The compound effect, or how small changes in your life can have a huge impact

Making small, consistent changes in your daily routine can lead to extraordinary results in the long run.

That’s the beauty of the compound effect.

We all have heard about the marvellous long-term effects of compound interest. If you save $100 a month and earn an interest of 1% on your capital, you will have $1,206 in the first year, of which $6 will be earnings for interest. After 30 years, you will have saved $41,933, of which the outstanding amount of $5,932 will come only from interest. And that’s only with a 1% interest.

That’s the beauty of the compound effect in action. 

The earnings are added to the principal, and the interest is applied to an ever-increasing amount, so the effects in the long term can be enormous.

The beauty of the compound effect is that it doesn’t apply to the finance world only. It can also impact considerably our personal life, positively or negatively.

Small changes in our personal life compound over time to bring incredible results.

Compound effect: choices + time + consistency

To work in your personal life, the compound effect requires three elements (financial compound effects would require a fourth element, interest): 

· Choices: your choices have an effect in the short term that compounds in the long term. Those choices can have a positive or negative impact.

· Time: the longer the time, the bigger the effect. Tiny actions can have an extraordinary effect over the long term.

· Consistency: consistency is vital. It is an overrated superpower. Without consistency, there cannot be any compound effect.

If you choose to do 10 minutes of exercise or read five pages of a philosophy book every day, your action might seem small, but if you keep the consistency over a long period, the results will be astounding.

Ten minutes of exercise every day allow your body to get used to more challenging workouts with time. The positive effects on your body and exercise body compound over time.

Same with reading a few pages on a topic that interests you every day, or writing, or painting, or any other activity that requires skill. If you do it consistently long enough, the effects will be unimaginable. 

Compound effect on good and bad habits

When we talk about choices, time and consistency, we enter the terrain of habits, good and bad.

Habits can make or break a life. You can become a better person by building positive habits or destroy your life by being dominated by bad ones.

Habits are so powerful due to the compound effect. They compound over time, either positively or not so positively.

With building positive habits, you start small, but when you keep doing it consistently over time, the results begin to compound and work in your favour.

Take meditation, for example. You start by trying to focus on your breath for a few minutes, but your mind wanders everywhere. If you do that for a few minutes every day for a while, it becomes easier, and you are able to focus better and for more extended periods. 

Before you realise it, you are meditating for 30 minutes or more with no difficulty.

Read more: Good habits make you better 

Consistency is key

The key for the compounding effects to work is consistency.

For that, I like the don’t skip twice rule. 

You can miss one day once in a while. We all do. We are not machines, so please don’t treat yourself too harshly when that happens. 

But try not to skip twice in a row. 

That’s when consistency starts to break. Once you miss something twice, you realise you are not being consistent, and the likelihood of you returning to the path of consistency goes down. 

The more you skip, the more difficult it will be to come back to a positive and consistent pattern.

If you miss something one day, that’s fine, but try not to miss a second day in a row.

Unleashing the power of small actions

Small, consistent changes over a long period have a considerably bigger impact than abrupt and sudden changes.

Don’t underestimate the power of small actions.

You don’t get fit by running a marathon once and not running anymore. You do it by stacking the kilometres and the hours at the gym regularly.

You don’t lose weight by skipping breakfast once. You do it by reducing your calorie intake (and doing exercise), one day in, one day out.

You don’t save money by not spending your full salary in a single month. You do it by saving a little every month.

Little changes compound over time and multiply their effects.

The key is to maintain consistency over a long enough period.

Compound effect on writing

I started writing for this blog in 2020, during the covid lockdown, and it helped me stay sane in all that craziness.

Back then, I only wrote two or three articles a month and used most of my weekends for it. I lived alone and couldn’t leave the house, so that was fine.

When the pandemic was over and my social life started back in earnest, I couldn’t dedicate enough time to writing, and my cadence and regularity suffered. In some months, I only wrote one post, and there were months without a single post published. 

I loved writing, but I couldn’t keep the practice going. 

Then I realised that I just needed to write every day, even if it was a little bit, and the compounding effect would do the rest. I just needed to be consistent enough for a long enough time.

I started waking up earlier and writing a bit every day. I would continue writing more over the weekends, but I’d try to also write during the week, and so I did.

I now sometimes write 15 minutes in one day, other days 30, but the secret is I write something every day. This has made my writing to come easier for me, so it is not only that I dedicate more time to it, but I also write more in less time.

My writing productivity has increased, so I now write a long-form article like this once a week, plus shorter-form posts on LinkedIn every working day, and that’s because I just write a little bit every day.

Compounding success

This is just an example. There are many more out there.

Compounding can be a great ally and friend of yours if you use it wisely.

The secret is to realise that small little changes, if enacted for long enough, can have huge effects, both for the better and worse.

This realisation, if used correctly, can be of great help to anyone. Compound effects can be applied to finance, health, personal growth, or to any other aspect of life.

It can be used to build small habits that will improve your life or stop the ones that are destroying it.

Compound effects are powerful, so use them wisely!

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Personal Growth is the fourth and last Leadership Quality of the Future Leader

To learn more about developing this Leadership Quality, read How Coaching Exercises Can Help You Develop into a Successful Future Leader

Personal Growth is the foundation of successful leadership. 

It always has been. In a world that is more VUCA every passing day, the ability to unlearn old skills and learn new ones will gain importance and criticality. The future leader will have to be obsessed with their personal growth and that of their team members to be successful. 

We have already touched on the other leadership qualities of the future leader (Future Ready, Purpose, and People Skills). Here we will go deeper into Personal Growth.

Why Personal Growth is critical for future leaders

Think about the leaders who inspire you the most. Chances are, they’re the ones who have continuously worked on their personal growth skills.

You cannot stay still in a changing world. 

Leadership is a complex and multifaceted discipline, a very demanding one at that, and it requires its practitioners to keep updating themselves, their skills and their views on the world constantly. If we add to leadership the future dimension in an ever-changing world, this requirement to continually grow and learn is even more essential. 

There cannot be a great future leader who isn’t constantly learning and developing themselves and their teams. 

How to work on your personal growth

First, a caveat: we are human beings, not machines. 

We can do many things to learn and improve, but there are some limits.

If you read social media and many publications today, many people don’t seem to have received the memo, and they treat people like machines. There is a hustle culture with an excessive focus on productivity, working a lot and filling the hours of the day with either working or learning new skills. 

You are supposed to wake up at 5 am, have an ice-cold shower, have introduced two hours of deep work under your belt, and read a chapter of a book by a self-help guru even before you sit down for breakfast. 

This approach is toxic (see the Manifesto against Hustle Culture) and unsuitable for high-performing or high-growing leadership. 

Personal growth is crucial but must be part of a balanced life. 

Having introduced this caveat, let’s look at three tips to work on your personal growth.

Self-awareness, or why you cannot improve what you don’t know

The average person spends more time on their phone daily than they do reflecting on their thoughts and emotions.

We sleep-walk through life without thinking about ourselves and without knowing ourselves well. We lack self-awareness. The thing is, without self-awareness, there cannot be any personal growth. 

You cannot improve what you don’t know. 

Self-awareness means understanding our emotions, traits, quirks, motivations, passions, and intuitions. 

In order to grow, it is crucial to know our final destination, but it is also essential to know where we are starting from. Self-awareness is knowing where our starting point is, who we are today, and who we have the potential to become.

As I explained here, there are different ways to work on your self-awareness, but my favourite ones are asking and receiving feedback, working with a coach, and meditation. 

Good habits are the foundation of Personal Growth

There is a reason why Atomic Habits by James Clear is one of the best-selling books of the last few years. 

Good habits are the building blocks of personal growth and a happy life. We become who we are by showing up consistently, doing the right things regularly, and stopping doing the things that don’t add value to our lives. It is easier said than done. reinforcing

Nobody said it was easy, but if you can build the right habits for yourself and stop the harmful ones, you will be on the right track.

Little tiny atomic habits bring tremendous results if you keep at them long enough. Consistency is key here. Good habits compound over time, like a savings account with interest, so small changes can have a considerable impact.

