Self-Awareness and Reflection
Before we can lead ourselves, we must first know who we are and what makes us tick. After all knowledge is the doorway to change, whether this be within an organisation, within helping others to develop or, as in this case, in learning and growing ourselves.
A large aspect of self-leadership comes down to understanding how we react innately as a result of our internal beliefs. This is what is known as self-awareness. My second ever podcast episode was entitled “The Self-Aware Leader”, I chose to explore this very early in my podcast sequence as even then, at the start of my in-depth exploration of leadership, I had come to realise how important the ‘self’ was when it comes to leading others.
Self-Awareness is defined as “a conscious knowledge of one’s own character and feelings”. In other words, we are aware of how we react within different situations, and why we react in this way. The first thing to understand is that, for most of us, our emotional response precedes our rational response in almost all instances. Therefore, we need a greater understanding of the mechanisms at play here and how we can get ahead of our emotional response.
For me, one of the greatest and most intuitive models behind this came in a popular self-help book, ‘The Chimp Paradox’ by Professor Steve Peters. Within this model he shares that there are three levels to our brains, he calls them the computer, the chimp, and the human. In essence, the computer holds the ‘programming’ which our brain uses to react. This is where our internal beliefs and values are held, hard-wired in our brains and as a result of our upbringing as we have seen at the start of this chapter.
When this model is married with Willingham’s simple model of memory which is shown in the diagram below, we can see that when a situation happens, we pick up a series of ‘stimuli’, some of which are noticed while others are ignored based on our level of attention.
In our brains, our knowledge and understanding are stored through a complex web of ‘schema’. Underpinning all of these are common threads, which are hard-wired into our long-term memory. As they are common threads, and the neural pathways are regularly used, they are firmly embedded into the make-up of who we are. Every situation, and the stimuli which we attentively observe, is then compared to this internal store of knowledge held in our long-term memory.
A large number of these common threads go together to form our internal belief system, as we generally associate the majority of ideas and behaviours to these pathways.
So how does this link to Professor Steve Peters’ model? Well, when an event happens and we pick up a range of stimuli our brain automatically runs this past the schema which we have in place, purely to make sense of the situation. Therefore, we are ‘processing’ the situation using our computer, which is an unconscious process. The computer will then output a level of understanding based on the internal belief system which is stored in our brains.
We then have two other systems which kick-in, these are the chimp and the human. The chimp is the emotional centre of the brain, here we have instinctive responses which the computer feeds in to. This has served us very well in the past when we consider the evolution of our species. Having a ‘quick-fire’ brain which told us how to react in given situations, such as running from fire and fighting when threatened allowed us to survive and reproduce. Through Darwin’s theory of natural selection, it becomes intuitive to reason that those with the best, most advantageous chimp brain would have survived longer and reproduced more offspring. Therefore, our brains would have descended from this over the last tens of thousands of years (a very short time in evolutionary terms) and not have changed a large amount, which is why we still host this brain today.
So, the internal beliefs we hold within the computer, is fed into the chimp which instinctively responds in an attempt to preserve and survive. However, in steps the human, the rational centre of the brain. Here we have logic, reason and the social element of our brain. The human has the power to override the computer through logical reasoning and therefore can learn. The chimp however is very stubborn and adamant it is correct, as it cannot override the computer, it ‘runs’ from the computer. The chimp is a very short-term, selfish thinking system, whilst the human is a more long-term, greater good thinking system.
Therefore, we must accept that the chimp part of the brain is there, and we cannot change it directly, instead the only way to influence it is to think long-term and work on the computer; the underlying internal belief system which we have. This is self-leadership and starts with self-awareness. So, how do we do this?
Knowledge is power, and we need to understand how our brains work at a deeper level, and therefore how we percieve the world around us. There are two main ways in which we can interpret the stimuli we experience, autobiographic and prospective.
- Autobiographic is a reflective process, where we compare a given situation to a similar event in the past.
- Prospective on the other hand is a future focused view, where we consider the consequences of an event.
Autobiographic is often an easier, and therefore quicker, process and therefore can precede the prospective interpretation unless we are intentionally maintaining a future focus.
There is a third interpretation which often runs parallel to these, which is focusing on the now. This is a perspective where our private-self (our internal emotions and character traits which often remain hidden) is being compared to our public-self (the visible characteristics, mannerisms, and behaviours which we portray). With this, in time, comes a level of self-awareness, however this is a much slower process, and the insight which comes from it will be significantly delayed if little to no intentionality is placed into this interpretation.
