6

Self-Awareness

I think your only salvation is in finding yourself,

and you will never find yourself unless you quit preconceiving

what you will be when you have found yourself.

— ROBERT HENRI

Just as a compelling insight forms the foundation of a leader’s effectiveness at winning intellectual commitment, so self-awareness is the necessary foundation for winning emotional commitment. Self-awareness means tuning into one’s own inner world. Daniel Goleman wrote that self-awareness is “the keystone of emotional intelligence.”¹ Without self-awareness leaders cannot even recognize or acknowledge their own emotions, let alone manage them in anything approaching an able fashion. Without it, significant personal growth is unattainable, and empathy—a leader’s ability to connect with the emotions of others—is impossible. When leaders are unable to connect with the emotions of others, winning emotional commitment is beyond their reach.

Gary Zukav, scientist, philosopher, and award-winning author of The Seat of the Soul, wrote, “Emotions are currents of energy that pass through us. Awareness of these currents is the first step in learning how our experiences come into being and why.”² Emotions are reactions to both our environment and our thoughts. They then create further thoughts as well as behavior, thus participating vitally in an endless cycle of experience.

Bring on the Feeling

The previous four chapters have shown the competencies that leaders exhibit in order to win intellectual commitment: insight, vision, storytelling, and mobilizing. As the model of levels of commitment in Chapter 1 shows, intellectual commitment alone is limited. Intellectual commitment is based on understanding a leader’s story, and understanding does not necessarily lead to action. Emotional commitment, on the other hand, impels people to act—to do something about the new understanding intellectual commitment produces.

Jim Wold made clear the need for leaders to seek emotional commitment when he said, “One of the mistakes that I have made in leading is that in having an intellectually great idea, you can lose connection with a group because you have thought it through so often. The emotional piece is really the glue, the connection, with the group.”

If leaders are to have any hope of winning the kind of sustainable commitment that will create significant change, they must also pay attention to winning emotional commitment. Winning emotional commitment is not an entirely separate thing from winning intellectual commitment. It must be woven into the fabric of activities to win intellectual commitment so that emotional commitment is won during the course of telling a story and mobilizing people. We will treat it separately here only to highlight it as a crucial element of winning commitment from others, and to examine it more closely.

Experience in the Moment

Self-awareness is the foundation upon which any attempt to win emotional commitment must be constructed. Self-awareness is alertness to what we do, to how we feel, and to what we think. It is not psychoanalysis: It does not require examining the causes of thoughts and feelings, merely their recognition. It is not introspection, as that usually involves trying to solve a problem or understand something in a new way. When self-awareness is present, it is simply present, gliding along in the same way as behavior. It cannot be forced. It must, rather, be allowed to occur.

Just as we sometimes inhibit our behavior with judgment, or fear, or a variety of other obstructions, so we also inhibit self-awareness; many of the methods for developing it involve removing whatever barriers we have erected in order to keep ourselves unaware. Any thought that takes us away from the moment we are in obstructs self-awareness. And sometimes self-awareness means paying attention to thoughts and feelings that we would prefer to ignore.

Practitioners of Zen call this awareness of self in the moment mindfulness. Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh says, “You must know how to observe and recognize the presence of every feeling and thought which arises in you.”³ Self-awareness is not a separate activity and does not require sitting cross-legged in a quiet space. Thich Nhat Hanh spoke of “washing the dishes to wash the dishes,” meaning that while washing the dishes he becomes completely aware of the act. He describes washing the dishes with awareness in this way:

Wash the dishes relaxingly, as though each bowl is an object of contemplation. Consider each bowl as sacred . . . do not try to hurry to get the job over with. Consider washing the dishes the most important thing in life.⁴

The point of self-awareness is to attend to what is happening at the moment, to not allow the mind to be sucked into ruminations about the past or the future, and to not place ourselves at the whim of transitory emotion. When attention is focused on the moment in this way, it becomes possible to recognize the thoughts and feelings that arise within. Then, says Thich Nhat Hanh, “There is no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.”⁵

Self-awareness requires alertness to both thoughts and feeling because thoughts give rise to feelings and feelings give rise to thoughts. We will, however, focus here on feelings because the challenge for the majority of leaders in Western cultures is to reach beyond intellect when seeking commitment. Western culture prizes intellect above emotion. We like rationality, order, and logic. We are uncomfortable with that which cannot be thoroughly elucidated or quantified. Our schools emphasize training the mind over developing emotional intelligence. Prospective leaders whose gifts reside in the intellectual realm, and who wish to win emotional commitment, will have to extend themselves to learn the competencies needed to do so; their training does not ordinarily prepare them.