As I explained in this post based on James Clear’s book, there are four laws to consider when building good habits (or stopping bad ones, the process is the same):

1st Law – Cue: Make It Obvious

2nd Law – Craving: Make It Attractive

3rd Law – Response: Make It Easy

4th Law – Reward: Make It Satisfying

Follow these rules, and you will build healthy and positive habits, and as you do so, you will progress in your personal growth journey. 

Sharpening the saw

In his classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey gives the seventh and last habit an extremely apt name: Sharpen the Saw.

Like a woodcutter must sharpen the saw to carry on chopping wood and falling trees, so the great leader, the effective manager or the person merely focused on their personal growth must continue sharpening the saw in the four areas of life: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual.

Books and book collections have been written about growth and care in each of these areas, and this is not the place to go deep into each of them. Still, I wanted to highlight here that life goes beyond the mental or physical arena, and there are many different areas to consider. All of them should be taken care of. 

Tools like the Wheel of Life can help us maintain the necessary focus on all critical areas of life. 

Do exercise, meditate, meet regularly with family and friends, read extensively, get a coach or a mentor, write in a journal, study or learn something new, travel around, meet new people, reflect on your emotions… 

Do whatever takes you out of your comfort zone and gives you growth opportunities in each area of life without focusing too much on only one. 

Growth vs Fixed mindset

We cannot finish a post treating the topic of personal growth without talking about growth and fixed mindsets.

Popularised by Carol Dweck in his book Mindset and many speeches, articles and Ted talks, the concept of growth mindset has gained broad popularity in the last few years. Like most powerful concepts, it is simple: some people have a fixed mindset, and others have a growth mindset, and that makes a huge difference.

People with fixed mindsets believe our talents and abilities are innate, so there is not much we can do to improve them. When we fail at something or make an error, it is us, as a person, who fail. The failure is proof of our incapability to do that thing correctly.

People with growth mindsets, on the other hand, believe our talents and abilities are acquired, and we grow them through hard work, learning, living experiences, and, yes, by making mistakes. A mistake or error is not a failure or proof of anything, only a new opportunity to grow and learn.

There is no question which of the two mindsets is more beneficial if we want to develop our personal growth and development. If you see yourself falling in the ways of a fixed mindset person, be aware of what you are doing and try to change your thinking. 

A fixed mindset won’t allow you to grow; a growth mindset will.

Personal Growth is a journey that never ends, and that’s fine

Leaders who neglect their personal growth skills are doomed to fail.

This premise is now truer than ever. It applies to everyone, not leaders only. Adapt, learn and grow, or fail.

The world is changing faster and faster, so we need to adapt more quickly too. That means learning, developing and acquiring new skills.

Personal growth will make you a better professional. It will also make you a better human being, a better partner, friend, and all the other roles you have in your life. 

It will also make you happier. Self-actualisation and the thirst for learning and self-improvement are the highest human need, so we are happy when we learn new things and become a better version of ourselves.

Personal growth never ends, but that’s fine. Personal growth makes us more human and more satisfied with our lives.

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Self-actualisation: what it is, why it is important and how to work towards it.

Self-actualisation is probably the most important element of a happy and fulfilling life you haven’t heard much about. 

Or maybe you have. It is not part of everyday language, but it has been discussed for decades in humanistic and positive psychology circles.

Maslow put self-actualisation at the top of his famous hierarchy of needs as the highest and most sublime need humans can have. Other psychologists have expanded on Maslow’s work in the last few decades.

But what exactly is self-actualisation? And why is it so important? Can it be developed and worked upon?

We’ll answer these and other questions below.

What is self-actualisation?

So many features and dimensions have been added to the concept of self-actualisation over the years that it no longer has a clear definition.

In A Theory of Human Motivation, Maslow defined it as “self-fulfilment, namely the tendency for the individual to become actualised in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.” 

In later writings, Maslow replaced the term self-actualisation with being “fully human”. For him, self-actualisation was the highest human need and being self-actualised meant being fully human or displaying the fullest humanness possible.

Self-actualisation is about being the best version of yourself, having a growth mindset, and constantly wanting to improve and learn new things. 

It is also about self-awareness, listening to your nature and being your true self.

It is a multi-faceted and multi-dimensional concept.

10 characteristics of self-actualisation

Maslow wrote about many of the characteristics of self-actualised people in different papers. The psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman has looked at them in detail, and after testing them and comparing them to existing research, he has grouped them into ten characteristics.

He explains them in his best-selling book Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization and has created a free test to find out how self-actualised you are based on these ten characteristics. 

Let’s have a quick look at these ten characteristics.

Truth Seeking

Self-actualising people like to get to the truth of things and people. They like to find out how things really are. 

For Maslow, truth is one of the most fundamental human values, recognised across all cultures. It is a universal value. 

Self-actualised people are driven by the search of it.

Acceptance

The first person one has to accept is oneself. 

Before being able to love others and be compassionate to them, we need to start with ourselves.

Self-actualised people understand this. They understand they are not perfect, but they accept themselves as they are, with their quirks and desires, without shame or apology.

Purpose

A favourite in this blog, purpose is essential to being a happy and fulfilled human being. It is also an essential part of self-actualisation.

Purpose is about having a mission that goes beyond one’s self-interest, knowing what it is and working towards achieving it.

Authenticity

Self-actualised people are authentic to themselves. 

They accept themselves as they are, so they have no problem with being authentic to their real self, regardless of the situation they find themselves in.

As Barry Kaufman says, they “can maintain their dignity and integrity even in situations and environments that are undignified”.

Continued freshness of appreciation

Self-actualised people enjoy and appreciate the little things in life. 

They are like grown-up children who haven’t stopped marvelling at all the wondrous things life has to offer.

Watching a sunset is wonderful, it doesn’t matter how many you have already seen. So is smelling the earth after a summer rain, listening to a moving song, watching the view from a high mountain, and other million things. 

Others may have become tired of these experiences, but self-actualised people keep enjoying and savouring them as if it were the first time.

Peak experiences

Maslow dedicated much time to studying peak experiences. 

In The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, he defined peak experiences as “transient moments of self-actualisation. They are moments of ecstasy which cannot be bought, cannot be guaranteed, cannot be sought.” 

They can be attained by different means. For example, giving birth to a child can be a peak experience, but so can be working in a flow state on something requiring concentration, finishing a marathon, making love or having a hallucinogenic-induced trip.

Humanitarianism

Self-actualised people have a genuine desire to help the human race to get better. They want to contribute to building a better world and a better society.

Good moral intuition

Self-actualised people know straight away when something is right or wrong. They have a well-tuned moral compass, and they are guided by it.

They don’t need to reflect on it. They just know. 

The right moral intuitions guide them.

Creative spirit

People manifest their self-actualisation through their creativity.

Self-actualised people like and want to create new things. They realise creating things is one of the most human endeavours, and they relish their creative spirit.

They squeeze their creative juices to the maximum.

That doesn’t mean all self-actualised people are artists or that they are the next Leonardo or Michel Angelo. Creativity can be applied to all human activities, not only arts, and we will all apply it in our levels of mastery, without necessarily being the next genius.

Read more: 6 Practical Tips To Unleash Your Creativity

Equanimity

Self-actualised people tend to take life’s vicissitudes with equanimity. 

They take them with grace and acceptance. 

They know that life has ups and downs, which are a necessary part of life, and they accept them as such.

A pyramid that isn’t a pyramid

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has been drawn as a pyramid so many times that it is now difficult to imagine it any other way, but Maslow himself never envisaged it as such.

He thought some needs were at a higher spectrum than others and that you needed to have some basic needs covered before you could aspire to others, but Maslow never envisaged life as a videogame with different levels, where you need to cover one need before you go up to the next one.

Life is more complex and nuanced than that, and so are human needs. 

As Barry Kaufman tells us, “most people are partially satisfied in all their basic needs and partially unsatisfied in all their basic needs at the same time.”

Following up with the videogame metaphor, we are all playing at all levels all the time, depending on our state of mind at the moment. I might be working on my self-actualisation because some of my lower needs are covered, but in specific moments I might feel unsafe for some reason, and my need for safety will need covering.  

The psychologist John Rowan compared Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with Russian dolls: “each larger doll includes all the smaller dolls but also transcends them.” When working on a higher-purpose need such as self-actualisation, the lower-level needs don’t disappear but become integrated with the higher need. 

