, however, you have to know yourself well. This means acknowledging and embracing your strengths. It also means understanding and learning to manage your weaknesses. It’s tougher than that sounds. How do you know what your strengths and weaknesses are? What are your core personality attributes? How do you make decisions? What’s your decision-making style? How do you know? How do you know accurately?

This certificate offers an extraordinary opportunity to spend some quality time with yourself to assess your current level of soft skills, clearly define your core self, and build soft skills which are essential to professional, not to mention life, success.

Knowing what you can change and what you can’t is invaluable knowledge. Stop investing in trying to change the unchangeable -- your traits -- and learn to work with them. Stop trying to change others’ traits, too. Learn to work with your strengths, build new skills and perfect existing ones. Then do the same for your team. To start, you must have self-awareness.

Within self-awareness are several dimensions essential for effective leadership::

emotional intelligence

personal values

cognitive style, how you think

orientation to change

core personality attributes

With the exception of core personality traits which are much less open to change, all other areas of self-awareness are open for development.
Anonymous

Great Leadership Starts With Self-Awareness!

Self-awareness is an essential trait of a great leader. By knowing our values, personality, needs, habits and emotions, and how they affect our actions and the actions of others, we will be able to manage our emotions, make better decisions and lead others to do the same.
Anonymous

very interesting and unique course with practical approach of learning and getting aware about ourselves..
Fathia Salma

I think the University System of Maryland provides such unique and effective subject, which I barely found in my country or academic system around my university. This subject, titled "Let's Get Started: Building Self-Awareness" not only helps me increase my knowledge, but also helps me to understand myself better and learn how to treat people (or conditions) as well as possible. I hope in the future, this program continues to offer materials that will be useful to those who learn about it.
Anonymous

I really enjoyed this course. It was very instructive and also it is not too hard. In this manner, I handled easiliy. In addition, the videos are very good.
Anonymous

My first venture at edX brought a new perspective on knowing myself more. This online course introduced new pathways for self development as I was able to assess my personal/professional strengths and weaknesses; this course has truly helped me in b…

My first venture at edX brought a new perspective on knowing myself more. This online course introduced new pathways for self development as I was able to assess my personal/professional strengths and weaknesses; this course has truly helped me in becoming aware on which areas I could improve more, in approaching and accepting changes as challenges, in focusing on what I can control by maintaining balance in approaching situations, and strengthening my inner core by improving cognitive styles that could also help in making and acting on valuable decisions.

The only experience I missed in taking this endeavor was the utilization of UMD Power Lab as I wasn't able to access the self-assessment tests. However, I was able to make use of the other opportunities such as the SMART Goals App which could help in tracking day-to-day progress of the goals I have kept for myself in every module taken though it would be much of a great use coupled with the results of the self-assessment tests. All in all, it was a productive and a fruitful experience!

Plus points for the downloadable videos as I can watch and access these even offline.
Anonymous

I have learned many things from this course. The materials are easy to understand, and the quiz will help you to assess your understanding. However, I had some problem that I could not open UMD lab, so I could not take any self assessment.
Anonymous

This is my first online E-Learning course experience. Hence before I start this course, I went through the DemoX course to understand and familiarize with system how it works and found it very helpful. Overall, it is a good course and it has helpe…

This is my first online E-Learning course experience. Hence before I start this course, I went through the DemoX course to understand and familiarize with system how it works and found it very helpful.

Overall, it is a good course and it has helped me to refresh things which I learned long back by attending off-line courses. I also got to know and learn some new things while doing this course. However, I do like to give below suggestions to make EDX course for beneficial for all learners –

1. Should have Big Idea video (recap) after each topic giving summary of the entire topic in brief (I found it helpful for topic – Approaching to Change and Cognitive Style)

2. UMD Power Lab platform should also be available Free to all learners

3. For all paid course, request to allow access to it for life time to subscribers (not sure whether it is available for life time or for limited period like 1 year, 5 years etc.)
Anonymous

This course is a great value addition to my career and a paradigm shift in my profession to reach my destination.
Harsh Kothari

nicely taught his course makes leadershipprocess easy. being a leader was cool for me, but now it is more cool, fun. How to cite source and integrate others' thoughts in your essay always made me confused, but now I know when to cite, where to cite, how to cite. thanks to the team.

have learned the skills of advance academic writing essentially useful in college and university studies. I have also learned about plagiarism and it’s conseq, plus MLA formatting of paper. These skills will add value to my writing skills. Thanks to my professors and coursera to provide me this incredible opportunity of learning. I would love to do mentoring for this course if given an opportunity.
PIJUSH ROY

I really enjoyed the course. It was well planned and layout, easy for me to follow. I could finish everything with enough time, Learn about the topics and not feel over loaded and rushed.

The course was very interesting. It was short and simple, but contains lot of necessary features like SMART GOALS, EMOTIONAL STABILITY, LOC,TOA ORIENTATION TOWARDS CHANGE, COGNITIVE STYLE, BULDING SELF AWARENESS, LEADERSHIP etc.

I definitely believe I could grow up better in my professional and personal life with these wonderful experience.

My sincere thanks to edx team and our coach and mentor Jocelyn S Davis for giving me such a wonderful guidance.
Anonymous

The course was well conceived. By the end of each module, there was a recap of the entire module major take-aways. All lesson summary was very useful to go through the topic easily. Small quizes in between modules helped to answer the final quiz easily.

This course helped me to understand what actually self-awareness is. It was an eye opening for me to know where I was all these days and where I really need to improve myself in order to develop my actual self awareness. I am very happy to have undertaken this course.

I definitely believe I could grow up better in my career and in my personal life.

Overall, the course was good.
Anonymous

Very interesting course.I remember when I first visited the main page of edX, my very first impression was that I’ve just entered a university website. I guess this is what they were going for, seeing that they offer “professional, university-level courses”.

I actually really liked the page - it’s really short and simple, contains only the necessary features and avoids any trivial information or annoying popups. I could immediately see the sections of all of the different courses to choose from, the search bar, the partner list - everything right in front of me.
Anonymous

Very good course. It all about Self-awareness. How much aware we are! and how to make good manager and leader. this course changed the way of thinking. this course is made in so simple way that I did not feel any difficulty at any stage of learning. The most beautiful part of this course is firstly it tells what is skills, different styles, habits and later on it tells how to build them. one can be a good manger-leader through this course. I give my sincere thanks to edx team and my coach and mentor Jocelyn davis for giving me such a wonderful guidance.