It’s All About You. (Psst – It’s not about you.)
““We convince by our presence.””
Humans are a species of fixers and tinkerers. We’re constantly pushing at the current situation, thinking of ways to make our lives safer, easier, and more productive.
Some aspire, like Elon Musk, to world-shaping ideas like electric cars, ultra high-speed commuter loops, and spaceships to Mars. Some of us just want to find a better way to complete everyday tasks, like finding a parking space when we need it. In either case, the dynamics of creating change are the largely same.
Once you become aware of the need for change in the outside world, the place to start the change process is not by surveying the field, but by looking within, with some meaningful navel gazing. In part, this is self-protective: Initiating a process of change by looking inside yourself is a way to build your resilience for the struggles that will inevitably come. When you develop a fuller understanding and power over your internal gyroscope, the values and ethics you hold most dear, you’ll have greater capacity to stay balanced and oriented amid the chaos that often accompanies change.
Self-knowledge will also help you maintain your ethics and morality when those around you abandon theirs. Duff McDonald argues in his book The Golden Passport that Harvard Business School and other American institutions have baked ethical indifference into our business culture. He decries “a sort of amoral approach to decision making, the idea that there is no wrong decision…a mindset that allows [people] to talk themselves into things they might’ve otherwise not been able to do.” If McDonald’s even partially correct, we should all spend a little time reflecting on those boundaries before we start inadvertently crossing them.
Starting inside also makes you a more powerful change agent. Enhancing your self-knowledge expands your ability to not only see the environment clearly, but also to understand your own motivations and resistances, and those of others. It also broadens your range of action, revealing more options to intervene effectively. Since you never know what challenge awaits around the next corner, it’s wise to build up your toolbox and hone your skills in the widest array of approaches
Most importantly, a robust self-knowledge makes it easier to build deeper relationships with other people, which are essential to bringing about change. To build durable and compelling relationships, you must be fully present. And to be fully present, you must know yourself.