Self-actualisation is at the peak of the pyramid that isn’t a pyramid. It is the highest-purpose need, but it is integrated with all the rest. 

It includes and transcends them all.

Why is self-actualisation worth pursuing?

Self-actualisation is the higher need we humans can have, so it is essential to being happy and satisfied.

It is as simple as that.

It is what we are meant to do, but we often go astray and lose our ways. Self-actualisation is your way to go back to what you were supposed to be doing. 

All babies are born with the desire and urge to grow and learn. During the first years of their life, toddlers and little children are sponges absorbing all kinds of knowledge and new skills. They explore the world and become better at being human beings.

Then most of us lose that urge and become stuck in adulthood. We get stuck in a job we don’t like, relationships we don’t enjoy, thought and behaviour patterns that make us unhappy, and unhealthy habits. We don’t learn new things, we don’t create anything new, we don’t grow.

We get stuck.

We don’t let our self-actualising nature express itself, so we wither and wilt like an untended plant.

Self-actualisation is worth pursuing because it will make us feel alive and bring a higher purpose to our life. 

It is what will give us real and profound joy.

How to self-actualise

All this is great, but how do you self-actualise? Is it possible to become a self-actualised person?

First of all, self-actualisation is an ongoing process, like life itself. There is no final destination where you suddenly arrive, and hey, presto, you are now self-actualised. 

You constantly self-actualise, but there is always room for improvement. It is a process of continuous becoming rather than being.

You can do different things to work on your self-actualisation, to work on this continuous becoming. 

The ten characteristics mentioned above would be the best starting point. Just look at them and reflect on how you do against each. 

In some, you will do great; in others, not so much, but that’s OK. You will then know now where to start.

Once you do that, you can focus on the three areas below. 

Know thyself

Self-actualisation is about following your nature, about being your real self. It’s about doing what you are supposed to do and not what your parents or society expect from you.

To do that, first, you need to know yourself well. You need to know who you are. You need to be self-aware. 

There are different ways to know yourself better, like asking for feedback from others or using the services of a coach. I explained them well elsewhere, so I won’t discuss the details here.

Another good option is to carry out the test on self-actualisation I mentioned above. By doing so, you will gain self-awareness in general and in all the specific dimensions of self-actualisation, so you will know where to focus more.

Once you know who you are, you just need to be yourself. Find your purpose, what you are meant to do, and try to live according to your authentic nature. 

Be creative

Creativity is one of the most human features. 

Creating things gives us purpose and meaning, so it can be highly satisfying. It is also fun.

All human beings have their own creative impulse. Don’t ever believe you aren’t creative.

We all are. 

So, create new things, build them, test them. Try and experiment with new things. Play an instrument, draw, paint, mould clay, write, try a new method or process at work, or, why not, start your own blog. 

Express your creativity the way that feels best for you. We all have our own different ways of being creative. 

Find yours.

You will know what it is when you do it.

Don’t stop learning

Learning is the source of one of the biggest joys in life, but it is an unappreciated joy for many.

Don’t be one of those many. Appreciate the joys learning brings.

There is so much knowledge, so many skills, so many interesting facts, so many valuable tips… so many things to learn out there, that you can learn something new every minute for the rest of your life, and you will still have plenty of things left to learn. 

But that’s fine, it’s not a race.

The self-actualised person doesn’t compete with anybody else, only with him or herself. They want to become the best version of themselves, get as close as possible to their potential as a human being.

To do that, the self-actualising person needs to keep learning and improving. 

They keep learning not because they must so they can get better but because of the joy it brings them. 

Learning is not a means to an end; it’s the end itself.

Towards full humanness

For Maslow, self-actualisation meant being fully human. 

Working towards self-actualisation means working towards full humanness. It means being the best version of ourselves, making the most of our most human capabilities.

It means listening to our inner self, knowing who we really are, and using that knowledge to live the life we are meant to live. It also means being creative, never stopping learning new things and living by our values.

An ideal world would be one where everybody, the entire population, was encouraged and had the time and everything they needed to work towards their self-actualisation. 

A better future would be one where self-actualisation was a value and a state of mind cherished by society, where we all made an effort to be the best version of ourselves.

It is a distant future, but not impossible. We are born to self-actualise, but some of us forget about it. We can build a society where we don’t forget it, and everyone is allowed to live the life they are meant to live.

Wouldn’t it be great to live in such a world? 

Definitely!

It is in our hands to build it. What are we waiting for?

Read also: Why self-actualisation is the key to building a happier world

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“I think we have a lot of self-limiting beliefs. And the self-limiting beliefs, a lot of these come from inside us. Basically, I can’t do this. I can’t do that. This is just the way I am. One of the most common problems is, this is just the way I am as if we have some “real” fixed identity that lives throughout time. And I have to really work on people to change that. Even smart people say things like this, “I can’t listen. I can’t listen. I’ve never been able to listen.” I’ll look in their ears. “Why not? You got something stuck in there? Why can’t you listen? Do you have an incurable genetic defect that is prohibiting you from listening?” As long as we tell ourselves, “That’s the way I am.” Two things happen, both bad. One, we inhibit the odds of ever getting better. Two, even if we do change our behavior we don’t seem authentic to ourselves. We feel like a phony because if the real me can’t listen and you say, “I’m a good listener. You know what I’m thinking?” Well, that’s not the real me. I’m just pretending to be a good listener because the real me is no good at that.”

I heard these words from the famous leadership thinker and coach Marshall Goldsmith in The Knowledge Project podcast, and I realised I hadn’t written about limiting beliefs in Humane Future of Work. It is time to amend this important omission. It is an oversight for a site that prides itself on building a better Future of Work through improved leadership, the power of coaching and helping its readers in their personal development journeys. 

You see, our beliefs are one of the most important forces shaping our worldview, and when those beliefs limit our understanding of what we are capable of, they become one of the biggest barriers to our success and growth.

The good news is that limiting beliefs can be worked upon and transformed into enabling ones. Let’s see how.

We all have limiting beliefs

We all have beliefs about the world surrounding us, as otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to function. We all have empowering beliefs about ourselves that make us stronger and better. We all also have limiting beliefs that make us smaller and less capable of dealing with our problems.

I tend to see myself as a shy introvert who doesn’t set a room ablaze with funny jokes. I also believe I am not good at selling or doing anything with a commercial smell. I believe I am not good at presenting to big audiences and that I don’t have anything interesting to say anyway, so why would anyone want to listen to me? (writing is another matter, it’s much easier for me, as I don’t see my audience)

All these are limiting beliefs. There may be some truth to them, or so I think, but maybe not. They are only true inasmuch as I make them true. Limiting beliefs are like self-fulfilling prophecies: they are true as long as you believe them. They will limit you also as long as you believe them. The moment you stop believing them, they stop limiting you.

Limiting beliefs are so ingrained in our worldview that it is difficult to overcome them by ourselves. They are blind spots. It’s as if we were sitting on top of them, and as such, we couldn’t see them until someone else pointed them out to us. Then we get an aha! moment and ask ourselves how we didn’t see them before.

This is why the help of a coach, mentor, or a frank friend we trust can be helpful to overcome our limiting beliefs. 

When coaching, we often work on limiting beliefs because of their impact on personal development and performance. Coaches help their clients overcome their limiting beliefs and demolish the barriers they create through powerful questioning or the use of tools such as the Ladder of Inference.

The Ladder of Inference

We can use the Ladder of Inference to combat our limiting beliefs and convert them into enabling ones, with external help or on our own. It is called a ladder because it describes, step by step (or rung by rung), the thinking process we go through to move from facts to an action or a decision. This process is often unconscious, and beliefs are formed at the last steps of the process (see picture below).

When something happens, or we are faced with some facts, there are some filters between those facts and the decision we make about them. First, we are not omniscient and cannot perceive everything that happens around us. We never have all the facts, and even from those present, we can only select just a few, as we cannot process all the information in front of us. We select certain facts and discard others. 

