Welcome again to our leadership corner, where we examine signal traits, qualities and characteristics that make you stand out as a competent leader of self and others.

In this edition, we will be taking a reflective look at a key skill that exceptional leaders have: the skill of self-awareness. Notice I did not say an introspective look — because while many people think that self-awareness is all about looking inwards and asking why we are the way we are and how we can improve, it turns out this is nowhere near the true state of internal affairs.

What then is self-awareness, and how do we both practice and measure it?

Self-awareness has been variously described as our ability to understand and monitor our inner world. It has also been described as the distance, or the space, between how we see ourselves and how other people see us.

And it turns out that these two descriptions are correct in their own ways, because they help define two broad categories of self-awareness — internal and external self-awareness — as described in organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich’s work and her most recent book, “Insight.”

The first category describes what the majority of us identify as self-awareness: how well we can assess our thoughts, feelings, behaviors and actions, and how this impacts our environment and other people. People who are high in this dimension of self-awareness have better person-to-job fit, which leads to higher job satisfaction and happiness.

The second category, external self-awareness, deals with our understanding of how people view us. People who are highly skilled in this make for more empathetic leaders, who go on to have better relationships with their teams, which enhances their leadership effectiveness quotient.

People who are overly skilled in the internal dimension tend to be highly introspective, and while this may appear to be a good trait, too much introspection can cause us to ruminate over reasons for why a certain situation turned out the way it did, as opposed to working to find ways to improve upon a next time. Likewise, those highly skilled in the external dimension tend to be people pleasers, overly focused on how people view them and ignoring their own wisdom regarding a particular situation.

In cultivating our self-awareness, we should take care not to nurture one dimension to the detriment of the other. Our aim should be to work on enhancing both our internal and external self-awareness, as that brings us into balance — knowing ourselves and what we stand for, while valuing other people enough to take into consideration how our behaviors may impact them.