The Myth of Self-Awareness
One reason so many people overestimate their self-awareness is that they conflate it with personality awareness or behavioral feedback. They know their strengths, their Myers-Briggs type, and their Enneagram number. They’ve heard from colleagues that they need to work on listening or that they’re strong in execution. That’s good information, but it’s only part of the picture.
That is the “Doing Side” of the self: how we behave, how we perform, and how we appear to others.
But true self-awareness lies deeper – in the “Being Side.”
The Being Side: Awakening to Your Internal Operating System
Stephen R. Covey once wrote that self-awareness is “our capacity to stand apart from ourselves and examine our thinking, our motives, our history, our scripts, our actions, and our habits and tendencies.”
This is the essence of the Being Side.
It’s the internal operating system that drives our doing. It consists of:
- Our Deep Underlying Motives: Why are we programmed to think and operate in the ways that we do? (e.g., Do we lead to serve or to prove ourselves?)
- Our Nonconscious Scripts: In what ways are we programmed to respond to certain circumstances? (e.g., Do you immediately get defensive when you receive constructive criticism?)
- Our Mindsets: How do we see the world, others, and ourselves? (e.g., Fixed vs. growth mindsets; prevention vs. promotion mindsets)
- Our Automatic Tendencies: What are our automatic ways of responding to challenges, feedback, or emotion?
When leaders only focus on their Doing Side, they may improve skills or behaviors, but transformation, the kind that fuels real leadership growth and culture shaping, only happens on the Being Side.
Why This Matters for HR Leaders
HR leaders shape the soil in which others grow. You are in the business of developing people and cultures. But what determines the depth and quality of that development is not the number of workshops you offer or policies you refine – it’s the depth of your own self-awareness practiced through authentic leadership.
If you operate from unexamined motives, rigid scripts, or unconscious mindsets, those will ripple through your interactions, decisions, development efforts, and the culture you co-create.
For example:
- An HR leader unaware of their fear of vulnerability may unconsciously fuel a performance culture where authenticity is punished.
- An HR leader with a closed mindset is likely to fuel a psychologically unsafe culture.
But contrast that with an HR leader who is attuned to their Being Side:
- They recognize when their ego is driving a decision and recalibrate.
- They can sit with discomfort in a conflict and create space for real dialogue.
- They foster safety because they are safe in themselves.
This is the invisible but powerful work of stewardship. And it starts within.
The HR Leader’s Role in Guiding Deep Development
HR leaders play a pivotal role in shaping the developmental journeys of organizational leaders and employees. You are not just facilitators of learning initiatives – you are cultivators of depth, growth, and transformation.
To be effective in this role, it is not enough to focus solely on surface-level behavior management or performance improvement. True development requires that the individuals you serve – leaders, managers, and team members – become more self-aware. And that process must begin with you.
You can only guide others into greater awareness, emotional maturity, and internal growth to the extent that you’ve gone there yourself. If your self-awareness is only skin-deep, your impact will be similarly shallow. But the deeper you can go into your motives, your scripts, and your mindsets, embracing your authentic leadership, the more powerfully you will be able to facilitate meaningful development in others.
This means doing the personal work to become attuned to your own internal operating system. It means modeling what it looks like to explore the Being Side of leadership: moving from reaction to reflection, from unconscious patterns to conscious choice.
The deeper you go, the more effective you will be. Not because you’ll have all the answers, but because you’ll create the kind of space where others can begin asking the right questions of themselves.
A Personal Moment of Awakening
I once coached an HR leader who prided herself on being calm, collected, and analytical. But her team experienced her as cold and distant. She didn’t understand why.
Through our work together, she discovered that a script from early in her life told her, “Don’t show emotion – it’s a weakness.” That belief, lodged deep in her Being Side, was sabotaging her ability to connect.
As she did the internal work to challenge and shift that script, her leadership transformed. Her team felt seen. Conversations deepened. Trust grew. She hadn’t changed her personality – she had rewired her operating system and embraced her side as an authentic leader.
The Invitation: Deepen Your Being Side
You’re already a builder of people. But to truly guide others toward growth, you must go first. You must become the kind of leader who does the inner work to:
That’s why I’m facilitating an HRDQ webinar designed specifically to help HR leaders deepen their self-awareness along their Being Side. In this immersive experience, we’ll explore the layers of your internal operating system so that you can:
- Lead from authenticity, not anxiety
- Cultivate cultures of safety and trust
- Unlock growth in others by modeling transformation in yourself
Final Thought
You are already influencing the depth to which your people can go.
The question is: Are you inviting them into shallow waters – or are you willing to wade into the deep?
Because the truth is, you can only take others as deep as you’ve gone yourself.
And your organization is waiting for you to go there and embrace your authentic leadership side.
