E x e c u t i v e   A w a r e n e s s . c o m          

Because without it we are pushed around by our internal compulsions, not knowing where they come from or why we are doing what we do.

Have you ever found yourself reacting in a particular way, or heard yourself saying something which, with hindsight, you would rather not have done or said?

Have you ever found yourself suddenly overtaken by extremes of emotion (anger, rage, jealousy, fear, sadness, sorrow, joy .....) without understanding what has triggered off such a strong reaction?

Without becoming more and more aware of our own internal self, which motivates and drives our external self - we have little hope of being masters of our own destiny and actions. All we end up doing is reacting to external stimuli - people and events, in the same old way, without being able to control it ourselves. In essence, we stay bound to what shaped us into who we are from a very early age.

If you say "..... but that's how I've always been and I cope quite well, thank you". That's fine for you in your personal life, but if you now move the context to your business life, especially when you have responsibilities for leading other people, then you owe it not just to them,  but also yourself and your employer, to encourage self-learning for all, in order to bring about more effective organisational performance.

With growing self-awareness the leader becomes a more effective leader and the organisation a more successful organisation.

Benefits for Individual Executives

Benefits for Organisations

"People have to stop thinking of their feelings as irrelevant and messy, and realise they are in fact, highly differentiated, nuanced patterns of reaction, knowledgeable sources of information........We only will know what to do by realising what feels right to us. Attention is our most precious resource. Feelings are the body's version of the situation; everything we know about our situation is revealed in our feelings.

The big switch for business people comes when they realise what they thought was soft is hard, and what they thought was hard is often arbitrary. In this sense, feelings are guides to the big issues, like where am I going?"

Shoshana Zuboff, quoted in Goleman, D. 1999, Working with Emotional Intelligence, Bloomsbury, London

 

"It takes enormous reserves of time, energy and attention to maintain an emotional survival strategy that served us in childhood but that may now be outmoded."

Helen Palmer. 1997, The Enneagram Advantage. Three Rivers Press, New York