Then we interpret those facts in a certain way based on our way of thinking, our previous experiences, and many other factors, including our existing beliefs. Based on those interpretations, we make some assumptions and then get our conclusions. Those conclusions, if reinforced adequately, will help us develop our beliefs about the world, and based on those beliefs, we will then decide to act in a certain way or other. 

This process is self-reinforcing: the beliefs we develop will have an impact on the facts we select, how we interpret them, our assumptions about them, and so on. Thus, the process is prone to creating both virtuous and vicious circles. 

The Ladder of Inference in practice

Let’s illustrate the Ladder of Inference with an example. Joe is a colleague of yours, and every time you cross each other at the office, he looks away, and he doesn’t say “hi”, even if you have worked together on several projects and he knows who you are. He is rather cold with you. You assume this has something to do with you and the way you behave, and you start to suspect Joe doesn’t like you.

He is not the only one who doesn’t say “hi” or is cold to you, so you must be doing something wrong. You have many good friends but also many people you are indifferent to, and Joe must be one of them. “You cannot be friends with everybody or be liked by everyone!” you tell yourself, and you try to carry on with life, but something inside is nagging you. Some self-doubt starts creeping in, and you ask yourself, “why doesn’t he like me? Am I boring? Or does he think I’m stupid? Maybe I am not a good professional? What did I do wrong?”  

You start to develop some negative beliefs about yourself. Next time another colleague doesn’t say “hi”, you will think it has to do with you, not with the other person. 

When facing any situation like this, it is worthwhile thinking about what rung of the Ladder of Inference you are on and then go back until you get to the base, the facts. In the example above, the fact is simple: “your colleague Joe didn’t say “hi””. All the rest have been interpretations, assumptions, and conclusions based on your pre-existing beliefs.

When you get to the base, you should start climbing up the ladder step by step, asking the relevant questions in each rung: have I considered all facts or selected only a few? What other interpretations are possible? What different assumptions could I make? And so on.

If you do that in Joe’s case, you will realise there are many interpretations of the fact that he didn’t say “hi” to you. Maybe he didn’t see you, or most likely, he is timid, and he has his own self-limiting beliefs and internal demons impeding him from having regular social interactions with his colleagues.

We tend to blame ourselves or look negatively upon ourselves when facing problems with others, but more often than not, this has nothing to do with us but with the issues other people have. 

Rigid beliefs

Apart from limiting, beliefs can also be rigid. “This is just the way I am” is one of the most harmful things we can tell ourselves because it is both limiting and rigid. It implies that you are a fixed entity, with no possibility for change, and whoever you were when you were born, that’s who you still are, and you’ll never be able to change that. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. It’s complete nonsense. 

There are some things you cannot change about yourself. Our genetic inheritance and past experiences limit what we can or cannot do. For example, I will never be an NBA basketball player. I don’t have the necessary height, physical strength or skill with the ball, and it is probably too late for me to start practising and get to the right level now. If I had played basketball for 8 hours every day since I was a kid, maybe I would have made it, but probably I wouldn’t. Some things are out of our reach.

Those things aren’t as many as we think, though. We can achieve much more than we think. With practice, dedication and the right mindset, we can do a lot. 

If we can overcome the beliefs about ourselves that limit us, we will get far. How far? That depends mainly on you.

A word of caution, you CAN NOT be whoever you want

Notice the word “mainly” in the last phrase; it is there for a reason. It is there because where you get will depend mostly on you, but not only. Other people also play the game. There are external factors, luck or lack thereof, natural disasters, you name it. Many things can go wrong, and they often do, even if you have the right attitude and bravely fight all your internal demons and limiting beliefs. 

Positive psychology proponents and self-help books send out the message that if you want to do it and work hard enough, you can make it. You can be whoever you want to be as long as you work for it. This is a laudable message and can help us pull ourselves to reach our maximum potential, but it also has its risks. 

You cannot be whatever you want to be. You can try, and you can get to the maximum of your potential, which should be enough to fulfil you and satisfy you, but we all have our limits, and there are also the external factors we mentioned earlier. Still, aiming to reach your maximum potential and fulfilling your purpose in life is as high as you can aim. That should be enough to give meaning and purpose to your life. 

From limiting to enabling beliefs

That was a bit of a downer, but it had to be said. Having delivered the unpleasant message, let’s go back again to the exciting world of limiting beliefs and how to transform them into enabling ones.

Let’s recap. We all have limiting beliefs. We believe we cannot do something because we couldn’t do it in the past or our parents or high school teacher told us we couldn’t do it. We didn’t have what it took, the right personality trait or the right skill. Skills can be learned, and some personality traits are more fixed than others, but you can always change who you are, at least a bit, and be a better version of yourself every day. 

This means you can overcome your limiting beliefs and see them for what they are: fictions you tell yourself about what you can and cannot do. If that were all, it would be OK, but the problem is that telling yourself you cannot do something ends up becoming true. You can get yourself out of the vicious circle thus created, but it takes time, dedication, and some introspection. 

You can do this with the help of a coach, mentor or good friend with some listening skills and empathy, but if you have neither at hand, you can do it yourself. At the end of the day, you will have to do it yourself anyway; they are YOUR beliefs, so only YOU can change them.

Here is how to do it in an easy-to-follow and step-by-step form:

– Think about the beliefs you have about yourself. What are you good at? What are you bad at? 

– Then take one of the “bad ones” and ask yourself, “where is this belief coming from?”

– Apply the Ladder of Inference to this belief. In what facts is it based? Were there other facts you didn’t consider? What assumptions did you make? Are there other explanations you haven’t considered?

– What would it look like to be good at this skill, competency, or way of behaving? Can you picture yourself doing it? What would you have to do to get to that level? What barriers would you have to overcome? 

The moment you visualise yourself doing it and realise there is a way to get there, even if it will take you hours, weeks, or months of practice and some hurdles to overcome, will be the moment you will realise it is possible. 

The only thing stopping you is your own limiting belief. You put it yourself in your own mind, so you are the only one who can take it out. 

I mentioned above my beliefs about my shyness, not being good at interacting with strangers, not having a commercial mindset, etc. I have overcome some of these beliefs, and I am happy I did. Some others, however, I am still working on them. One thing is to know the theory, and then another to put it into practice, one day in, one day out. 

Nobody said it was easy to overcome your limiting beliefs, but it is worth trying. You can do it, but only if you believe you can.

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We demonstrate who we are by what we do, not by what we think. You may think you are this way or the other, but if what you do is just the opposite of what you say, you will be proving otherwise. We demonstrate who we are in the little things we do every day. We become who we are by keeping some habits and relinquishing others.

Like most things in life, habits compound, like a savings account with interest. When you have a positive habit, its benefits add on top of each other, and they grow exponentially with time. They compound to the positive. Alas, when you have a harmful habit, it also compounds, but to the negative. Its negative consequences add up and become increasingly worse with time. 

This compounding effect means that mall habits can have a significant impact on our life. They can transform our lives profoundly, for the better, or the worse. The trick is to select our habits well and be consistent in keeping them. 

When you select and maintain a good habit, one that makes you healthier, more thoughtful, fitter, or wealthier, you become that better person you want to be. 

Habits are a vital ingredient for a meaningful and successful life, so we are dedicating today’s post to them.

Atomic Habits

Habits are such an essential part of a good life that a book dedicated to them, Atomic Habits, has become one of the biggest best-sellers of the last couple of years. This book is the place to go if you want to learn about habits.

Atomic Habits was published in 2018, and since then, it has sold more than 5 million copies worldwide. The author of the book, James Clear, has dedicated his life to researching, talking, and writing about habits in his podcast and blog. This book is the coronation of his life’s work. 

Clear believes we fail when working on our habits because we tend to focus on goals, not systems. We want to stop smoking, lose weight, save money, or be more productive at work, which is excellent, but we don’t focus enough on what will make us achieve those objectives. As Clear states, “you do not raise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” You might have lofty goals but won’t achieve them unless you set up suitable systems. 

In Clear’s words, personal changes operate at three different levels: outcome change, process change and identity change. They all have their benefits, but the most permanent and impactful change will come at the identity level. Through your regular habits, you are telling yourself and others who you are. Habits are a vote on the type of person you want to be.

