Leaders must commit to understanding themselves as human beings if they hope to grow and lead others effectively. This commitment is a fundamental starting point for everything else. While a commitment to the self may sound somewhat indulgent, it is no small, nor easy, task.

Truly understanding the self as objectively as possible and then intentionally acting on that knowledge—those two are not the same— is a lifelong journey that inevitably involves experiences ranging from unease to discomfort to outright pain, along with bright, wonderful, gratifying moments, too. It is not a journey for the faint of heart, but self-awareness, growth, and effective, authentic leadership can be the prize.

The great news is that it is something anyone can do. It does not require any special cognitive intelligence, gifts, or abilities. It is a capacity resident in human beings, and there are specific steps you can take to learn about yourself and grow.

As a result of taking these steps, you should come to know more about yourself, who you really are, and how you come across to others. From there, you can engage in new behaviors and even ways of thinking that maximize your own effectiveness and satisfaction.

What Is a Commitment to the Self?

To start on this journey, we can ask: What is the “self”? It can be defined as the sum total of perceptions, experiences, conscious and unconscious activity, culture, worldview, judgments, styles, preferences, values, and all components that make up you as a unique human being. The self is a complicated, unique package.

A commitment to self means understanding that you never really, completely figure out everything about yourself. Your self-awareness evolves and deepens over time with this commitment. This is progressive inner wisdom. You can perhaps recall a time in your life when you thought you “had it all figured out,” and there wasn’t much more, or even anything else to learn. You might chuckle now at that notion.

For example, when I was younger and studying logic I was convinced that marshalling a logical, air-tight argument would convince others that I was right. To my consciousness at that time, right equaled right, and how complicated was that to understand?

Later in life, after repeated frustration, it occurred to me that I had completely overlooked the human side of the equation. This meant things such as involving people in the thinking stage, asking their opinions, and recognizing their ideas. The human element in influencing was unconscious to me at the time. Further, my limited vision, or blindness, on this point meant that I was perplexed by resistance and push-back, especially when it didn’t seem logical! Only after more than a few instances where I didn’t get what I wanted did I start to question my own approach. When I finally realized the massive oversight on my part, big new doors opened. The self-awareness helped.

Another example many people can relate to is the dawning recognition that the work one has chosen doesn’t actually bring happiness. Many people tell themselves they need to work in the field they studied for, which brings some measure of status and security, and which seems acceptable to others, particularly influential figures such as family members. Sustained introspection around career choices often surfaces emotions that have long been suppressed, particularly when the introspection occurs during the fertile mid-life period. This, too, is an example of self-awareness.

Developing a Commitment to the Self

If you accept that there is more learning and growth ahead along the road of your life, the first question is: How do you learn more about yourself? This is essential in order to then act on that knowledge to intentionally set personal growth into motion.

The following are powerful techniques:

•  Understand your story

•  Take the time to notice

•  Use the Johari Window

•  Learn your type and archetypes

•  Use the Action-Reflection Loop

•  Know your strengths and weaknesses

•  Discover your personal mission, vision, and values.

Let’s explore each of these to see how they can help you. Some will likely have more impact than others, depending on what’s happened so far in your life and development, and what you sense is ahead.

Understand your story

One effective practice coaches use to help clients come to a new and often transformational understanding of themselves is helping them understand “the story.” Your story, in this context, means truly comprehending—often for the first time—what you tell yourself about who you are. The story is an often unconsciously chosen narrative that explains reality to you, and often justifies your actions. It is the product of deep assumptions about the self. An erroneous, self-limiting belief is an example of a bad story.

Some examples of self-defining, identity-oriented stories include “I have a very busy job, a great family, no time, and a stressful boss.” Or, “I am a great team member and I work well with others, but I have no life and I have questions about whether I’m doing the right thing.”

Underneath these stories are deeper, nested stories that have powerful effects on how we engage the world and ourselves. “I am very competent.” Or, “I have questions sometimes about my competence.” A pivotal part of the story for a leader might be “You can’t trust people,” or “I have to do things myself.” Contrast that with a story about trusting others and believing that delegation is essential, and good. The story becomes action.

The story is the product of internal scripts or “lines of code,” reflecting the deep assumptions about who we are and what we are about. It is often forged early, usually in our adolescent years, and events can reinforce or challenge it. Children start to shape their story about themselves watching adults in action. Anything from a victim mentality to a sense of unlimited opportunities comes out of absorbing the messages and the narratives children see playing out around them.

The story is also the product of intrapersonal and interpersonal sense-making. It’s how we explain what is happening in and around us. The story can have elements that are very helpful and functional. That is, as a metaphorical map it accurately describes the world and the interactions we have experienced so far. Or, the story can include erroneous, incomplete, self-justifying, rationalizing, and self-deluding elements.