As part of this self-awareness interpretation, particularly as a leader, are two elements referred to as corollaries. These are our ‘self-agency’ and ‘theory of mind’. The self-agency in particular is the perception we have of our agency over our actions, the level of control we have over how we react in situations. Whilst theory of mind is the ability we have to perceive and make inferences of the mental state of others. The ability to determine the thoughts, feelings and reasonings behind the actions of others and therefore the impact our actions have on others.
There are many other ‘selfs’ which we must consider here before we can consider how we can develop a greater sense of self-awareness from what we have discussed here. These are:
- Self-Knowledge – this is what we know about ourselves and hold to be true.
- Self-Description – this is how we personally describe ourselves, our understanding of who we are.
- Self-Evaluation – this is how we judge ourselves and our performance.
- Self-Esteem – this is how we feel about ourselves, our emotional connection to ourselves.
- Self-Regulation – this is how we control our instincts, the level of control we have to develop our internal beliefs and therefore ‘calm’ our ‘monkey’. Essentially this is a measure of our internal programming.
- Self-Efficacy – this is our beliefs in our ability to perform in the pursuit of our goals, we have seen this before at the start of the chapter within the humanistic theories.
- Death Awareness – this is our awareness of our own mortality and the relationship we have with this.
- Self-Conscious Emotions – this is our awareness of how we are feeling at any given moment. Essentially this is the relationship between the ‘monkey’ which has no language control and the ‘human’ which has linguistic capabilities. If we are able to vocalise how we are feeling this link is stronger.
- Self-Recognition – this is our awareness to recognise ourselves, our actions, our behaviours etc. This plays a huge role within growth and development as we can only grow when we recognise and own the part we play within events and situations.
- Self-Talk – this is our inner voice, the way we communicate within ourselves and essentially access and recognise each of the above.
There are then two internal processes which we have allowing us to access and work on each of these, these are:
- Self-Reflection – this is a measure of our curiosity of ourselves, the extent to which we not only can, but look to reflect on our emotions, values, thought processes, attitudes etc. High levels of self-reflection leads to an increased level of Self-Knowledge and Self-Regulation.
- Self-Rumination – this is a level of anxious attention on oneself. This process is where we have our fear of failure and can have a detrimental impact on our level of self-worth. Excessive amounts of this ruminative self-focus can create worry, guilt, shame, jealousy, insomnia and may lead to psychological dysfunctions such as anxiety and depression. This is often called ‘overthinking’.
We must therefore consider how we as leaders can use the two processes above to develop and evaluate our personal strengths and limitations, identifying the areas for personal and professional growth.
The best framework which I have found for this comes through an understanding of model through which self-awareness impacts our individual development. This model was proposed by Alain Morin. Within this model, there are two perceived measures of self which we all have and ae continuously comparing between.
These two measures are:
- Our Real Self – this is who we actually are right now, our current self, in essence this is the “reality”.
- Our Ideal Self – this is who we would like to be, who we aspire to be, this is what we use internally to guide our actions.
Our process of Self-Reflection can utilise our Self-Evaluation mechanism to measure our Real Self against our Ideal Self, and 99% of the time we will find that there is discrepancy. Our Real Self, how we have shown up in the world, does not match up against our Ideal Self, who we aspire to be. The size of the discrepancy then determines what happens next.
If there is a large positive or negative discrepancy, then we have some work to do to correlate these within ourselves. A large discrepancy, in either way will cause a low rate of growth or development as we consider it to be an anomaly and do not put it down to internal factors which we can work on. A large positive discrepancy, where our Real Self outperforms our Ideal Self gets put down to luck, a consequence of chance and not something which we can recreate, rather than humbleness this becomes an ‘escape’, we have an external clause as to why it occurred. A large negative discrepancy, where our Real Self massively falls short of our Ideal Self gets put down to external factors again, we cannot internalise a failure like this, and we look to externalise the reasons. This type of discrepancy becomes an ‘avoidance’, where we are avoiding any internal factors which caused it to happen as we are looking to avoid a severe bout of self-rumination.
If there is a small positive or negative discrepancy, then we are in the sweet spot to work on ourselves. A small discrepancy, in either way will cause a high rate of change. When the discrepancy is a negative, the real self has fallen short of the ideal self, and therefore we have a low measure of self-actualisation. There are two ways we can deal with this, either we adjust our ideal self and decrease it to make it easier to achieve and less likely to lead to further negative discrepancies. This adjustment is easier and is what holds us back. However, we could instead look to reflect on ourselves and ways in which we could grow and develop in order to close this gap and improve our real self towards our ideal self. This leads to a greater level of self-actualisation, however, is much harder to do as we must be prepared to work on changing ourselves and our internal belief system.