Tossed Around Mindlessly

When self-awareness is present it is nearly invisible to others, who normally see only its effects, and not its actual workings. The same is true when self-awareness takes a holiday. At such moments we look at the unmindful person in front of us and wonder, “What could he be thinking?” Here is an example of self-awareness on a holiday.

A senior executive of a large corporation was asked to lead a meeting of nearly 300 employees during which he would talk with them about the company’s challenges and its plans to meet those challenges. He was comfortable talking about the hard bottom-line aspects of the message. But he was not so comfortable with his boss’s expectation that he would also speak from the heart about the overall mood of the organization, and respond to comments and questions about employee morale. In other words, he was comfortable with the part of the story that needed to be told in order to win intellectual commitment, but not nearly so comfortable with what he had to do to win emotional commitment. He was, in his owns words, “a numbers guy.”

He was also quite practiced at ignoring his own emotions and so, emotions being the persistent devils that they are, his discomfort grew into near-panic. Which he also ignored. He was quite accomplished as a public speaker when he had a prepared speech in his hands, and he believed that his experience would carry him through. But the success of the meeting required a generous measure of improvisation, which depends on self-awareness. It also required that he acknowledge and respond to the feelings that his message was sure to raise. Without awareness of his own feelings, this task was beyond his reach. What happened to him in the meeting is well described by Gary Zukav: “When we close the door to our feelings, we close the door to the vital currents that energize and activate our thoughts and actions.”⁶

Just before the meeting began, he received information that the audience did not yet have. A corporate reorganization was in the works and important decisions had been made on the previous afternoon about which executives would be filling the high-level positions on a new organizational chart. This matter was not on the already fully packed meeting agenda.

When he took the speaker’s platform to open the meeting, the unacknowledged stew of emotions that had been bubbling within him threatened to boil over. He did what he was used to doing; he retreated from the emotions. He told the audience that he had important news for them, picked up a marking pen, turned his back to the 300-person group, and began drawing the complex new organizational chart on a piece of paper on an easel. The drawing was too small for anyone to read other than those in the very front of the room. For an agonizingly long five minutes he stood with his back turned while his audience wondered what he was doing, why he was doing it, what people he was talking about, and why it should matter to them. More than a few eyelids fluttered and nearly closed.

There were, of course, many actions this man might have taken in order to create a more positive outcome. But all of these actions depended on self-awareness; the possibility of a different outcome was precluded by his avoidance of uncomfortable emotions. He responded to his fear without being aware of it. In fairness to him, and to the many executives like him, he had spent his entire career in an organization in which tight scripts were the norm rather than improvisation. In this organization, a good story was supposed to reside in numbers, charts, and graphs, and such a story was thought to be all that was needed to inspire people. As a result, political commitment and intellectual commitment were coin of the realm. He had no meaningful experience to draw upon in a situation where emotional commitment was required in order to produce significant and sustainable organizational change. This history, combined with his preferences for intellect and for avoiding his emotions rather than being mindful of them, worked together to undermine his attempt at leadership, leaving him “tossed around mindlessly.”

A Potter at Work

Unlike this executive, people with highly developed self-awareness are able to experience both whatever is going on around them and whatever is going on inside themselves, as well as the relationship between the two, almost simultaneously. They may be tossed around, but it is not mindless.

M. C. Richards is a potter, poet, and author of the book Centering (she and I are not related). I once sat beside her as she worked at her potter’s wheel. She was trimming a small cup. She spoke as she worked in order, I suppose, to allow a glimpse into her creative process. She said something like this, addressing the cup as it rested on the wheel: I think you are too heavy at the bottom so I will shave a bit of clay and make you lighter and more balanced. She removed a slice of clay from the cup’s bottom. Now . . . let’s see what Dick thinks of you. She handed the cup to me and I held it first in both hands, then in my right hand as I normally would hold a cup. “Feels good to me,” I told her while wondering what qualified me as any kind of expert in the matter. She took it from me and weighed it in her own hands. You still seem heavy to me, but Dick thinks you are all right. I wonder . . . are you really all right and am I the problem? Am I afraid that someone will judge me to be a poor potter if I let you go into the world this way? Will my fear cause me to make you lighter than you are supposed to be? Will my insecurity ruin you? Well, yes, I am afraid of being judged a poor potter, but I really do think you are too heavy at the bottom. Then she removed the cup from the wheel and continued trimming.