However accurate or productive the story, it has a powerful role in forging identity, a sense of reality and meaning, and from there, behavior, communication, and functioning in the world. You do everything for a reason—it has to make sense on some level to you. The story is the central sense-making mechanism within you.

When your views of yourself and the world become dysfunctional or confused, when you consistently experience problems—particularly recurring problems—it may be time to look at your story. In other words, the focus might be turned from external events to your interpretation of those events in the context of your story.

When the story isn’t working well for you as a leader anymore, when inner or outer conflict, doubt, anxiety, and self-questioning rise above a certain level, it is an invitation to ask yourself the pivotal, and often pause-inducing question posed by Dr. Neil Stroul, an executive leadership coach in the Washington, D.C., area: “Do you have your story, or does your story have you?”

This powerful question points to the difference between being aware of the story and being its unwitting victim.

You can often find the story in recurring problems, patterns, or systemic frustrations. Be careful, because to many people, the story conceals and protects itself through your projecting of the problem onto others. For example, when I couldn’t prevail with impersonal, cold logic, the issue was others’ lack of rationality. Only when I traced the problem back to how I was framing the interaction did I realize I had a bad line of code called “people don’t matter” in my story.

The gift of the question about the story is that it invites leaders to consider whether they are really the sum of all their experiences, perceptions, values, opinions, and beliefs (particularly beliefs about the self), or whether there are other possibilities. Discovering that the story is often somewhat arbitrarily and unconsciously constructed, and that it is actually just one story among many, opens the door to deeper awareness of self. It means you can not only look at situations in new ways, but more fundamentally, also look at yourself in new ways. There’s still much work to do on the journey, but a hugely important step has been taken. This is an enormous pivot point in adult development.

In a sense, we are victims of experience if that experience is not coupled with continuous reflection and a conscious choice of the story that is the most accurate and works best. People who are committed to the self are aware of and—as we will see—create their own story.

Take the time to notice

A simple and powerful technique you can use to understand yourself more objectively is simply to take the time to notice. Not judge, evaluate or interpret—simply notice. This means heightening awareness of actions and reactions, internally and with other people. By temporarily refusing to put a value judgment on what you observe, you bypass the ego-based unconscious defenses and explanations of behavior that often seek to justify and explain away anything potentially negative.

Simply noticing what it is happening means admitting into consciousness a larger and more accurate picture of internal and external reality, so that you can understand more clearly what is happening. By staying grounded in fact, you heighten your awareness of exactly what is going on, but not, at least not yet, what it means.

This practice is powerful because internal defenses kick in in a flash, in milliseconds. An easy way to understand this is to hear that some-one you don’t like is critical of your ideas. Without even being aware of it, you probably go immediately to a consideration of all the things wrong with the other person, how unreasonable or unfair he or she is. In this way the ego keeps the kernel (or boulder!) of truth that may be present in the comments at a safe distance.

In this case, staying in the noticing stage might surface awareness of internal discomfort with the critical information, a realization you are angry at the other person, and perhaps a feeling of insecurity. By noticing and starting to understand these reactions, you create the opportunity to truly understand what is happening inside. Perhaps it is the fear of being wrong that has set everything into motion. That’s quite a discovery, and potentially an opening to a new way of thinking. It might be something like “Everyone is wrong sometimes, and I can learn from the situation when that happens.”

Negative emotions can often be the starting point of the journey into self-awareness. They are the doors into self-exploration, but it is not easy to be objective about negative internal experiences and the potential meaning they hold.

For another example, let’s imagine someone who is perplexed by the non-responsiveness of a colleague. Despite the best and well-intentioned efforts to bring him out into the open, the colleague simply doesn’t have much to say. For most people, the interpretation would be that it’s all about the state of the other person, and all that’s wrong with him.

Perhaps. In the noticing stage, the first person may heighten awareness of what’s really happening in the interaction, without going to judgment so quickly. By standing back and noticing, for example, that he or she is doing most of the talking, interrupting, and general steering of the conversation, this person may come to realize that these signals might be causing the other’s lack of response. Further, this person in the noticing stage may now perceive an undercurrent of frustration. This might be exacerbating the monologues and one-sided conversations.

By becoming aware of the whole picture in a nonjudgmental way, the first person may enable new possibilities to emerge, such as reducing his or her air time and asking more open-ended questions.

