S elf-awareness is an ever- evolving, dynamic and is, we are unable to teach or develop it. I have been interested in this area for some time, reading books such as Good to Great by Jim Collins, but it was my PhD research that really opened my eyes to what I needed to do to develop the concept and the way I talk about it when teaching coaching programmes at Henley Business School. I was initially made aware of the theory behind self‑awareness during my leadership training to become a Royal Naval officer and then dipped into thinking about it through personality profiles, 360-degree feedback and appraisals. Training to be an executive coach increased my interest even further when I noticed that the harder I worked on myself, the more effective my coaching became. This led to me doing a deeper dive into it and undertaking a PhD centred on research around the subject. complex construct. This can be problematic when teaching on executive education programmes since, if we are unclear on what self-awareness We need to be clear on what self-awareness is to develop and teach it. I use a simple visual model of the construct and present the components as ‘ingredients’, explaining that we need to work on all of them to develop the concept fully. The model I use is a diagram that shows that there are two core components: the inter-personal, ie how we act in relation to others and the intra-personal, ie what is within us, what we know about ourselves (or can discover), but others don’t know. The inter-personal is on top because we do this work in service of leading and managing, but the intra-personal components feed into the inter-personal. The diagram can also support clarification in the difference between self-awareness, self-consciousness and self-knowledge. In this context, self-consciousness is equivalent to the intra-personal components of self- awareness, while self-knowledge is the output or result of self-awareness. I would add a note of caution here, though: the visual that I’m referring to over-simplifies self-awareness because it is not actually as neat and tidy as a two-dimensional box diagram. Instead, it is more like lots of balls of wool all tangled up, whereby pulling on one strand, you find out something about another part of the pattern.
PEDAGOGY
Humans’ ever-evolving nature Self-awareness is not something we can focus on, develop and then be done – it is an ‘infinite game’. We are ever-evolving creatures, always developing and making meaning. I had been under the illusion that there would be a point when my journey was complete, but I now realise that is not the case. We need to keep thinking and reflecting to continue deepening our self-awareness – and for those with a preference for completing, finishing and perfectionism, that is challenging. It is, therefore, something to be returned to continually during business management programmes and executive education courses. We are not as self-aware as we think we are. I say this because most people don’t actually know what self‑awareness is. It is something that is ever‑evolving in nature; the minute we think or say we are self‑aware is often the moment we tip into self‑delusion, self‑deception or hubris. Gaining an accurate insight into how others experience us and our impact on them is challenging because other people often project their ‘shadow’ side on to us. They give feedback based on their filters (their intra-personal aspects) and then we as receivers delete, distort and generalise the information they convey based on what we want to hear. This means we
Business Impact • ISSUE 2 • 2026
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