In this small episode, Richards is aware of her surroundings—of her hands at the potter’s wheel, of the cup, and of me sitting beside her. She is also aware of her own thoughts and feelings, and of how they might influence her work. She is aware of a desire to somehow include me in her process and make it more transparent to me, so she speaks her internal dialogue aloud and she hands me the cup. She has knowledge of her fear and insecurity, and wonders about the effect these emotions might have on her product. She does not want the cup to feel unbalanced and also does not want to ruin it because of self-doubt. Finally, she makes a judgment that her fear and insecurity are in fact getting in the way; they are causing her to mistrust what she can sense with her hands—the cup really is too heavy at the bottom. She is aware of all of these things almost simultaneously.

Those trained in the arts are, in general, more practiced in self-awareness than those who are not. Art is obviously a form of self-expression, so self-awareness is more obviously integral to the work. Leadership, as an art, is also self-expression, so leaders must be just as self-aware as any other artist.

The executive who got tossed around mindlessly did so because he was unwilling or unable to acknowledge the value and significance of his fear. When he pushed his fear aside rather than acknowledging it, he relinquished any possibility of mastering himself in an unfamiliar situation, and any possibility of artfulness as a leader. Richards is aware of her fear and its significance—its potential consequences to her work. She sees it lurking in the shadows of her self, and so it is far less a danger.

Richards is dedicated to drawing the analogy between her work at the potter’s wheel and the work of forming a whole person. “It is not the pots we are forming, but ourselves,” she wrote.⁷ Because of her dedication to that purpose she integrates what she feels into her work process in a way that illuminates the work and allows her to make judgments about what she is doing based upon her sense of quality rather than upon her fears.

The Talk

Dawn Gutierrez also sometimes sees difficult feelings lurking in the shadows of her self. When she became executive director of New Way Learning Academy, she had to come to grips with the fact that not everybody on the staff she inherited was interested in hearing her ideas or her feedback. “I had some hurt feelings,” she says. This is self-awareness—a simple acknowledgement of a feeling. When it is present, it seems obvious, unremarkable, and hardly worth mentioning. Yet its absence can be disastrous for a leader, as the executive in the story above discovered.

Because Gutierrez is aware of feeling hurt, she is able to do something productive about it. She says, “I came to the realization that not everyone would like me. That was hard because I am a people-pleaser.” Gutierrez works at separating complaints about decisions she has made from complaints about her personally. She says, “I had to learn that it wasn’t about me, or about me being right or wrong, it is about what I need to do to get the job done. It is hard. There are still times when it hurts a little bit, and I just give myself the ‘It’s not about me’ talk.” Her self-awareness provides her with the opportunity to adopt a different way of thinking about situations in which her ideas are met with resistance or rejection.

Like Richards, Gutierrez relies on being clear about her sense of purpose. When she is unclear about her purpose she harbors self-doubt, and then criticism from others seems to strike home because it contains a grain of truth. She advises, “If you stay focused, and you stay on what is right for the greater good then you are going to be all right with that criticism.” This understanding is a direct product of self-awareness.

Noticing and Valuing

Richards and Gutierrez both overruled their feelings; Richards by deciding to make her cup lighter, and Gutierrez by giving herself “the talk.” Overruling a feeling is one, but not the only choice a leader might make. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, for example, responded to feeling “anxious and out of sorts” about his age by taking the retreat that spawned his insight about the elder years. Bonnie Wright reacts to her regrets about not taking enough time for reflection by making sure that she now does take enough time. When they are acknowledged and accepted, emotions that do not need to be overruled can act as clues that something ought to change. Difficult feelings, in particular, are clues that something ought to change—that we either need to do something differently or to think differently.

All feelings obey the paradoxical theory of change, which states that change occurs when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not.⁸ When a leader experiences anger, frustration, hurt, loneliness, or any other feeling, it will not change until self-awareness arrives on the scene. It may be driven underground where it does its work in much the same way as a computer virus, wreaking havoc on the psyche and creating peculiar behavior, while remaining undetected. Awareness of the emotion provides a leader with a choice that would otherwise be made on the basis of whim or habit, a basis having nothing at all to do with the question at hand. Goleman says, “The goal is balance, not emotional suppression: every feeling has its value and significance.”⁹

When leaders are practiced at self-awareness, they are then capable of responding to the emotions of others in ways that win emotional commitment. The paradoxical theory of change also applies when leaders must deal with the unconstructive feelings of others. Every leader would love to transform those unconstructive feelings into the enthusiasm that marks emotional commitment. Such a transformation becomes possible when leaders acknowledge those unconstructive feelings; when they allow others to be who they are rather than who they want them to become. There will be more to say about this in Chapter 7.

Development Strategies for Self-Awareness

Leaders can develop self-awareness, but it needs exercise. Meditation is certainly a proven way, whether it is the kind that requires sitting in stillness or the kind practiced by Thich Nhat Hanh, who speaks of being mindful during mundane activities such as washing the dishes or taking a walk. There are also some very simple ways to exercise self-awareness that can easily be integrated into a daily routine.