Sometimes, realizations that surface through noticing more clearly, such as “I thought I was supposed to like this and the reality is that I don’t,” or “I convinced myself I wasn’t angry, just firm, but the fact is I was very angry,” can set into motion a path of inquiry that helps a leader grow. One participant in a professional development event remarked after some exercises to increase self-awareness: “I had no idea how much trouble I was in. I was carrying a lot of anger and sadness.” Whenever it might seem like committing to the self is not that important, consider this comment. Another leader said after a leadership development course, “It just hit me that I have no idea what I’m doing in my role. I’ve just been going along.” This is a great step in self-awareness.

Use the Johari Window

The Johari Window, developed by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham, is a powerful tool that can help you learn about the self. It helps configure everything from what you and those around you share as knowledge about you, to what neither knows.

The upper left quadrant means there are things about you that both you and others understand: that you’re excellent at marketing and customer contact, for example, but not so strong in budgeting and strategy, or that you have a hot button around deadlines.

The lower left quadrant means there are some things you know about yourself that you have not shared with others: for example, that you are afraid of conflict, that you are thinking of leaving for another job, or that you sometimes wish you had pursued a different career.

The lower right-hand quadrant is mysterious, and at least at the present time, unknown, both to you or others. Call it future learning that you may or may not share, or that others may realize about you at some point in the future (which they may or may not share with you).

The upper right-hand quadrant can be the most fruitful for you in learning about yourself. It represents what others know about you that you cannot see nor understand. What may be transparent to you is often very apparent to others. This quadrant is called the blind spot. As a leader, you can either make it safe for people to offer observations about this area, or you can make it so threatening that they will never get close. The most committed leaders want to know how they are perceived by others. As a leader, you can simply ask others what their perceptions are of you, your performance, your style, and your approach. This can be specific, such as how you handled yourself in a tense meeting, or more general, by asking how you come across.

As people rise through formal leadership positions, it gets harder to get honest feedback from others. Many organizations are using 360-degree assessments to help with this. In a 360 assessment, everyone chimes in on your performance—subordinates, peers, and whoever is above you. Responses to negative 360 data generally fall into two categories: denial/blame, or acceptance.

Denial and blame keep uncomfortable information away, as defense shields rise into place. Acceptance means standing back and accurately observing the messages in the data, particularly when they collide with a self-view, or the story. I once had a client blame others’ withering assessments of her communication skills on the structure of the U.S. government. She hotly insisted—and with multiple interruptions—that if I truly understood the structure of the government, I would understand why others rated her so badly. In this case, the messenger was attacked, too! An important question is how often, if we are honest with ourselves, do we do this, too?

Shocks, big surprises, and puzzling disconnects between what you expect and what happens can be a prime entry point to discovering what you don’t know about yourself, but others do. This is where your metaphorical map of reality breaks. Unfortunately, many people blame, rationalize, explain away, or deny the information, depriving themselves of the learning that takes place when there is a commitment to the self. It doesn’t make the reality of the situation any less true; it just buries it conveniently in the unconscious mind, out of awareness and where it (only temporarily) relieves the psychological pain and pressure.

Where things are not working out, or where failures routinely materialize, can be an excellent starting point for considering what you might not yet know or understand. For example, many leaders are puzzled by a lack of motivation in the workplace. They cannot understand why people don’t do exactly what they would do, with equal energy.

If a leader took time to consider the reason for the lack of motivation, this person might discover some unfortunately very common truths about his or her behavior: micromanagement, mostly negative feedback, and harsh judgments. When this information is conveyed to those responsible, the response is often defensive. “If you only knew how things were around here” is a common refrain, effectively ceding the power of choosing productive communication to the stresses and strains that are found in virtually any workplace. Clearly, this victim mentality and leadership story have serious limitations.

Another example occurs when leaders are genuinely puzzled by people who leave their organization. Such leaders are often baffled about why staff had such a sharp reaction to something they did or said. “They need to get over it,” a leader will sometimes declare, not under-standing that he or she is actually fostering the problem. The leader will remain trapped in this blind spot until the consequences become unbearable, or until the leader connects the dots leading back to his or her actions or words that are causing this recurring problem.

For example, I once spoke with a person who was describing a situation in a manager’s department. Only after literally years of unwanted turnover was the manager finally starting to “get it,” I was told.

When this happens, when you “get it,” when new understanding about the self occurs, it may be experienced as an epiphany, a flash of insight, a potentially huge restructuring of consciousness. It will feel clearly and intuitively “right.” It is a realization, a new awareness of what is real. It may be felt as an “Oh my gosh” moment.

In their book Why CEOs Fail, Dotlich and Cairo explain what happens when the opposite occurs: “Companies frequently experience serious setbacks when entire groups of people collude to overlook, deny, or manage around a CEO’s negative personality characteristics. We have witnessed the demise of once great companies such as Enron, Kmart, Global Crossing, and Tyco realizing far too late that one factor in their failure was the fact that no one could tell the emperor the truth.” ¹

None of this is to suggest that what happens is always a leader’s fault. Workplaces are far too complex for such a simple explanation. However, a critical task of leaders is to learn as much as possible about the self and its impact on others, in order to raise the game to the highest possible level.

