Leaders seeking Self-awareness practice solitude

Introduction

In a world of go-getters and extroverts with action-orientation bias, it is natural to wonder what value solitude or self-awareness has in Leadership development journey. Leadership necessitates the presence of others–followers or the people you’re leading– and hence alone-time is rarely front and center. Solitude (not being lonely in one's one company), is key to self-awareness and definitely a counterintuitive pathway to leadership growth, so let's dig in.

Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and another poet argues that “Isolation is the gift" for aspiring writers. However, benefits of solitude anticipated in 2012 Harvard Business Review article for organizations has hardly been realized in the last 12 years but the laments of "Alone together", stemming from "Net’s isolating and society-corroding tendencies have come true. Hence, it is best to clearly state at the outset that,

Loneliness is not same as Solitude or isolation-by-choice for our growth.

Academic press and thought leaders have been generally quiet on this topic as I found in my search for solitude in their publications while paying tribute to mindfulness as if to imply that true work of practicing them to be self-aware, can magically occur at workplace or left as take home, for leaders to figure it out. A recent book on science and power of solitude speaks about it. This article aims to link the poesis and praxis of this simple yet powerful practice to self-awareness, a much-needed leadership asset.

Attention and Doing

Earlier, we had explored attention (paying and seeking) and how action-orientation ("human doing") traps us in its net. Awareness is a pre-cursor to attention and is an attribute of "being" state of a human. As we focus our awareness intensely to truly attend to a task, without interruption or distraction, we achieve the flow-state, that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi states as effortless effort, where one is completely absorbed in an activity.

The best leaders know their focus is limited

They're strategic about where they direct it, understanding that their focus areas will dictate the organization's direction and priorities. The advantages of a razor-sharp leadership focus are clear but needs practice to be single pointed. Do Leaders consciously and deliberately move from awareness to attention choice fully? Can they work on awareness to increase one's concentration (see Avadhanam)? Are there practices like meditation, that can increase the attention span, intensity and improve its quality?

This is where self-awareness comes in. Who is witnessing you as a leader, to tell you that yourself is attending to action without biases such as likes-dislikes or wants-don't-want that subtly or overtly influence our choices. We can reflect at the end of action cycle (eg: daily,...), get solicited or unsolicited feedback or wait for results/periodic outcomes like quarterly results to close-loop after the fact. Won't it be preferred to prepare for action by withdrawing into solitude to not just plan external action but how we can lead by being-doing either alternatively like inhalation-exhalation. We can even this by using solitude (action-downtime) as a way to explore means of strengthening our witness qualities ( "shAkshi bhava"). We can then deploy it to be mindful of biases that may creep into our judgement unconsciously.

Awareness and Being

Some of us may have heard of "Wu wei", a Chinese concept that means "non-doing" or "effortless doing". It is a state of mind or spirit that involves being at peace while engaged in tasks and flowing with life events instead of fighting them. When we are engaged in action or doing something, the concept of being "effortless" seems antithetic as we are told we need to work hard. Is it an oxymoron then? or in a Mezirow's model of an ideal-typical learning process, a disorienting dilemma? This can represent the initiation of a transformative learning experience that triggers a questioning of assumptions, resulting in transformation.

From childhood we are told that you can't have your cake and eat it too. Generally, this is true for physical realm. How far it is true for mental or psychological things in the subtle realm. Many of us have experienced this - when you enter a new space or office or physical environment what you pay attention to may be limited (perhaps 7 items) but what you become aware of (and can later recall if questioned or hypnotized) is much larger set. The question I want you to consider as a human/leader is this:

Is attention directed/has direction while awareness is general and non-specific?

Why is this important? There are some key concepts that I want to introduce here from Inner Yoga ("Antharanga Yoga"). Attention can be variously directed, discontinuous, and diffused or it can be set on an intent pursuit of one object, close and undisturbed attention (like in hunting as an example) also known as "one-pointed" (Ekāgratā). These practices can come when we spend quality time with ourselves in isolation, by our own freewill and choice to practice 'gathering towards' (Pratyahara) - the fifth element among the Eight stages of Patanjali's Ashtanga Yoga - which involves withdrawing the senses from external stimuli and focusing inward. Such meditative work-out can broaden and deepen our awareness and deploy it in multi-modal way of witnessing oneself thinking about action and acting dynamically. This can consequently make you aware of any internal bias triggered (positive hopes glimmering that are unfounded) in the "actor" within us and course-correct right then and there without residual self-loathing or other secondary waves.

Our being is capable of such multi-dimensional deployments if we cultivate necessary time to hit the 'inner-gym' with a suitable trainer and then practice it ourselves - This needs solitude.

Personal Experience

Thanks to my teachers of Inner Yoga, I have faced a few such polarities or catch-22 (called 'dharma-sankat' in Sanskrit or the key problem to be solved in Hero's Journey). The key characteristics of them is that they make you pick among the choices of either-or when you really want to pick both-and. This can get you stuck, pick suboptimal compromises like win-lose/lose-win and hence disoriented when what you want to do is avoid lose-lose and pick win-win. Simply managing polarities ( like reorganizing to best of centralized or decentralized office models or work-from-home / no-remote-work) are sufficient in some situations. I found in my case, vertical development experiences came from spending time meditating in solitude.

One example is what I call as "emotional agility" when I am with my clients in coaching sessions.

Working with leaders as (sacred) reflecting mirrors to help leaders clearly see what is blocking them from their growth and development is my responsibility there. Metaphorically, as a reflector, my emotional intelligence needs to be more agile to pick up on subtle feelings and full-blown emotions of clients, mine and beyond (watch 7-eyed model of Coaching Supervision). This required me to practice the above inner-yoga methods for many years by gathering self-awareness, deepening and widening it, in solitude on a daily basis to be present full for my clients. Of course, my single-pointed goal was to be the best coach that I can be for my client-leaders who are sitting across from me in a session which required me to develop and deploy multi-dimensional presence as a coach (doer-witness) and occasionally self-supervise, in abbreviated form, as needed even in the session. This came in immensely useful in team-coaching sessions where there are lot more moving parts (like co-coach, many clients and client-team-leader).

Incidentally developing such self-awareness held in certain family situations as well where previously emotions used to otherwise flood the situation.

Conclusion

A journey of thousand miles begins with a single step

Leaders journey to full self-awareness (self-actualization in Maslow's) is a long and arduous one. As the saying above goes, we each need take a first step towards developing that for ourselves, teams, stakeholders and the community we serve. The need for why we need to develop this may be varied based on the roles and responsibilities we have chosen.

For instance, a startup tech entrepreneur with an aim to launch a commercially successful startup faces these two realities

1.      The chances for a startup to be successful from a business perspective, (i.e., being hugely profitable, getting acquired, or going IPO), can be as low as 1%.

2.      As a founder, failure is not an option.

Startup Entrepreneurs generally know both to be true - even as they laugh at the dichotomy or contradiction. As a founder, starting a startup can be a very odd choice of a career, because of the failure rate being high and yet all founders hope to score/succeed (even when we toss a used napkin into a dustbin!) Thus, it is dilemma that can disorient them occasionality on how to move forward.

The first step in this and other cases I submit is solitude. Allocate some to spend with oneself and see where it leads. I have personally seen it turn into an asset. - even chatGPT seems to corroborate my view in out chat. Would love to hear your views. What has been your experience with solitude and self-awareness?