The Problem with Self-Awareness
Jonathan Reams
Part One. Setting the Context
I’ve long advocated for self-awareness as the core of leadership development. I’m not alone in this either, as you can find more people, whether academics of coaches or consultants, even leaders, describing the importance of self-awareness. So why do I want to write today about the problem with self-awareness?
I’m going to do this in two parts. The first part is about the journey into the territory. While this will be applied specifically to the topic of self-awareness and leadership, I believe it also applies more generally to encounters with a topic, theme, concept or practice in general. This description came to me as I began writing this piece, as I notice I have a habit of long framings to situation myself in relation to a topic before getting into it. I’ve learned that making context explicit can be useful.
The second part will explore the topic itself. There I aim to outline several perspectives I have come across that can at least begin to map out issues with the way I at least perceive self-awareness being used in general, and then in relation to leadership development in particular.
Landscapes
When I was young, I was enthralled reading about explorers in the early days of European settlement in what became Canada. Alexander McKenzie, (who reached the Pacific over land about 15 years before Lewis and Clarke did), David Thompson and others captured my imagination. Then there were the early fur traders, then European settlements, the inevitable conflicts. (Although not as bloody as in the US, there was conflict. Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear is a masterful exploration of the nuances of this from inside multiple perspectives). This fascination carried over into my focus on studying history in college.
During those studies, my attention turned to the history of ideas, in particular how Western intellectual history evolved. I studied classical Athens, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, (at least that’s how it was framed, and in hindsight many questions could be asked about how ‘enlightening’ it was), into more recent explorations by people like William James. I remember my history thesis class professor joking that I used history as an excuse to study philosophy.
Thus my interest in the metaphor of a landscape, and phases of one’s journey into it, while having its roots in physical landscapes, has really been about conceptual landscapes. Our encounters with ideas offer ways to shift our lens for seeing the world, and from that for how we act in the world.
The Journey into Conceptual Landscapes
If you spend long enough in any landscape, you begin to notice many layers in your journey of navigating the territory. Here I’ll focus on navigating conceptual landscapes as a way of setting the stage for part two.
You might begin with the enthusiasm that comes with discovery, as a new vista is opened up through finding people who speak your language. Something that has been inside you, vague and unarticulated suddenly comes into focus. It’s like when I was younger and got a new prescription for my eyeglasses and details came into focus that had been fuzzy and hard to make out.
You find mentors and guides in the territory, those who came earlier, maybe even pioneered and laid claim to particular ways of describing the landscape. You learn to make more distinctions and have a finer grained language to describe what’s going on. This is also often accompanied by a phase of proselytizing, where you are maybe (only in hindsight) a bit overly eager to share with others the importance of the ideas, insights and views you have found and are learning.
Eventually, we might gradually mature and stop annoying everyone we meet with our latest and greatest insight that they just have to care about as much as we do. That’s if we are lucky and have reasonable self restraint. If you are like me, it took some hard knocks, difficult feedback or even losing a valued relationship before the message got through. Not everyone wants or needs to hear about what is so important to you.
Another layer we might encounter, that I think can come after the initial over sharing, or can be a parallel route for those more inclined in this direction, is to see this as esoteric knowledge, not to be shared with the masses. You feel grateful to have been initiated into the realm of those granted this knowledge and you guard it carefully, to the point where you might even avoid sharing it with those who are genuinely curious and eager to find their way into the territory.
If you persevere long enough, you might settle in this territory, and find your own niche in the landscape. You find your neighbors, you learn more about who knows bits that fit with your understanding and make it more robust, and who might help you extend your horizons. You might also get to the stage of sharing this knowledge with the outside world in a more skillful manner, and use that to add another layer, the phronesis, or practical wisdom that takes your ability to be helpful for others to another level.
Eventually, you might even start to see the shadows in the landscape. The bright lights of insight and enthusiasm don’t dominate attention anymore, allowing you to notice things that might not have been visible at first. Things that might have challenged your understanding and curbed your enthusiasm.
I’ve described all this as a way of generalizing my own relationship to the concept of self-awareness, especially as it connects to leadership and its development. 30 years ago I took up the academic study of leadership, wanting to bridge things like spirituality and consciousness into the field of leadership. Now, having left formal associations with academic work, but still curious about the ways in which how we talk about leadership affects how we practice it, I thought I would share a little bit about what I notice in this particular area.
However, this context setting has rambled on long enough, so I’ll close here for now, and come back to describe what I see next week.