Learn your type and archetypes

Another powerful way to increase an understanding of the self is by exploring your own psychological type and archetypes.

Type refers to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator(r), a widely used personality indicator that can have incredible power in aiding understanding of the self and interactions with others. The theory, based on the work of Carl Jung, is deep and multifaceted, potentially launching lifelong learning.

Reduced to its simplest expression, the theory holds that some people prefer extraversion over introversion. That is, they are more energized by interaction and communication with the external world, while introverts are more comfortable in their inner mental world. Extra-verted leaders tend to be more outgoing and interact more with others, whereas introverted leaders operate more behind the scenes.

The way we take in information varies, too. Sensors prefer factual, concrete, and detailed content about the here-and-now, whereas intuitives prefer processing in big-picture, thematic, and future-oriented patterns. Sensor leaders usually pay more attention to the facts and figures that are knowable, while intuitive leaders think more about conceptual plans for the future.

Once we have information, the next step is to make judgments, or decisions. Thinkers prefer a rational, logical, principled approach, whereas feelers prefer to make judgments by referencing the human values in a situation. Thinker leaders usually refer to an objective standard to make a decision, while feeler leaders tend to think more about the people involved in the decision.

Once we have information, the next step is to make judgments, or decisions. Thinkers prefer a rational, logical, principled approach, whereas feelers prefer to make judgments by referencing the human values in a situation. Thinker leaders usually refer to an objective standard to make a decision, while feeler leaders tend to think more about the people involved in the decision.

The final dichotomy, judging and perceiving, refers to our outer-world orientation and lifestyle—whether we prefer as judgers to come to closure on decisions in a structured way, or as perceivers to generate more options and stay open longer to new information in a more spontaneous way. Judging leaders often seek to come to a decision and move on, while perceivers take more time to consider alternatives.

Think of meetings where some people did most of the talking and others just listened, and you may have seen the extraversion-introversion dichotomy in action. Overuse of either preference can cause problems. Extraverts can wind up doing a disproportionate share of the talking. Leaders who prefer introversion may be misunderstood because they choose to convey less to the outside world. Either one is an important awareness about how the self is showing up to others. I experienced earlier in my life situations where I sensed I had dominated the air time, and so chose to say less and create more space for others to contribute.

If you have experienced frustration over too many details and therefore “being in the weeds,” or been unable to get your hands around something purely conceptual and wondered whether others were “building grand castles in the air,” you may have seen sensing versus intuition in action.

If you have had trouble making a decision in a group because there was a technically “right” way to decide an issue and another way that more explicitly acknowledged the human beings in the mix, perhaps by not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings, you may have seen thinking versus feeling in operation. In organizational restructurings thinking versus feeling can come to the fore: What’s the right thing for the business? versus How can we take care of people?

And when there was a disagreement on a process, or how long it should take to come to a decision, you may have experienced the tension between judging and perceiving.

No type is better than another. Although leadership positions are overwhelmingly dominated by thinkers and judgers, the key is to understand and respect both your own and others’ preferences, and to become more skilled in flexing your behavior depending on the needs of the situation. It is all too easy to operate only out of your own preferences, dismissing others who have different preferences. When this behavior comes from a leader, it is particularly damaging. Culture often is a reflection of the preferences of leaders, and those who take a different approach can feel like second-class citizens.

This summary of type explains just a few basics. It is important to know that type is much more than a simple additive process with four preferences. These preferences intermingle in myriad ways. You can probably imagine how an extraverted intuitive and an introverted sensor might experience tension in communication, for example; or how a feeling perceiver and thinking judger might have trouble coming to a decision. Type ultimately reveals how we process, what is usually communicated or not, how we tend to engage the world, and what happens under stress, for example.

Carl Jung also pioneered work in the area of archetypes, which can be enlightening in the same way as type. Archetypes are transpersonal, collective, unconscious ways of seeing, interpreting, and then acting in the world. They surface consistently in myths and stories told across cultures.

An example of an archetype is the warrior, someone who is prone to conflict behavior. You probably also know someone who fits the lover archetype, for whom life is an opportunity to nurture, take care of, and help others. The innocent archetype manifests in someone who does not see the sometimes harsh realities of life. And the sage archetype is all about knowing more, being wise and informed.

It has been said that three people with different archetypes can walk into the same meeting and experience it very differently. The warrior scans for who has power and must be overcome, the lover wants to know if anyone needs help, and the sage wonders what he or she can learn from the situation.