There are seven famous sayings engraved on the Temple of Apollo in the ancient Greek city of Delphi. Among them, the most widely circulated and the most influential, so much so that only one is considered to have ignited the spark of Greek civilization, and that is: "Man , know yourself”.

Understanding yourself means distinguishing "who you are and who you want to be" and "who the world thinks you are and who they want you to be". Self-awareness and self-understanding Creation is a lifelong process. No one can teach you how to become yourself, how to take responsibility, and how to express yourself except yourself.

So how can a person effectively improve self-awareness?

Today I would like to share with you four key points on improving self-awareness from the book "Becoming a Leader". I hope it will be helpful to everyone.

The author of this book is Warren Bennis, the father of leadership in the United States and a pioneer in organizational development theory. Bennis is an outstanding representative of modern management thinkers in management, especially leadership research and consulting. He has made a lot of achievements, and many of his books have won the McKinsey Best Management Book Award from the international management community. He is known as a leadership master. Over the past 40 years, he has written and edited nearly 30 monographs, more than 1,500 articles, and published hundreds of research papers.

So how can a person effectively improve self-awareness?

The author mainly talks about four points:

1. You are your own best teacher.

2. Take responsibility bravely and don’t blame others.

3. You can learn anything you want to learn.

4. True understanding comes from reflection on experience.

Now I will share with you these four points in detail in four parts.

1. You are your own best teacher.

Why do you say that? What is the purpose of our learning?

Many people may answer this way: We study in order to have knowledge and use the accumulated knowledge as a wealth.

But Bennis offered a different perspective.

He believes that a person does not need to regard accumulated knowledge as a property, but to let himself become another person and learn, not to possess knowledge, but to achieve self-achievement.

Gibb Arkin, a professor at the McIntyre School of Business at the University of Virginia, once studied the learning experiences of 60 managers, and then in a research paper published in "Organizational Dynamics", he found that these Managers' descriptions were surprisingly consistent, and they habitually described learning experiences as a form of personal transformation.

The managers interviewed by Akin mentioned two basic motivations for learning. The first motivation is curiosity, which they described as more like a desire for knowledge, and sometimes Hold their attention until it is satisfied. The second dynamic is role awareness. It arises from a person's perception of the gap between who he is and who he should be.

In other words, these managers know that they have not fully utilized their potential and have not fully expressed themselves. They know that learning is a way out of this dilemma and an important step towards self-expression. , they regard learning as something closely related to themselves. . No one can teach them this in school, they have to teach it themselves. They reach a critical point in their lives when they know they must learn something new, either learn to reinvent themselves, or admit that they cannot fully express themselves.

If you can accept all this, just like those managers, all you have to do is take responsibility for yourself and your own education, and shirk responsibility and blame on the road to self-knowledge. Others are the main stumbling block.

2. Take responsibility bravely and do not blame others.

In other words, a person must be responsible for himself.

In the book, the author cites the story of educator and Disney executive Madi Kaplan.

Today Kaplan is a lecturer at the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School and an accomplished screenwriter and producer.

But he was in his mid-30s when he began his third career as vice president of Disney Productions in the mid-1980s. When he entered Disney, he had a broad social background, ranging from biology to After learning about the Harvard Lampoon Society, he had connections ranging from broadcasting and press publishing to high-level political campaigns.

He knew a lot about many things, but he knew very little about the film industry.

So how did he design his own self-study plan to grow up quickly?

First of all, before entering the work of Disney, he conducted an unexpected study. He watched five or six movies a day for six weeks, trying to see all the successful films of recent years. Then to figure out what would make these movies great, he read every script he could get his hands on. He designed his own course of study in order to gain an understanding of the film industry and film art.

Through this kind of surprise study, he learned that there were about 100 core script writers in this circle, so he systematically read one or two movie scripts from each of them. So in just nine months, he had a basic understanding of the industry.

After making various mistakes in his first year on the job, he found that he could already do as well as his colleagues who had been working here.

He attributes his progress to self-discipline, desire and the learnability of these skills.