From smoker to runner

I agree with Clear here. Linking habits to your desired identity can be very powerful. I didn’t verbalise it in such an explicit way, but this is something that worked for me when I stopped smoking nine years ago.

I was a heavy smoker, of more than a packet per day. I used to wake up in the middle of the night and smoke a cigarette before going back to bed (yes, I know, that’s disgusting, and desperate). I tried giving it up many times, and sometimes I’d stop for a few days, other times for a few weeks, but I’d always end up having a puff, and, in no time, I was chain smoking again. I now realise that at the time, I saw myself as a smoker and didn’t want to change that.

The big change came when I realised I wasn’t a smoker if I didn’t want to be one and could be someone else. I stopped smoking for the 50th or 60th time, and I started running. I enrolled on a 20 km race in Berlin and started training for it. Considering I hadn’t run for more than a couple of kilometres for ages, it was quite an ambitious goal, but I had a few months to train. I swapped a harmful habit, smoking, for a healthy one, running, and this was made possible because I also changed my identity: I went from smoker to runner.

I haven’t smoked since then and have run a couple of marathons and triathlons. The identity change is now complete, and I don’t think I will ever return to smoking again. Never say never, but that’s how I feel today.

The four laws

In his book, Clear mentions four laws for habit creation. 

1st Law, Cue – Make it Obvious

The 1st Law is called Cue, about making it obvious. All habits are triggered by something. Our minds make connections about what triggers certain habits. For example, when I was a smoker, I had to smoke a cigarette after each meal and whenever I was having a coffee. That was my cue.

If you want to maintain a positive habit, Clear suggests making the cues for the habit obvious and easy to spot. It is about being more mindful of our habits, the ones we want to have more of, and creating the right stimuli and cues for them. 

We can design our environments to make the cues for our desired behaviours more visible. This will make our work easier. We need to create the right system to make the flourishing of our desired habits easier. 

2nd Law, Craving – Make it Attractive

Once we have associated a cue with a habit and made it obvious and easy to spot, we need to make it attractive. 

Our minds make links and associations between different behaviours and actions. We can use this to our advantage by pairing actions we want to do with those we need to do. For example, if you want to check your social media but also need to do more exercise, you can create a rule that you will do ten push-ups before connecting to Facebook. This will make our habits more attractive by association. 

Another approach we can take to make our habits more attractive is to join a culture where that habit is appreciated and valued. In my transformation from smoker to runner, I found it helpful to spend more time with friends who were also runners, make running trips, train together, etc. That made this habit stickier and much more enjoyable. 

3rd Law, Response – Make it Easy

Our brains are lazy. Our minds like shortcuts and the path of less resistance. Any action or behaviour will have more chances of becoming a regular habit if we make it easy and it doesn’t feel like a chore or something difficult.

There are many different things we can do to make our habits easy. First, we should reduce friction and the number of steps between ourselves and our habits. The simpler and easier, the better.

We can also prepare our environment to make our desired habits easier. Investing in technology and one-off purchases that will make your future habits easier is also a winning strategy. 

4th Law, Reward – Make it Satisfying

The aim of the first three laws is to enable the creation of a habit by making the behaviours linked to it visible, attractive and simple. The fourth one ensures a behaviour is repeated and becomes a habit. For that to happen, we need to reward it.

An obvious action we can take here is to reinforce the desired behaviour by rewarding ourselves when conducting it. You can give yourself a little treat every time you maintain a positive habit. Our brains are responsive to positive and negative reinforcements, so this will help fix the desired behaviour, and our brain will associate it with the reward, thus craving for it.

Clear also suggests the creation of a “habit tracker” to track habits, see what we do easier, where we have difficulties, etc. This can be helpful at the beginning when you want to fixate the habit, but it might be cumbersome afterwards. It all depends on your tastes: if you enjoy tracking things and are a tracking device freak, by all means, go ahead and track your behaviours too. Personally, this stresses me a bit, and it becomes hard work, so after a while, I stop doing it (basically, this behaviour is not attractive, easy and rewarding enough for me to become a habit).

Stopping bad habits

Stopping bad habits is often more important than creating new ones. Giving up smoking is one of the best things I have done in my life. Luckily, stopping bad habits is as easy or as hard as creating good ones. You just need to follow the inverse process. Thus, the four laws mentioned above are transformed into Make it Invisible, Make it Unattractive, Make it Difficult and Make it Unsatisfying. 

You need to do the opposite of what you were trying to create the habits, and you’ll be fine. 

Why habits matter

We become who we are by our actions and behaviours. When these are regular, we call them habits. Habits sculpt us into the person we become. Good habits create a healthy, productive, satisfied and happy person; bad habits just do the opposite.

As already mentioned, consistency trumps anything else, including intensity and talent, so start small if need be, but be constant, and you’ll get there. 

I am trying to build the habits I want to have in my life, like writing regularly, spending more time with the people I love, exercising, and meditating every day. I try to be as consistent as possible, but there are days when I don’t show up. It happens to the best of us. When that happens, I try not to be too tough on myself, reflect on why it happened and learn from the experience. This is how I work on consistency and integrate my desired habits in my daily routine. 

By working on my habits, I am becoming a better version of myself, or so I hope. And you, what are you doing about it?

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Cal Newport is that rare breed of an academic, the academic with valuable pragmatic ideas. Among other works, he is famous for his book Deep Work, which advocated for focused, deep work, avoiding distractions and shallow work to obtain better results. I wrote about it when discussing the purpose of your job. 

Now he is coming back with a novel idea called slow productivity. 

Shorter working week to the rescue

It all started with burnout. Employee burnout is on the rise, and many are proposing solutions to it, like shorter weeks or working days, for example. Some countries, such as Iceland and Spain, have conducted pilots at a national level to test the idea. Newport argues that shorter weeks or working days don’t arrive at the heart of the problem, which is the volume of work. 

Today’s knowledge worker has more autonomy than any other worker of the past. They are supposed to organize their workload and achieve their objectives. They are owners of their calendars and their tasks. As long as they complete their goals, it doesn’t matter when or how they work. 

That’s the theory, and it sounds great, but this makes ideas like shortening the week or banning emails after work hours futile. If you are supposed to deliver on your work objectives, and these bring about a heavy workload, you will have to deliver that work, regardless of the time you have available. Shortening the week will only make you more stressed, as you will have to do the same in a shorter time or work outside your regular working hours (which is what many people do today).

This is where Newport’s slow productivity comes to the rescue.

What is slow productivity?

As Newport explains in the article linked above, the solution to reduce burnout isn’t to shorten the working week but to reduce the volume of work. The idea is to work less, so people don’t feel stressed and anxious. Simple but genius, right?

As Newport says, “the central goal of slow productivity is to keep an individual worker’s volume at a sustainable level.” The focus is on the quality of the work, not the quantity. He believes that if we reduce the volume to sustainable levels (this assumes the current levels aren’t sustainable, which I tend to agree with), people will become more productive, more effective, less stressed and happier. 

This way, companies will get better results and employees will improve their wellbeing at work. What is there not to like?

This approach is based on the premise that we are currently neither effective nor productive because we are jumping from task to task like headless chickens, trying to do too many things simultaneously. The human brain gets blocked when it perceives it has too many things to do and considers it won’t be able to achieve them all successfully. We get stuck and anxious, so we burn out and don’t get things done. Reduce the workload, and voilà, your results and your health improve. 

As I said, simple and genius. Newport deserves a statue somewhere. But does he? Is his proposed approach feasible?

Some limitations of slow productivity

Managers as the bottleneck

Newport proposes a system by which managers would not inundate their team members with work. They would have to allocate this work smartly and ensure their employees aren’t overwhelmed by it. Here lies the first limitation of this approach: you cannot depend on managers to do more work for a system to work. It will fail. 

Newport explains how the system currently works. He says managers allocate work as this arrives onto their plates, so it doesn’t stay there burning them. So Maria, the Marketing Director, has a new project that needs to be done, and she decides to shove it into Paul, the Product Manager, without considering the latter’s current workload. The latter will have to prioritize and manage his workload, as we all do. It is part of the game, after all. Unfortunately, this is when the feeling of not being able to face the workload, the anxiety, the burnout and the stress arrive and block the employee.

