Jarlath Duffy - Change from Within

For those of us in positions of responsibility - be it as managers, leaders, supervisors, etc - a first stepping stone to our development is knowledge of ourselves. On many occasions people will apportion blame for problems to other people rather than themselves because they fail to recognise their contribution to the problem. Therefore a solid solution usually involves a change of behaviour that is not forthcoming due to lack of awareness.

In the development of training programmes for managers, leaders, etc I initially include a segment of Managing Self and then broaden it out to Managing Teams and Managing in the Organisation.

So what is Self?

We all have the idea of separateness from others and we rely on the essential privacy of our own consciousness. This is reflected in the ways that we communicate with others as opposed to how we communicate with ourselves. We communicate with others mainly through externalising speech and non-verbals. Whereas we communicate with ourselves privately - internally - , which makes the process relatively more secret and safeguarded. And also our communications with others first originates with an internal communication.

We set boundaries for the experiences that we allow to be relevant to ourselves and to ones that are outside us.
We see ourselves as causes and accept a partial responsibility for the consequences of our actions and therein often lies selectivity in what we chose to accept e.g. the positive consequences were as result of my input as a manager and the major negative consequence was down to the employee John Doe.

A key part of our experiencing self is made possible through the process of reflection i.e. standing back and viewing self. We experience and reflect upon our experience, summarise it, comment on it and analyse it. This ultimately is consciousness.

Next>>
Back To Resources Page
Download This Document as a PDF