The Other Side of Leadership: Moving from Authoritarian to Authentic
Robert Palmer, PhD
Your life is all about you, but not the way you think. You don’t know yourself very well. In actuality you’re a very complicated person with layers of experiences where you have engaged in natural and learned behaviors. To be a person of influence is to be a true leader. You need to understand how you function and what influences you to think, feel, and act as you do. The ability to influence starts with your intrafunctioning—the relationship you have with yourself. You are influencing your capability to affect the achievement of your full potential. You can deliberately and knowingly affect how you think and feel and, ultimately, how you act by developing your awareness of two key factors.
1). What is going on around you, and
2). What is happening to you?
It would be best if you made sense of your life. How do you even begin to do that? By understanding what has negative and positive impacts on the way you think, feel, and act, Awareness allows you to function more effectively because you know the effects of what influences you subject yourself to and how those influences impact your identity. You must understand how you process your understanding regarding the difficulties you face, the pain you experience, and any success you achieve. Otherwise, your circumstances alone will define you and undermine your authentic functioning.
You develop awareness through conscious reflection and self-awareness practices. An individual’s full functioning is typically buried under layers of phylogenetically and ontogenically psychological development. Understanding how you function as a person is difficult, especially in the context of your experiences. The continual struggle to understand what is happening around you and what is happening to you requires understanding your consciousness and your reality versus actuality. Several factors play into this struggle: a lack of discipline to focus, mental fatigue, overwhelming circumstances, distractions, high anxiety, stress levels, low energy, dehydration, lack of sleep, and the ultimate—fear all keep you from learning how you function. In addition, everyone has blind spots and lives in false realities. You lie to yourself. Your feelings lie to you. Family and friends lie to you. The media lies to you. The misinformation can be so overwhelming that it stifles you, limits you, and helps you be dysfunctional. Awareness is the first step to changing you from dysfunction to functioning. You must be aware of what is happening around you and what is happening to you.