Vertical Growth

8Overcome numbness and denial

‘It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.’

Marcus Aurelius

We've now explored the centre of the Mindful Leader Matrix, self-awareness and self-regulation, and the operating system that moves us either towards or away from our values. Now let's dive deeper into the left side of the matrix to better understand the dynamics that move us away from our values. This is where we begin to systematically ‘make object’ the fears, attachments, assumptions and behaviours that move us away from our aspirations, or the talk we are trying to walk as leaders.

Carl Jung, one of the fathers of modern western psychology, spoke of the ‘shadow’ in relation to our capacity to hide from ourselves and deny our own behaviours, thoughts, feelings and beliefs. We keep them in the shadow of our mind through defence mechanisms such as numbing, denying, blaming and justifying, instead of bringing them into the light of our awareness. Yet literally everything we are subject to is held in the unconscious, which is why Jung was so insistent that we work on the shadow element of our unconscious in order to grow and rediscover wholeness. In adult development language, we would say that until we make our shadow object to us, we will continue to be subject to it. In other words, vertical growth depends on our willingness and ability to look at and work with our shadow. The shadow is what we explore on the left side of the matrix.

In chapter ...