Self-awareness: Searching for the dark with a flashlight
Part 1 of a deep dive into the Henley Development Framework's nine aspects of Personal Development
“Self-awareness is noticing a personal pattern in the moment it is happening.”
That sentence is from the Henley Development Framework (HDF) and is my attempt to summarise Self-awareness as a foundational aspect of Personal Development. When I wrote it, I had already decided to locate self-awareness in the present moment rather than in retrospect. I’ve been thinking about Personal Development, in one context or another, for at least two decades, and despite having direct access to it, I have always found it a difficult idea to define. However, access to awareness, I realise, is always and only a present-tense state. And yet, how elusive that state is in the modern world.
Awareness must surely be key for leadership and management. Yet even if senior managers realise that self-awareness is important, do they know how to find it?
Terminology
Before going on, some words on terminology. First, what is awareness? What is self?
To understand awareness, I must single it out as a concept in its own right, separate from self. Outside of some non-standard literature exploring mystic traditions, awareness is rarely treated as an independent idea. Nevertheless, this is the most important thing to think about, even if our descriptions of it are tentative and even poetic.
Awareness is a natural, evolved capacity of a living organism to register experience. It is, for me, the default ‘on-state’ when I am awake. It has no content of its own but is the starting point for everything else. Awareness is what is there when you do not shine a light on it. Or, if you prefer, it is what you see when you stop looking for it.
And what about self?
In me, as a human, self is the umbrella name given to all those ideas I fill my awareness with that I have become attached to define my identity as “me”, “mine”, or “not me”. Self functions to register both my similarities with others and my differences. I accumulate this throughout my life as a process of “selfing”.
Next, the compound terms. Self-awareness, self-consciousness, self-knowledge, and metacognition are related but philosophically distinct. In general usage, they are often interchangeable, while in the academic literature, they may be treated as separate.
As I see them:
Self-consciousness refers to the reflexive structure of the mind and its capacity to recognise itself as an object. Humans share this with other great apes, and there is good evidence that dolphins, elephants, some birds, and a wider range of species than previously thought also possess it to some degree.
Self-knowledge is an epistemological concept concerning the reliability of first-person access to one’s own mental states. We can most easily demonstrate this through language, and if we knew the languages other species use, we might find the capacity extends further than we assume.
Metacognition could also be called awareness of awareness: a cognitive-psychological term for higher-order monitoring of one’s own thinking and mental states.
Self-awareness, in the social-psychological tradition, typically means self-focused attention (intrapersonal and interpersonal) and its motivational consequences. More precisely, for me, self-awareness is the process of self-observing the self.
I am going to draw on all of these and move between them, treating self-awareness as a broad heading under which related inquiries sit. Anyone who follows the references into any particular tradition should expect to find a more technically constrained usage than this article adopts.
The self-awareness problem
Although everyone develops the capacity to self-observe, not everyone uses it. And when they do, they often search for it as if they were using a flashlight to look for the dark; what their enquiry illuminates is what they already know.
This partially aligns with Tasha Eurich’s research on self-awareness. In her book, Insight, she defined self-awareness as:
“the ability to see ourselves clearly—to understand who we are, how others see us, and how we fit into the world” (2017, p. 7).
In her research, she found that 95 per cent of people reported themselves as self-aware, but when assessed against her criteria, this dropped to no more than 15 per cent, a figure drawn from survey data rather than independent measurement. She also concluded that the more power a leader holds, the less self-aware, on average, they are, because their seniority reinforces the patterns in awareness that most need examining. I agree with that last point. Where I differ is on what self-awareness is ultimately for. Eurich’s framework aims for accuracy: knowing yourself and your impact more clearly to perform better and relate more effectively. I can see how this is valuable as a tool, but it leaves the self-concept intact and treats its contents as facts to be managed rather than constructions to be questioned.
With self-awareness, I am interested less in the comfortable and more in the emancipatory. As a process, it involves noticing not just what your patterns are but that they are patterns, held in place by habit and attachment rather than innate necessity. My aim is not a more accurate picture of a fixed self but a looser relationship with the construct itself. For Eurich, the aim is to manage or organise the contents of the self more efficiently and effectively, which is a management task. For me, the contents of the self are subject to further, fundamental, and critical interrogation. Self-awareness could be what leads a person to discover the freedom to live sustainably with health and well-being in an ecosystem as healthy as they are. This is, or ought to be, the fundamental aim of education.
This is new for me
It’s only relatively recently that I have started deconstructing self-awareness in the MBA and DBA environments. I skirted the question, never making it a focus in its own right, because I wasn’t keen on giving it as an instruction. It felt too big, too metaphysical, and therefore too removed from the business curriculum. The problem was that the phrase was widely used in business and leadership development, and, alongside other terms such as values, strengths, and purpose, it didn’t offer much nourishment.
On the other hand, this is a general question that we must answer before we can expect to respond to other important personal development calls. In addition, I found a combination of my natural curiosity and cumulative experience with thousands of adult learners emboldened me at least to try. If self-awareness matters, then let’s get into it properly. That is how I got to the current version in the Henley Development Framework.
As I was thinking about how to process all this, I wanted to look at how self-awareness has been recognised in various forms over time. Part 2 will be a relatively lengthy and (inevitably) incomplete review. Before that, a word on terminology. The terms self-awareness, self-consciousness, self-knowledge, and metacognition are related but philosophically distinct. In general usage, they are often interchangeable, while in the academic literature, they are treated as distinct.
Why this matters
Learning how to ask “What is self-awareness?” can, I believe, be useful in dealing with many other problems you might be facing. The reason for this is not the answer, but the fact that it requires such a serious effort to work out what the question means. That effort – with all its twists, turns, and dead ends – is a pattern you can apply to challenges in human life in general. Progress in Personal Development does not equal certainty. In fact, it will look more like doubt.
There is a historical context for self-awareness and, in the next part, I will review how it has been examined and debated over the last 2,500 years.
References (part 1)
Eurich, T. (2017) Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think. New York: Crown Business.