When the small discrepancy is a positive, the real self has exceeded the ideal self, and as a result we can react in two ways. As the discrepancy is small, we believe it was to do with ourselves achieving peak performance and not a result of external factors. Therefore, either we put it down to a one-off and not something we can consistently achieve, in doing so we give ourselves room to drop our performance levels and maintain the ideal self. However, this does not lead to growth and instead leads to long term stagnation or plateauing. Rather than this, what we should do to encourage growth and development is to adjust our ideal self to raise our standards.
This model is summarised in the following diagram:
As we have seen, external factors play a large role in learning. When we accept that we are life-long learners, we need to seek external inputs beyond the observations we make. To help us to break our prejudices and bypass our internal belief system in order to achieve growth, we must intentionally seek more than just knowledge, where we are most likely to internalise the elements which fit with our current belief system. There are two mechanisms here which we can utilise.
The first is through intentional interrogation of our values system against what we are learning, trying to look at the bigger picture and finding ways in which our internal beliefs are limiting factors (often called ‘limiting beliefs’). This can be hard to do, and when used solely on its own can actually be detrimental to our growth as there will always be some personal bias which we introduce into the process.
The second is through external feedback, which is pivotal in particular as a leader where our role is externally facing and involves others. Accepting that our leadership is an interactive process, whereby we are learning and developing as well as those in our charge.
However, the act of getting external feedback from others is not enough. Instead, it is about the way in which we engage with this process which is pivotal to our growth and development. We have all experienced this in some way another when we were growing up, when our teachers gave us feedback. When we engage in this feedback, we make greater and faster growth and development, achieving a higher level of learning. The same principle applies when we are seeking out this feedback.
We must also be careful of how we deal with different types of feedback. Positive feedback can lead to low levels of avoidance if we take it at face value. We are innately predisposed to take positive feedback as affirmation that what we are doing is right and therefore there is no room for improvement. On the contrary, negative feedback can have the opposite effect, causing a level of avoidance. This is because it can feed into our self-evaluation mechanism in the same way as a negative discrepancy, however as it has come from an external source, we place greater emphasis on the evaluation of our real self and it can become catastrophised, therefore being processed as a large negative discrepancy.
Our relationship with feedback is therefore vital, but how do we avoid catastrophising the feedback if it was to be negative and avoid complacency in the face of positive feedback?
There are several aspects to consider here:
- The weight of the feedback gets lower the more we receive. If we only get feedback once a year, then this feedback carries immense weight, and we place a large amount of value on it. However, on the flip side of this, receiving too much feedback can lower the impact of the feedback itself.
- The weight of the feedback is greater, the higher the value we place on the opinion of the individual providing it. In other words, when we look up to, or have a valued relationship with the individual we are seeking feedback from, their opinion is provided greater emphasis.
- The value within the feedback is directly linked to the level of honesty placed within the feedback. If the individual providing the feedback either has an agenda behind the feedback or is looking to protect your feelings, then the level of honesty within the feedback decreases and the value within it diminishes.
We must therefore look to find a balance regarding the feedback we are seeking. We can achieve this by thinking about the following considerations:
- What is the purpose of seeking this feedback?
- What are we trying to achieve through the feedback?
- What type of feedback are we looking for?
- Who is best placed to provide this feedback?
- How can we ensure that they provide honest feedback?
- How many people should we look to receive feedback from?
- How regularly should we be looking for this feedback?
- For how long should we be looking for this feedback?
- What are we intending to do with this feedback?
- How open to change am I related to the feedback I receive?
Standard Summary:
In order to effectively lead others, we must first look to lead ourselves. The corner stone of this is being open to growth and development ourselves, accepting that we will never be the finished article and therefore we must continuously learn and grow.
This starts with working on achieving a high level of self-awareness which is not just a knowledge of how we show up in different situations, but an understanding of why. Only when we know this can we look to develop and change this.
When we develop and work on our internal belief system, we are able to change the way we interact with others and thus how we lead them.
The way in which we work on our internal self is through intentional self-evaluation, looking to either develop our real self through interrogating our internal beliefs and breaking down any limiting beliefs, or our ideal self by raining the standard so we are always looking to achieve self-actualisation which is key driver behind growth and development.
We must also look to intentionally seek regular feedback, from individuals who are best placed to provide honest and actionable feedback. We must be prepared to receive feedback which contradicts our internal beliefs, however when we have a healthy relationship with feedback, we can utilise it to either raise our standards or improve ourselves.
When feedback and self-reflection is used on a regular, and ongoing basis we are able to consistently develop and grow, and in doing so we start the process of self-leadership.
Christopher Waters
Founder of LAMDA Solutions