The Problem with Self-Awareness

Jonathan Reams 

Part Two. More Groundwork

I thought I would finish this topic today. Oh how deep self-deception goes. Today’s installment will merely lay out a bit more of the groundwork for examining the problem with self-awareness. I realize that age has brought an accumulation of layers, of interconnected  perspectives, to hopefully find a vista point in the landscape where a shared view can be seen. 

To get started today, I did a quick google search for “self-awareness + leadership development” as well as one in google scholar. In google, I only went 10 pages deep to see the combined topic terms are used extensively by university leadership programs, coaches and consultants. The inevitable AI summary told me “Self-awareness is the cornerstone of effective leadership development, acting as a “superfood” that improves decision-making, emotional intelligence, and team relationships.” Sounds good and I think most of us can get behind that.

Google scholar, being a bit more constrained by my use of quotation marks and the + sign, still returned 53 items. I even used one of my favorite academic tools, Consensus, and it summarized its findings like this: “Self-awareness is widely viewed as a foundational leadership competency and a core element of emotional intelligence. Recent work links it to better decision making, ethical behavior, team performance, and successful leadership development across sectors and cultures.” Again, easy to agree with.

So why do I want to point out problems? I have read some excellent articles on the topic over the years and I’ve advocated for and used various means to support the development of self-awareness in leaders. I have even used the phrase ‘awareness based leadership development’ to describe my own work. Going back to the landscape metaphor from part one last week, I’ve been around long enough to have some of the shadows related to this come into focus. I’m hoping that shining a light on them will be useful.

This comes from having become more sensitive to how underlying assumptions, worldviews etc., will shape how we conceptualize a given term. These aspects are seldom explicitly elaborated – that is why they are assumed. I have encountered how these iceberg-like deep layers of meaning can collide, even while the visible, explicit tips appear to be aligned. This is the direction I want to take, to see if others find my problematizing of self-awareness useful.

Concepts of Self

One place to explore is what is meant by ‘self’? Such a common term will inevitably suffer from diverse meanings being implied. I see the same with terms like love, or consciousness. We all have a felt sense, or lived experience of these things, yet when people try to define them, we immediately find ourselves in a veritable Tower of Babel. I recall being on the Journal of Consciousness Studies listserv in the late 90s and encountering this diversity and noticing how much work, patience and skill, (which I was lacking), was needed to truly inquire and reveal these deeper layers of the territory. 

I can describe many ways I have observed people appear to use the term ‘self’. Some of these are informal while others come from more of a rigorous research orientation. One is to equate self with the body. People study biology, genetics and neuroscience to understand self. Psychologists often focus a bit more on the subjective and talk about self as ego. Think of Freud and how we have come to recognize the impact of our subconscious mind and various aspects of it on our behavior. Combine these and you have Alan Watt’s notion of ‘skin encapsulated ego.’ 

Others point to how there is something missing from this equation. For example, David Chalmer’s formulation of the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness studies described that while physical sciences can describe immense amounts about physical brain processes, it cannot say anything definitely causal about how these brain functions create a sense of self that has subjective experience. 

Another version of this came from the physicist David Bohm, who posited that if we do not allow for there to be something that exists beyond the ‘system of thought’, (in terms of a holistic, comprehensive set of neuro, cognitive, emotional and physiological aspects), then we become doomed to live out our existence inside a system that can’t actually change itself.

This line of inquiry takes us towards the realm of transpersonal psychology, or the existence of something beyond self-actualization. It also takes us into the realms of spirituality, where notions of essence, soul, atman etc., have been used throughout history to distinguish between ‘skin encapsulated ego’ and something else, sometimes designated by a Self with a capital S. I have observed many variations on how people attempt to make such a distinction and generally end up back at the question of what is implicitly being assumed?

Concepts of Awareness

I want to pause here, to shift attention to the second half of the equation, awareness. What is it to be aware, and what are we aware of? Again, there is a veritable Tower of Babel, with a wide range of uses of the term, and close associations to other terms like consciousness. Wikipedia links self-awareness closely with consciousness. Common usage will depend on many things, while there is again a spectrum of approaches depending on the discipline and paradigm one is coming from.

My own leanings and investigations have gone in the direction of questioning many of the more materially grounded approaches to defining awareness. I have aimed to understand it from a more phenomenological point of view. What is experience prior to mental conceptualizations? Here it is easy to encounter a conundrum, where using words and concepts are inherently limited. Yet they are the tools we have, at least in mediums like this. 

The challenge, in my view, is that it’s all too easy to forget this, to only focus on the finger pointing at the moon, and have our attention constrained to the thoughts we use to be aware. Here, many people have pointed to this, such as Eckhart Tolle, or A.H. Almass. I find the book title from Alex Pattakos describes it well, how we can become Prisoners of Our Thoughts. The idea that we exist (a ‘self’) prior to our ‘thoughts’ is indeed a thought or concept itself. David Bohm made the move here to say that if we can posit that there can be something outside of this system of thought, it is possible to change the system. Otherwise we are stuck inside an endless loop, like Escher’s hands drawing themselves. 

Source: Wikipedia

To round off for now and foreshadow where I want to head eventually on this topic, I’ll leave you with what I wrote ten years ago in this article as a description of awareness as “the experiential realization of the virtuality of self.”