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The Misunderstanding Of Self-Awareness In Organizations

Forbes Coaches Council

Business leader in the coaching industry. EMEA Director of Coaching, Center for Creative Leadership. Senior practitioner. Keynote speaker.

Know thyself. Who would argue with the importance of such a maxim? It is the foundation upon which multibillion-dollar industries have been built, thereby making the case for raising self-awareness as an imperative for anyone wanting to advance one’s life.

But what is self-awareness?

In the world of work, self-awareness is defined as the understanding a person has about their dispositions, the perceptions others have about that person and the tension between these two points.

Such understanding is valuable because it allows us to play by our strengths, in congruence with our nature, but also to stretch ourselves in a voluntary effort to meet the demands (development needs) of our environment. And it has economical value, too.

Grounding ourselves in our dispositions spares us energy and stress, while developing ourselves to meet the expectations of our work gives us leverage and increases our impact. The combination of both allows anyone to do their job better and to increase engagement from self and others.

In the psychotherapeutic world, on the other hand, self-awareness is defined as a return to the real self, freed from the false expectations placed upon us by society. It's a pursuit to get rid of layers of conditioning, in the same way Michelangelo got rid of the excess marble when he famously said, “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block. I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

Self-awareness, in this case, is supportive of the individuation of a person, whereby the person integrates all that they are and finds their true signature, their unique way of showing up in the world. As Ian Wallace nicely put it, “Why are you trying so hard to fit in when you were born to stand out?”

It is interesting to notice that self-awareness is often understood as a discovery process more than a creative one.

When we approach self-awareness as a discovery process, we ask, “Who am I, and who was I meant to be?” When we approach self-awareness as a creative process, we ask, “Who must I become?”

The difference is paramount. The first one makes the case for authenticity, congruence, alignment and destiny, while the latter makes the case for creativity, abundance, transformation and vision. This choice of words makes both propositions very compelling, although the discovery process is overly emphasized in our society, at times with disastrous consequences.

At its core, it holds true that we have a certain nature and even possibly a certain mission to accomplish. On the “nature” side, a clinical psychologist would often revert to the Big Five personality traits to describe “what” a person is.

But do we “have” certain traits, or have we thought ourselves into them? After all, what shaped our understanding of who we are if not environmental imprints, beliefs we crystallized in the midst of defining events, or hard-wired habits built through years of conditioning? Seen from this angle (which is arguably too radical), raising awareness becomes no more than a reinforcement mechanism of a false self-concept. We shed a light on our automatism and say, “Yes, it’s me!”

But there is more to it.

Another misunderstanding of self-awareness comes from its overreliance on individual psychology over social psychology. Who we think we are is heavily dependent on the social context we find ourselves in. The Milgram experiment is probably one of the most illustrative representations of this, where normal people with no particular tendency toward aggressiveness would actually administer high-voltage electric shocks to others out of mere obedience to authority figures.

Our social nature very often contradicts our pseudo sense of self. Marketers, influencers and behavioral economists know this very well. Our behaviors can be influenced by design and with a retroactive effect called confirmation bias, whereby the subject feels as if choices that were fed to them were actually made out of free will. If this is true, who are we, really?

Our psychology assumes that we are this “familiar self” we have been accustomed to. The past, although volatile, random and subconscious, shaped us mostly without our own accord.

What would happen if instead of using the past, we started using the future to determine who we are? Then, the question around self-awareness will turn on its head and become: “Who must I become to empower my vision, my future, my life?” And with such a question, we elevate ourselves to the level of what we aspire to, instead of bringing our vision to our current level of functioning. Such is another misunderstanding of self-awareness: It is rooted in the past, not in the future.

Why should we give up on all our transformative potential in the name of a familiar “I”? The biggest misunderstanding of all, and therefore the most controversial, is what I would call the “fundamental identification error,” which I would define as the belief that we are separated from others. “Self,” in such a case, implies separation and an identity that one needs to defend. Self-awareness then becomes a mechanism of division and separation, instead of acknowledging our connection to a wider truth and our unity with everyone and everything around us. The separation of “self” is the mark of a dying world.

Our identification mechanism determines our thoughts; our thoughts, in turn, determine our filters and, therefore, how we experience the world and, ultimately, how we are shaped by it. Seen from this angle, the field of awareness is not a static space we need to visit. It is more like a mirror maze at the funfair that reflects the images we mentally create.

The invitation I’m extending in this article — which is in the DNA of the organization I’m working with — is to consider self-awareness in its aspects of discovery and creativity and to relentlessly shape ourselves to empower our vision. We all are the first instrument of its accomplishment because a vision is not something we have; it is something we are.


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