Finding the Barriers

Most of us who have been raised in a culture that values intellect and devalues feeling harbor rationalizations that create barriers to our own self-awareness. Those barriers are significant hurdles for leaders who wish to win emotional commitment. One of the first steps, then, in developing self-awareness is to become aware of the barriers. Ask this question: What do I tell myself in order that I may remain unaware of my feelings? Some people disparage their feelings, convincing themselves that they are unimportant. Others try to analyze their emotions rather than experience them, and in the process drive the emotion out with flights of mental activity. Some believe displays of emotion are inappropriate and embarrassing. Some see emotion as a sign of weakness.

These barriers are often very difficult to spot because they become habitual and so seem natural and right. A clue to the barriers keeping us apart from our own emotions can be found in our reactions to the emotions of others. Do we feel embarrassed, irritated, angry, disgusted by the feeling of others? Why?

Tuning In to the Body

Feelings are physical responses. Many of our ways of illustrating feelings are metaphors describing physical sensations: “butterflies in the stomach” for anticipation, a “lump in the throat” for pride or for a rising joy. Tightness in the shoulders or arms may signal anger or frustration. Tension around the mouth and eyes may signal an emerging hurt. Tuning in to feelings means allowing ourselves to notice and be attentive to these physical responses. Once aware of the physical sensation, ask the question, What is the feeling that goes with this?

Slowing Discussion Down

The mind ordinarily becomes fully engaged when we are in discussion, and if we are trying to “win” the discussion, or to prove something about ourselves to someone else, the mind can run rampant. We stop listening because the mind is busy forming a response while the other person is talking. When we do that, we also stop listening to whatever emotions are being called forth within us.

Slow discussion down by not forming a response while the other person is talking. Instead, either listen intently and do nothing else but listen, or listen while at the same time tuning into the body to sense emotions forming. Or, pause before responding to both form the response and tune in to the body.

Reviewing Experience

Disturbing experiences, the kind that nag at us as a kind of unfinished puzzle, often contain emotional content that has gone unacknowledged. Take the time to review those experiences, not puzzling over them so much as reliving them, as if playing a movie on the screen of the mind. Often, the emotions that were present during the experience will resurface and can then be brought into awareness. This practice will not change anything about the experience itself, as that is past. But self-awareness will have been exercised.

Shunning “I Feel That . . .”

A common mistake made by those who set out to become more aware of their emotions is confusing their thoughts with their feelings. Confusing thoughts with feelings is, of course, not conducive to winning emotional commitment.

We can catch ourselves making this mistake whenever we use the phrase, “I feel that . . . ,” as in “I feel that you disagree with me,” or “I feel that he is reliable.” What is said after the phrase “I feel that . . .” is always a thought and not a feeling. The statement, “You disagree with me,” is a thought. The statement, “He is reliable,” is a thought. In order to get beyond the thought to the feeling ask, What is the feeling that accompanies the thought? How do I feel about the fact that I think you disagree with me? How do I feel about the thought that he is reliable?

Practicing an Art Form

Important facets of leadership are shared with all of the other art forms: Facets such as finding one’s own voice, seeing things in different ways, navigating the turbulent waters of the creative process, meeting the challenges of self-expression, and submitting to the discipline of mastering a medium. Leaders who wish to master the leadership art will benefit greatly from serious study and practice of another art form as well. Bill Strickland made the point this way: “I think that a lot of the things that arts people talk about are qualities that have transferability into other areas of life.”

Summary

A leader’s ability to tune into his or her internal world—especially her emotional world—is a necessary foundation for engaging emotionally with followers and winning emotional commitment. A leader’s awareness of feelings invites others to bring their own emotions forward as well. Self-awareness is a moment-to-moment process that prevents leaders from being subject to unacknowledged feelings and to the inept behavior that such feelings often produce.

Questions About Yourself to Contemplate or Discuss with Others

Who, in your life experience, was practiced at self-awareness?

To what degree are you practiced at self-awareness?

What is it about self-awareness that rings true for your current leadership role?

How important is self-awareness to your further development as a leader?

Notes

1.Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (N.Y.: Bantam Books, 1995): 43.

2.Gary Zukav, The Seat of the Soul (N.Y.: Fireside, 1990): 61.

3.Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976): 37.

4.Ibid, 85.

5.Ibid, 4.

6.Zukav, The Seat of the Soul, 60.

7.M. C. Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989): 13.

8.Arnold R. Beisser, “The Paradoxical Theory of Change,” in Joen Fagan and Irma Lee Shepherd, eds., Gestalt Therapy Now (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1971): 77–80.

9.Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, 56.