If only managers could wait until the employee’s workload was cleared to give them more work and not stress them too much. This is what Newport proposes with slow productivity, but it is probably asking too much from our managers today. Are our managers ready to work a bit more and organize themselves better to distribute the work to their employees more gradually? Some probably are, but many aren’t. 

The rat race

In this post, Karla Starr makes a good critique of Newport’s proposal and makes her own. She advocates for sustainable productivity instead of the slow sort.  

Starr asks how practical a slow productivity approach would be in our current competitive capitalist system. As she points out, “there will always be assholes who work over the weekend, ruining it for the rest of us”. You can be as slowly productive as you wish, but you are competing with others after all, and if they are happy to be proud members of a hustling and grinding society, they will beat you at their game.

The problem with our current system is that it pits us against each other. You may want to work slower, take care of your wellbeing, and be more productive, but if companies keep rewarding the wrong behaviours among their employees, you will probably end up being on the losing side.

Karla has a point.

Do you work to live or live to work?

We are living in contradictory times. On the one hand, people are quitting en masse in what is called the Great Resignation or are simply Quiet Quitting, so employees are supposed to be making a stand, taking control and deciding about their future.

On the other hand, if you read the comments many people make on LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media, the working environment is more competitive than ever. Many people seem to enjoy being part of a grind and hustle culture. They live for their careers. They live to and for work. 

Hustle culture is real, and it is toxic (that’s why I wrote A Manifesto Against Hustle Culture). There are always more hours to work, a higher salary to be earned, a more senior position to be promoted to… It is an endless rat race, and the most likely prize at the end of it is burnout. 

This is not a recipe for well-being and a purposeful and fulfilling life, just the opposite. It is a recipe for disaster, stress and unhappiness. 

Dress me slowly because I’m in a hurry

In that sense, I’m not sure slow productivity is the solution to the burnout problem created by this hustle culture, but at least it is an attempt in the right direction. 

We are not our jobs. We are much more than that. We are mothers, husbands, cousins, friends, weekend runners, yoga practitioners, avid readers, amateur cooks, armchair experts in many fields… We are many things, and we have many identities. Work is just one of them, an important one for many people, but it is only one aspect of our lives. There are many others as important or, dare I say it, much more important than our work.

And yet, we spend a big part of our waking hours at work, and many people find purpose and meaning in what they do. Work is important, so we should try to make it enjoyable and, at the same time effective and productive. 

Newport’s slow productivity approach brings some solutions but also opens up new challenges and unanswered questions, especially around the practical aspects of it. It may be a bit naïve to think that companies will make an effort to provide more manageable workloads to their employees. We have all been there, and I’m not sure how it would work.

But the idea is good, it has its merits, and we should continue thinking about it. We spent the last few decades doing things faster: eating faster, shopping faster, working faster. It is time we started doing things more slowly again, more deliberately, mindfully, and enjoying them more. 

A Spanish expression says, more or less: “dress me slowly because I’m in a hurry” (vísteme despacio, que tengo prisa). When we want to do things quickly, we tend to do them incorrectly and have to repeat them, so often, it is better to do things slowly to get them done faster. It is paradoxical, but true. 

Let’s start doing things a bit slower at work, so we are more productive and happier. Not everything is about productivity, after all. Wellbeing and happiness are also important, are they not? Slow productivity may not be the final answer, but it is a nice idea in the right direction.

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A few months ago, when I started this blog, I was talking with one of my former managers about a common acquaintance, how he completely lacked self-awareness and how this affected his work and his relationships with others.

“You should write about self-awareness or the lack of it in your blog,” she said half-jokingly.

“I might, one day,” I half-promised.

And here I am.

A few months have passed since then, but I never forgot about that conversation, and I always thought one day I should write about it. I have touched upon self-awareness in other posts (the Man in the Mirror, The Wise Leader, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the Modern Stoic, or How to Overcome Limiting Beliefs), but this time the entire post is dedicated to the topic.

It deserves its space. As we will see, self-awareness is critical.

A New Year resolution

I don’t tend to pick new year’s resolutions (I chose many new resolutions, but why do they have to be in January and not in October?), but this year I am proposing to improve my self-awareness. 

Why? Because it is one of the most important competencies you can have.

It is the source of everything else. If you know yourself well and are aware of your strengths, weaknesses, motivations, emotions, drives, and desires, you are already well on your way to effectively leading yourself and others to success. 

In Ancient Greece, when people visited the Oracle of Delphi, one of the maxims written on the temple forecourt was “Know thyself”. It is the first step in self-development and growth. Know yourself, and then you will understand your purpose and motivations in life, be happy and improve your relationships with others. 

If self-awareness is that important and beneficial, is it something you can learn?

Nature vs Nurture

Like most skills and competencies, there is a bit of nature and nurture when it comes to self-awareness.

Genetics plays a part, and some people are more predisposed, by nature, to be better tuned to how they feel, what their strengths and weaknesses are, etc. 

Nature always matters, but it is never alone. Nurture also tends to play its part, and self-awareness isn’t an exception. The family environment, schools, the books read, the feedback received, mentors and role models… all of this builds up or fails to build a person’s self-awareness. 

So it is a bit of both.

Someone might have the potential to be very self-aware because it is in their genes, but if this skill isn’t honed and promoted, it will not flourish.

On the other hand, someone with a low potential for high self-awareness might work on it and get closer to the potential dictated by nature and display what would be high levels of self-awareness, even if not genetically predisposed to it.

Self-awareness as part of Emotional Intelligence

Self-awareness is the first of five components of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) as per the model of its leading proponent Daniel Goleman.

He believes it is an essential skill that allows those who have it to know how their emotions affect them and others and helps them improve their performance. People with self-awareness also have a better understanding of their values and purpose, which, as I wrote in another post, are key to high performance, fulfilment, and happiness at work. 

In Goleman’s opinion, self-aware people are able to evaluate themselves realistically and honestly, and are usually perceived as self-confident, even if they often have no problems showing their vulnerability (remember, Vulnerability is a Super-Power!), and they display a self-deprecating sense of humour. 

Self-aware people seek constructive feedback to learn more about themselves and improve, whereas people with low self-awareness often mistakenly think they know themselves well enough, so they don’t like to hear feedback that goes against the image they have built about themselves in their imagination. 

It is my own impression not supported by any evidence, so I might be mistaken, but I have the feeling that there is a positive correlation between people with high self-awareness and a growth mindset, whereas people with low self-awareness tend to lean more towards a fixed mindset.

If you are self-aware, you realise you can learn, grow and get better by practising and making mistakes. 

How to be more self-aware

There are different techniques to improve self-awareness.

Here I will focus on three.

Johari Window

The Johari Window is a technique created by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955, and it helps people know themselves and their relationships with others better. The name comes from a combination of the authors’ first names.

It involves an exercise whereby different adjectives describing a subject end up in different quadrants of a box (see figure). There is a public quadrant, also known as the Arena or the Open quadrant, where known to self and known to others match. This is the area in which our view of ourselves and that of others are aligned. 

The second quadrant is the Blind Spot area. This is where there are things about us others know, but we don’t.

The third quadrant, also known as the Façade or the Hidden area, is where there are things known to ourselves but unknown to others. These are our inner views of ourselves, which often we don’t want others to know, usually due to shame and embarrassment. These are things we don’t usually like about ourselves, so we don’t want others to know them.

Finally, there is the Unknown quadrant, with things neither we nor others know about us. 

The first quadrant can be made bigger through feedback, coaching, introspection, or just by conducting this simple exercise with others, making the quadrants two (Blind Spot) and four (Unknown) smaller. This increases our self-awareness.

We can also reduce the third quadrant, the Façade, by sharing more about ourselves with others and displaying our vulnerability, again making the first quadrant, the public one, bigger. This improves our relationship with others.

The Johari window was devised as a therapeutic exercise involving the subject and the people who knew them selecting adjectives defining them, but I don’t think it is necessary to conduct the exercise exactly as prescribed to get some value out of it. It can make us reflect on what we think are our public and façade windows, make the active commitment to reducing the blind window by asking for feedback and wonder what may lay in the unknown quadrant.

Coaching

Coaching is one of the most powerful methods to increase self-awareness.

