How much self-awareness is enough?
I’m just back from three days of coaching training at Henley Business School. Turns out that training to be a coach involves A LOT of introspection. One of the most valuable parts of the course is the practice you do on each other. And this means both coaching and being coached - multiple times a day.
The first challenge is you need to come up with things to talk about. Problems to solve. Ambitions to explore. Relationships to examine. By the afternoon of day three I felt like I was scraping the barrel. Not that I don’t have ‘issues’ or a complex inner life - of course I do! But I was done emoting. Done sharing. Done learning about myself.
After a few days of decompression I can see the value. And feel a lasting gratitude to my fellow students who accompanied me with patience and skill on my mental meanderings. But I’m also left wondering how much self-awareness is enough?
On the last day we practiced Gestalt techniques where you imagine yourself in a conversation with someone. You occupy your own position first - talking, perhaps, to an empty chair. Then you switch positions and imagine what it would be like to listen to yourself.
In theory - and remarkably, in practice too - this generates insights that you might not have had about your assumptions and relationships without the role play.
Amusingly, a fellow student decided after our session that they didn’t need to have the conversation after all. That doing so could actually be a bit self-indulgent, and that they could maybe just change their behavior rather than sharing their revelations about themselves with someone else.
I don’t think this means that self-awareness is not helpful. Rather that it’s a question of what you do with it. If it deepens a tendency to solipsism or even selfishness, obviously that’s not a good thing. If it gets in the way of - rather than facilitating - action, that too is probably unhelpful.
But if you can - as our teachers on the course are fond of saying - ‘hold it lightly’ and allow it to percolate through the way you interact with others; generating more compassion - for oneself and other people - and a deeper wisdom, then Eureka! you’ve got somewhere.
It’s a necessarily humbling experience, this training. Picking away at your long-built defences, questioning your assumptions, being challenged to look at things from another perspective. But it is also strengthening as well.
Perhaps in time, the result of this inner work is that rather than being like a brittle material that is superficially strong but might shatter under pressure, one can become strong yet flexible, like hazel, able to bend with circumstances and experience but still provide support, structure and integrity.
I am halfway through the course, and also realise this is not something I will nail in nine months. It’s about changing my outlook, and committing to perpetually learning and reflecting, while also - I hope - holding fast to some core principles about who I am, how I want to show up and why.
