Know Thyself, But Not Completely

Letter to a young leader. It’s never too late to be young.

​Dear young leader,

You have come to acknowledge that you already have paid a high price for your self-ignorance, when ambition that doesn’t know itself re-emerges as panic, when envy transforms itself into bitterness, anger turns into rage, sadness into depression.

You say that you aspire to an examined life, that it will help you understand your strengths, your weaknesses, and solve problems at work and in life. If you know yourself better, how others see you, and how you fit into the world, it will improve your interpersonal skills, making you better at understanding others and making more fulfilling contributions to the lives of people around you.

You mention that you also read that a high score on self-awareness is the greatest predictor of overall success in the workplace, according to Cornell University, and that it is one of the most important capabilities for leaders to develop if they ambition to significantly impact the bottom line.

Perhaps first and foremost, learning more about yourself is a natural inclination of yours. You’re a curious person by nature, and this curiosity drives you to learn more, to do more, to be more. And that’s reason enough.

You made it clear — despite what some models of human behavior still suggest to please their audience — that you are not always the master of your own mind, and you even admit, not without pain, that you do not make most of your decisions consciously and logically. You assume now that your actions are more often than not in response to a number of unconscious rules, and that they sometimes produce stunning results, but other times some completely baffling ones. You have indeed experienced first-hand that the unconscious strivings tend to easily override the most conscious good intentions. Although you know the benefits of change, it seems that some mysterious forces are sometimes trying to hold you back against your will.

The journey of change towards self-awareness and self-actualization has made you literally sweat. Self-reflection, as a route to improved self-awareness, has already required from you to learn to be more at ease alone with yourself and with others, to face opposite drives, and to pay attention to what’s happening here and now, to challenge some of your assumptions, and the courage to try, with no guarantee of success, new ways of behaving and interacting with others.

On your journey, you’ve explored your preferences with the help of online questionnaires, discovered the primary “colors” that seem to suit you best and learned where you stand in relation to the five classic personality categories, although you’re not sure if this has really helped you navigate your daily life to date. If personality can be seen as an entity at all, you suspect it to be dependent on elaborate and dynamic interactions (which is coherent with your high level of conscientiousness).

To narrow the gap between your good intentions and reality, you may find useful to ask those around you how they perceive your behavior. There may be more people than you think who know you better than you do. Do not neglect this rich knowledge.

Ask your significant other about your qualities and annoying flaws, how they manifest when you interact with others, one-on-one and in groups. If you are married, your spouse may well be the best “assessment center” you will ever get. And if you tend to share your intimacy with multiple partners, ask them similar questions, you will learn much about how your behavior is perceived by others. Hopefully you will uncover some recurring patterns and be able to highlight the inconsistencies with how you perceive yourself. Once the discrepancies are revealed, you will choose and decide to consciously work on narrowing the gap, or not. There is, however, one thing you will not be able to avoid anymore, and that is the mere existence of the gap.

You will need to have the patience to observe how you tend to react to your own painful emotions. Eventually you will discover some of the programs that tend to run your life beneath the surface of your awareness and learn by trial and error how to undo some conditioning that controls your behavior. To dare having an honest look at one’s vulnerabilities and weaknesses is not for the faint of heart.

Any effort taken to know yourself better, and eventually to change for the better, will require practice and persistence. Do embark on this journey accompanied by a thinking partner, whether it be a patient friend, a generous colleague, or a caring, professional partner who has already traveled (and come back) into the shadows of life and the mind. They’ll bring perspectives from different vantage points and encourage new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving.

True discoveries about one’s behaviors are not easy to process alone and often emerge through conversations. It is very easy to deceive ourselves, to fail to recognize our behaviors, beliefs, emotions and outcomes, when our only accountability partner is our own habitual way of thinking, which has become a master of its own conditioning.

Eventually, we can only get to know ourselves in relation to others, because relationships make us who we are. Get to know yourself through relationships. There may be no other way anyway.

To learn more about yourself, also do not neglect to set concrete goals. Not only will it help you focus on what you want and get it, but it will mainly help you clarify what is important to you and part of what makes you: you.

Nevertheless, don’t get caught in the knowledge of yourself. Let this knowledge be fluid, on the move. Do not allow it to rigidify, go against the natural tendency to fix it. In one of his letters, Oscar Wilde said it best: Only the shallow know themselves.

Not knowing is not ignorance, not knowing is what you have after going through the process of knowledge — you need indeed to have some knowledge to know what you don’t know. It is when we don’t know that we develop a kind of acuity similar to the one of those who are lost in the wilderness, when life depends on paying real attention and to be completely present to what is happening here and now, in the spontaneous and immediate relationship with reality as it is felt as a whole.

The person you convince yourself to be today may actually be the one you want others to see. Listen to the inner voice that tells you who you are, it may be showing you the way to the person you aspire to become.

And don’t get me wrong, of course, a fairly stable idea about what kind of person you are is useful, but to know yourself will always include a part of mystery. To know yourself will always be to know yourself partially.

You constantly change, and most changes happen under your conscious radar, you are not a final product. Who you think you are now won’t be the same person in five years (or maybe even tomorrow).

Your preferences and even your values change gradually, often without you noticing anything, and as you will continue to be exposed to some ways of living, you will be shaped by new habits. If you stay attached to your self-image for too long, then there slowly will be a deep abyss between who you are and who you think you are. You will know yourself better, but how you were in the past…

Don’t become a living caricature of who you think you are. Embrace the curiosity that has animated you.

Know thyself, but not completely.

Become aware of your multiple roles and notice if there are any upon which you are over-reliant for meaning and self-worth; play with them and challenge yourself to slowly integrate the various elements of your identity into a cohesive whole. Emphasizing and deemphasizing certain parts of your identity at different periods of time, your sense of self will relax, and you’ll be better ready to face inevitable change around and within yourself.

To know yourself is about being both who you are and who you become.

In the end, to know yourself may well be the inquiry about yourself.

Yours truly,

An old follower
​