When No One is Looking Take the Lead #3: Who Are You?

Who are YOU?

Read Leadership Essay #2: What do you know about leadership?

Self-knowledge: an individual’s understanding of the character, behaviors, principles, values, motivations, emotions, beliefs, biases, virtues, flaws, limitations and capabilities that define and socially represent who you are.

Imagine standing in the center of a great circular hall, completely surrounded by 360 doors, one door for each degree of the circle. The only way out is to open one of the doors.

Now imagine standing in that same great circular hall, only this time it exists within your mind. Opening a door is not a way out, but instead a way into “YOU”. Behind every door is an experience, each progressing in scope and challenge. A degree of knowledge about who you are is the gain of each experience. The more door-opening experiences you have, the more knowledge you gain. Opening all doors completes the circle of knowledge about you.

How many doors are you willing to open?

That question reveals a supporting realization: the pursuit of self-knowledge is an internal undertaking. To succeed at it requires an incessant curiosity, an untiring resolve, a compelling desire for self-improvement and constant questions about who you are.

A question is a thought. A question wants to know. Wanting to know means wanting to learn, and wanting to learn drives the process of developing knowledge.

Similarly, curiosity is interest. Interest wants to be informed. To be informed is the purpose of asking. See the connection? The essence of curiosity is a question. It is the reason why?, how?, where?, when?, what? and who? exist.

Curiosity: the instigator of all intelligence.

Without it, most of the doors inside the great hall of YOU will remain unopened, because the question self-knowledge answers most is, “Who am I?”

Leaders not only want the answer to this question, they need it. Instinctively they know that the height of their achievement, success and fulfillment is directly proportional to the depth of knowledge they have about who they are. They are driven to seek out people and situations that unveil what is untested, uncharted and unfamiliar about them, because the unknown self is who must be explored to gain self-knowledge.

Leaders are only interested in who they were yesterday (self already known), as a frame of reference for measuring who they are today (self being discovered), so they can set course for who they will become tomorrow (self to be determined).

The pursuit of self-knowledge also means the pursuit of limitations. Every time one is discovered, you must ask yourself two questions: 1. Is this the farthest reach of who I am? 2. Is this the most of what I can do?

Leaders pursue their limitations, as if seeking their next breath of air.

They never accept margins outlined by indoctrination, judgment, circumstance or competition. They are always defining and redefining the borders of their aptitudes and capabilities. For leaders, the discovery of a limitation is not the end of becoming. It is simply the beginning of becoming more.

To think this way requires a persistent eagerness to evaluate, if what you know and are doing now is the most of what you can know and do. This means questioning yourself not out of doubt, but because you are prodded by the purpose of transforming who you are into whom you want to be.

Read Leadership Essay #2: What do you know about leadership?