The Other Side of Leadership: Moving from Authoritarian to Authentic
Robert Palmer, PhD
Awareness is an interesting aspect of our humanity; it is evidence of your brain’s subconscious, unconscious, and conscious work. Awareness is an elusive phenomenon because it’s difficult to understand, yet you’re aware of your awareness to some degree in your everyday functioning (Bargh, 1994). It’s essential to develop your awareness to increase your functioning effectiveness. What happens around you is often based on your relationships, situations, circumstances, and goals. These aspects of your life have a significant influence on your intrafunctioning. You receive constant feedback that you must pay attention to so that you can learn and, therefore, modify your behavior to be a better functioning you. This feedback is critical to your performance in the work that you do and the relationships you have. Your context provides essential information that shapes your reality, but your reality has to be shaped by actuality. Let’s look at what makes up your consciousness and the impact of your reality vs. actuality.
Your consciousness is made up of your unconscious, subconscious, and conscious. It is your awareness of your surroundings, but more importantly, an awareness of something within yourself. Your consciousness emerges from incoming sensory information, and you need to understand what that means regarding you and how you function.
The unconscious is where all your automatic processing occurs. It includes your temperature control, heartbeat, body, brain fluids, and everything you never think about. All this happens automatically every second of every day. The unconscious includes all past events and memories, which are sometimes inaccessible to you no matter how hard you try to remember them. For example, the first word we’ve learned to say or how it felt to be able to walk on your own.
Subconscious
The subconscious is where your memories and impressions are stored. Your subconscious supports your reactions and automatic actions, which can be developed through reinforcement until the behavior achieves habit strength. For example, your ability to drive a car, you practice driving, reflect on your performance, receive reinforcement, and develop your skills. You get so good at driving that your behaviors become habit strength, and you don’t consciously focus so intensely on how to change lanes, which pedals to press, what the road signs mean, or which mirror to look at. Nevertheless, you always know what was done once you think about it.
Consciousness
Consciousness is the awareness of the information you’re reading right now, the sound of the music you’re listening to, or a conversation you’re having. The conscious is what picks up all the little things you notice. For example, maybe there is missing information in what you are reading, all of the thoughts that pass through your mind, the sensations and perceptions from the music, or memories that are triggered. Your consciousness brings into your awareness things that create your experience. Consciousness defines all thoughts and actions within your awareness. For example, the smell of coffee in the morning, a fire in the fall evening, the beauty and fragrant aroma of a red tulip, the sound of a powerful race car, and the feel of goosebumps when you realize something important. Your conscious provides immediate awareness when you take in information from your personality perceiving functions (i.e., sensing or intuition); you take in information, analyze the information, and then make decisions based on your personality judging functions (i.e., thinking or feeling) with this information. Even though you take in information automatically, most people could be better at the analysis part. How do you understand the amount of information, let alone the meaning of the information? If you can’t determine the meaning of the information, how do you know if something is meaningful to you? The key is practicing reflection, keeping a journal, tracking events with a planner, and striving to learn more about yourself and how you function. The perceiving and judging functions are aspects of your personality that we will discuss in the next section in more detail. Another practice you need to learn is distinguishing your reality from actuality.