After all, the coach’s mission is just that, to accompany the coachee on a journey of knowing themselves better so they can grow and achieve their goals. 

As a coach myself, I have been coached by others several times. Every time I have learned deep, meaningful things about myself that previously I was ignorant about. It never fails to amaze me. 

You think you know yourself very well, and bang, it hits you.

There is always something new you didn’t know that makes you see yourself and others in a different light. It is usually shocking and uncomfortable but also rewarding and enlightening. The truth, especially when it is about oneself, isn’t always pleasant, but it is the truth nevertheless, and knowing it will make you stronger, better, happier… you name it. 

A coach is like a mirror that, through questioning, feedback, and different exercises, helps you look at yourself better.

It’s a mirror that reaches hitherto hidden blind spots and uncovers what has been hiding, often in plain sight for all others but you. Coaching helps you reduce the Blind and Unknown quadrants, be more honest with yourself about your Façade quadrant, and question why you aren’t more public about it.

Know thyself, as the Delphi Oracle said. A coach is like a modern oracle, but she doesn’t tell you about your future. She doesn’t tell you anything but asks you the right questions for you to find your answers yourself.

Meditation

I started meditating through an app called Headspace in 2013 or 2014 but stopped after a few months, and since then, I didn’t keep up doing it regularly. I remember I felt good when I did it, but still, I stopped it for some reason I can’t remember. I guess I find it hard to keep some habits, especially if they are the healthy type. 

Then last year, the pandemic kicked in, and I was spending a lot of time alone at home, getting anxious and stressed, so I decided to give it a go again, this time with an app called Waking Up.

It was a great decision. Covid was terrible for so many reasons, but restarting meditation and writing will be something for which I will be forever grateful to this virus.

Meditation has many benefits, and I would recommend everybody to do it, but this post is not the place to extol all its virtues. We are here to talk about self-awareness, and oh boy, does meditation help with it. 

Meditation is about being more present and in the moment, being conscious of your breath and aware of everything that is happening in your consciousness: thoughts, sounds, sensations of the body, images, what you see in your visual field with your eyes closed (it’s never completely black, is it?). 

The first time you try to focus on your breath without concentrating on anything else, you realise how hopeless a task this is. A myriad of thoughts and images comes racing out of nowhere, and you realise you don’t control your thought process as much as you thought you did. 

As you meditate more and more, you start noticing better where your thoughts are coming from, and the images, feelings, emotions, sensations like heat or cold, the energy passing through your body, and the mood you are in… You start to be more mindful about everything happening through your consciousness, as and when it happens.

You begin to get to know yourself and how your conscious mind works better. 

In sum, you start to be more self-aware.

AI in support of Self-awareness

In this blog, we always tend to keep an eye on the future and how things might evolve and change, so I would like to share something I found interesting regarding AI and self-awareness in Pedro Domingos’s The Master Algorithm. 

Domingos explains that there is an enormous amount of data about each of us online, as we all know, but luckily, it is not located in one single place (yet), nor is it accessible to one single agent.

Google has some data about you, Facebook some more, Amazon knows something else, etc. Domingos believes that in the future, we may have all the data there is about us in a USB or cloud, all in one place, and we could ask the Master Algorithm (this will be the master of all algorithms, the one unifying all the rest, that hasn’t been created yet) to interpret the data for us and tell us who we really are.

In similar lines, Yuval Noah Harari argues in his works Homo Deus and 21 lessons for the 21st Century that we will reach a moment in the near future where AI and algorithms, based on all the data they have collected about us, will know our desires and what drives us better than ourselves. When this future arrives, we may have delegated all our decisions to machines, as they will know better what is good for us.

This is a scary and dystopian thought, and there are several reasons why I think (or hope) we may never end up there, but this is a discussion for another post.

What matters here is that as AI gets better and gets to amass data about us in one place, we may reach a moment when we could get some AI to help us increase our self-awareness. AI would analyse the data, how we did in certain meetings, how we are doing in our work, how we feel about it, etc., and give us advice, some pointers, tell us about our blind spots, etc.

It would be like an artificial mentor but with much more data about us than any human could ever have.

But I think we are still far from this, if we ever get there.

Before we get to that time, we’ll have to continue working on our self-awareness through the old means: introspection and reflection, seeking and interiorising feedback, coaching and mentoring, meditation, and tools like the Johari window. 

And you, how self-aware are you? What are you doing to improve your self-awareness?

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As I already argued in the post called I am a citizen of the world, the world is getting smaller.

We are not travelling much at the moment, and there has been a push towards localism and protectionism in the last few years, but thanks to the internet, cheap travelling, the rise of immigration, and an increasingly integrated global economy, we are more exposed to other countries and cultures than ever before in history. 

Each culture has its own ways of looking at and functioning in the world.

Some cultures (like mine, I’m Spanish) have a more fluid concept of time than others (Germans, for example). Some are more individualistic, others more collectivistic; some are more formal, others informal; some prefer to communicate directly, others indirectly, and so forth.

No culture is better than others. They all have their good and bad things, their advantages and disadvantages.

In this increasingly smaller world, we work and interact more often with people with different views than ours, so cultural agility will become a critical leadership competency. 

The leader of the future will be culturally astute, agile, and sensitive. She will display cultural intelligence.

Leading and Coaching across Cultures

A couple of weeks ago, I finished a training course on Leading and Coaching across Cultures by Philippe Rosinski.

Philippe is the author of several books on the topic and has been a coach and consultant on cross-cultural issues since the 90s. He has created several interesting concepts, such as the Cultural Orientations Framework (COF) and Global Coaching (coaching with a holistic view focusing on the physical, spiritual, managerial, psychological, cultural, and spiritual aspects). Apart from his evident expertise, he is a very approachable, nice, and down-to-earth man.

In the COF, there are 17 cultural dimensions where we display our preferences and abilities.

These dimensions relate to our communication styles (formal/informal, direct/indirect), thinking modes (deductive/inductive, analytical/systemic), concept of time (scarce/plentiful), organizational arrangements (hierarchy/equality, competitive/collaborative), and so on. 

Like many other things in life, the critical step here is not to learn the theory but to increase your self-awareness and be more aware of others.

Learning by heart the etiquette and customs of every country you will be visiting can be helpful, but it can only take you so far. Understanding the underlying preferences of the people from the culture you are seeing and how this differs from your preferences, on the other hand, is more helpful and can be easily applied across different cultures.

As an example, I am quite direct and have low context in my communication style.

This means I like to tell it as it is without adorning much what I am supposed to say, and I expect others to understand what I am saying and act upon it. There are other cultures, for example, in Asia, where I happen to live now, where direct communication can be seen as too harsh or aggressive and can cause others to lose face.

I can offend others without even realising it. 

High-context communicating cultures (like Asian ones again) convey their messages with much more than their simple words, like, for example, symbols, gestures, etc.

I suspect my colleagues in Singapore, India, or China have often sent me subliminal messages that I didn’t get at all due to my low sensitivity to high-context communication.

I am not used to it; so many things escape my attention.

Italians and Spaniards are different after all

I saw a clear example of this when I started my previous job in 2015 in the Mediterranean region.

We were reorganising our structure, and for the first time, Italians and Spaniards were going to work together as part of the same regional organisation. An Italian leader came to me, visibly upset and complaining about a Spanish colleague.

I asked him what had happened, and he replied something like this:

“This guy from Spain has sent a rude email to his new team in Italy. He asked the manager in Italy to send him an org chart of his organisation, can you believe it? This is outrageous!”

He was clearly agitated and upset, but I didn’t understand why.

I replied like this:

“But isn’t he the new manager? He is just asking for an org chart to get an idea of the organisation, who reports to whom, who is in the team, etc. I think it is a normal request. Why are you so upset?”

His response was enlightening: 

“You don’t ask these things like this. It is a lack of respect. The managers in Italy and Spain were peers until now. The Spanish one has been promoted and is now the manager of the Italian one, but the latter has been in the company for longer and deserves some respect. The Spanish manager should have come to Italy and start building the relationship. They should have a meeting, have lunch together, he should meet the team personally. Once that is done, he can ask the org charts and all the information he needs.”

This was a great lesson for me.