He has established connections between his knowledge in the field of molecular biology, politics and the film industry, successfully transferring knowledge and abilities from other fields into existing fields.

Again, it’s his ability to learn in reality.

When he first arrived at Disney, he sat in his boss's office all day long, observing his boss's every word and action day after day.

When the boss talks with script writers and producers, he pays close attention to what they are talking about. When the boss is on the phone, he will sit there and listen, and will hear what people like the boss argue with others, how the boss rejects others, how he agrees to others, and how he avoids others; For months, he kept a small notebook with him so that he could write down everything he didn't understand, any idioms he didn't understand, any jargon, any names, any strategies he didn't understand, anything he didn't understand. financial transactions, etc., and then he would rush off to ask anyone who could give him an answer.

The most important thing is that he does not place the blame on others.

He believed that there was nothing at Disney that he could not learn from, because everything there was new to him. So no matter what it was, no matter how insensitive the people he met, no matter how stupid their ideas, no matter how listless the agents selling him things, he treated it as a chance encounter that would always help him. , because after all, it was the first time he encountered such a situation, and everything was new, so he was fully able to withstand any possible experience.

Once he has learned that what others see as boring and stupid can be avoided, he can begin to filter them out of his own information, until he ends up doing only what he considers useful, important, and able to draw from. Things to learn or have to do.

3. You can learn anything you want to learn.

Giving full play to yourself is another way to learn.

The kind of learning that Kaplan engages in, the kind of learning that the author has just been talking about, is much more than a person's absorption of knowledge or mastery of a subject.

This kind of learning requires simultaneously recognizing the world as it is and what it could become, understanding what you see, and then acting on your understanding.

This kind of learning is a person's reflection on experience.

This is the desire for experience, because people can also be averse to experience and not learn. Unless you are eager to absorb potentially disturbing new things, you will not actively learn.

To some extent this comes from personality preference, which is fearless optimism and self-confidence, and not afraid of failure.

4. True understanding comes from reflection on one’s own experience

Kaplan is not simply watching movies and reading scripts, spending all his time in the company boss’s office. In fact, After completing all of this, he will also reflect on what he saw, read, and heard, and then form a new understanding.

Reflection on your own experiences allows you to have a Socratic dialogue with yourself, asking the right questions at the right time in order to reveal the true meaning of you and your life. Really know yourself.

You can reflect with questions like: What exactly happened? Why does it happen? How does this affect me? What does this mean to me?

In this way you can find and acquire the knowledge you need, or rather, you can regain what you originally knew but have now forgotten.

To a certain extent, reflection is about asking questions that evoke self-awareness.

Until you understand it, nothing truly belongs to you, not even yourself.

Our feelings are raw, pure truth, but that truth is worthless to us until we understand why we are happy, angry, or anxious.

For example, everyone has encountered a situation where their boss yelled at them. At that time, we could only close our mouths tightly, fearing that we might not be able to help but scold our boss back. Then we may yell at a friend who has done nothing wrong. This misplaced emotion interrupts our life and makes her taste bad. This is not to say that yelling and yelling back at the boss is effective. reaction, actually the correct answer is understanding. If you understand what is happening, you will know what to do.

We must learn to reflect on our experiences, and reflection can lead to understanding.

If you want to face the future keenly, you must review the past candidly.

Novelist William Faulkner once told us that the past is not gone, it is not even past.

Each of us contains our own complete life. Everything we have done or seen, everyone we have ever encountered exists in our minds, but by reflecting on all This mental baggage can be transformed into useful experiences that are easy to understand.

People, know yourself.

The great French thinker Montaigne also said: "The most important thing in the world is to know yourself."

It is impossible to live a successful life in a hazy life, just like a rower. , we usually move forward while looking backward, but until we truly understand the past, it is impossible to truly move forward and upward.

True learning is about unlocking potential, and the more we understand about ourselves and the world, the freer we will be to achieve all that we are capable of. By understanding your life, you can make your life truly yours.