Many people believe Italians and Spaniards are quite similar (Mediterranean, passionate, we like good food and long meals, similar languages, etc.), but we are culturally different. It seems Italians use a more high-context communication style than Spaniards.

The Spanish manager just wanted to get some information, so he asked for it as he knew, explicitly and directly. Italians, with their high context, looked at much more than the words uttered: how they were uttered, in what context, in what medium, and so on, and they got a completely different message. 

Who was right, and who was wrong? Nobody really.

They just looked at things in different ways, and there was a disconnect. If this can happen between Italians and Spaniards, what other misunderstandings can occur between farther away and more dissimilar cultures?

The margin for a relationship-damaging faux-pas is huge.

Leveraging differences across cultural dimensions

We all have different ways of looking at things.

We have unique individual characteristics linked to our personality, but also perspectives, preferences, and mindsets related to our culture.

We all belong to different cultural groups (ethnicity, country, region within a country, profession… even companies have their own culture) that give us different ways of thinking, communicating, and looking at the time, hierarchy, or the importance of relationships over tasks.

None of these cultural preferences is better than others; they all have their good and bad things.

I may think communicating directly is clearer and more effective, but indirect communication can be more appropriate in some circumstances and will probably help maintain the harmony of the team better. Understanding the advantages and drawbacks of both communication styles and being able to decide when to use each can be very helpful.

Cultural agility will be one of the main competencies a leader has to master to succeed today and in the future.

A culturally agile person is self-aware of her cultural preferences and abilities but understands other preferences can be useful depending on the situation and the people she needs to interact with. She will have a broader range of options to face different challenging situations.

Cultural agility is not only about understanding differences but leveraging them. It is about making the most of all the possibilities a broad palette of cultural choices offers.

Since that episode with my Italian colleagues, I learned that there are different ways to communicate with other people and that when you talk to someone, you convey a message with much more than your words.

Believe it or not, I wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time.

I think that episode helped me not only to work better with Italians but to adapt better to my life in Asia. 

Living in Asia, you get exposed to a dizzying array of cultural differences, working and socialising with Singaporeans, Chinese, Indians, Vietnamese, Japanese…

They are all very different from Spanish and among them too.

I made plenty of mistakes, and there have been plenty of misunderstandings along the way.

Still, every day I learn something new, and I expand my personal toolkit with different ways to respond to situations, get things done, and communicate with people. Every day I get better at leveraging differences for my own and other people’s benefit.

Every day I’m getting richer, not in money, but in internal resources to face the challenges life puts in front of me, and I love it!

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As an HR professional, I have always been interested in people development, so three years ago, I decided to get some training on coaching. I learned many interesting and useful things in that course, and it actually changed the way I looked at life. One of the most surprising things I learned was the importance of being aware of our vulnerability and expressing it to others. Vulnerability is an underrated super-power that we should be using more often.

I thought vulnerability was a form of weakness, something to be avoided. Consciously or unconsciously, I always wanted to be seen as strong, as the best at doing something, as the smartest one, as someone who didn’t cry or didn’t talk about feelings. Why? I’m not sure, and I don’t remember anybody teaching me this as a value, but I guess I thought that was the way I had to be. I had to be always seen as strong, infallible, and unperturbable. 

In that blessed coaching course, we learned that all human beings are vulnerable by nature. We all are, and that’s fine. That’s perfectly fine. Being aware of our vulnerability allows us to face the challenges life puts in front of us in a different, better way. It gives us more humility and compassion towards ourselves and others. Showing our vulnerability makes us more open and approachable to others. It helps us connect better with others.

Before this course (and even still today, I am not fully graduated in vulnerability yet; it’s a long journey), I thought that if I was seen as strong or as the best at something, people would love and respect me more. I would try to hide emotions like sadness and fear because they would make me be seen as vulnerable and weak. Now I know that the opposite is true.

When you try to hide your sadness or fear, as I often did, and I still do, people see through you. You think they don’t, but they do. People usually can perceive how you feel. They also notice you are trying to hide something. Some people may find this cute, but many others will wonder why you are trying to hide something you are feeling and it is clear for all to see. 

The real strength comes when you are sad, anxious, or afraid of something, and you are strong enough to realise it and admit it to yourself and others. That’s showing vulnerability and being vulnerable, and it is a sign of strength, not weakness. It will bring you closer to others, not farther away. People will love you more, not less. 

A poet’s vulnerability 

I prefer to borrow someone else’s words when they are able to express something much better than me. The poet David Whyte has written some beautiful words about vulnerability, that you can find here (I recommend listening to the audio, where he reads the lines himself; his voice and pronunciation are wonderful).

The first lines go like this:

“Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.”

We are all vulnerable. It is our natural state, so trying to run from it is pointless. The sooner you accept this, the better. When we are open to our vulnerability, we are open to the vulnerability of others. We are more compassionate, more understanding, more open-minded. Being vulnerable is also the first step to allowing others to help us when we are in need. Real generosity is not only about giving, but also about knowing when to receive. You cannot receive real help without vulnerability.

Let’s continue with Whyte:

“To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances, is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up, as we approach our last breath.”

Feeling powerful over the events and circumstances affecting our lives is an illusion. We may feel like this when we are young, but the tribulations of life put this illusion to rest. I believe we do have some agency in our lives, we can shape our fate and future through our actions, but we are never in full control of this fate. There are many things we cannot control, and that will hurt us and put us on the wrong path. Understanding this and living with it is part of the recognition of our vulnerability as human beings.

How to be vulnerable 

Being vulnerable is about being aware of our defects, weaknesses, and development areas and not being afraid of sharing or showing them to others. It’s about not taking ourselves too seriously and laughing at ourselves now and then. Being vulnerable is about knowing that we aren’t perfect and will never be, but accepting and loving ourselves nevertheless. 

How do we do this? Here you have some tips:

– Be honest, frank, and transparent with others about what you feel, what worries you, what you aren’t sure about, what you don’t agree with, and what you aren’t good at. You may think this will make you look weak and people will take advantage of you, but the opposite is true. By accepting and showing your vulnerability, you are telling others that you are aware of it, it’s not a blind spot, and are strong enough and feel secure enough to put it in plain sight for all to see.

– Practice unconditional love, starting with yourself. Love with strings attached isn’t real love; real love is unconditional. The first person you should love unconditionally is yourself. Many people (I include myself here) are too harsh on themselves and focus more on their failures than their achievements. Love yourself as you would love your partner, children, parents, or best friend: knowing that you are not perfect, but your imperfections are part of you and make you more lovable. Why is this so easy to apply to others, but not to ourselves?

– Don’t take yourself too seriously

– Cultivate self-awareness and introspection. Reflect on your inner being, what you think, what you feel, in what states of mind you are, what you like to do, and what you enjoy… Know thyself. Ask for feedback, talk about your blind spots with people you know, hire a coach, engage a mentor, visit a counsellor… Know, but don’t judge yourself.

– Practice compassion with yourself and others.

– Start a blog or some other creative endeavour. It works for me, at least. I’m showing some vulnerability by writing this post and publishing it for everyone to see, and it feels scary but also liberating.

Vulnerability as a super-power

Talking about vulnerability, compassion, and self-love may sound like spiritual New Age mumbo-jumbo, but it isn’t. It is really a super-power, and it should be part of the future leader’s toolkit or anybody’s toolkit for that matter.

Being aware of our vulnerability and displaying it enhances our Emotional Intelligence (EQ). EQ is about being aware of our and others’ emotional state and managing our emotions and our relationships with others based on that knowledge. By being aware of our vulnerability, we connect better with our inner states and learn more about ourselves. By displaying our vulnerability to others, we connect better with them and make ourselves more approachable.

In a world increasingly dominated by machines and when more and more people are feeling alienated and unhappy, two things are becoming more and more critical: self-awareness and human relationships. Vulnerability helps us in both, as it allows us to connect better with ourselves and with others. That’s why it will be an increasingly important super-power, today and in the future.

Closing words

I hope you can cultivate your vulnerability and proudly show it to the world. That’s what I try to do every day. I’m still learning, though, and I have a long way to go.

I couldn’t think of a better way to finish this post than with the last paragraph from Whyte’s writing:

“The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.”

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