Self-Awareness and Spiral Learning
A crucial part of self-development and emotional maturity, self-awareness is what allows us to connect with other people and ourselves more authentically, with greater complexity and nuance.
By being ourselves, we are already the experts – we know ourselves better than anyone else, so how do we get to know ourselves more deeply?
Spiral learning is a useful model of how we can deepen our self-awareness. Spiral learning refers to a way of learning in which key concepts or themes appear over time but gradually deepen in complexity or in how the new learning is applied. In can feel like you’re going backwards, by re-visiting old themes, but the new learning may be a deeper and richer experience. In coaching it means looking for developmental themes.
I’ll share an example of how this can show up in the self-awareness journey, a common one that maybe you’ll relate to.
Imagine being a young person in school and lacking confidence around giving presentations at school. You may work through this very specific issue in a number of ways but let’s imagine you try the plan of just buckling down, working extra hard, getting it done, sweating buckets but giving the presentation. You got the job done, right? So that’s good.
Fast forward, and you’re now in a role where you have to give presentations regularly for work, let’s pretend you work in marketing, so you have to deliver pitches. Here comes the fear again and the lack of confidence. This is different from the last time because the frequency with which you give presentations is much more. You address this fear by developing expertise in your area. You work very hard to make sure you’ve prepared for every rebuttal, every possible question, you ARE the expert after all. And with experience you become very good and eventually confident because you are competent.
Fast forward again, you are now an entrepreneur and creating your own business, and again shows up the lack of confidence. ‘Ugh! I thought I’d dealt with this! I just don’t get it, I’ve given a million presentations, why is this showing up again?’ You then goes to therapy where you learn about some of the formative experiences that have been shaping your confidence and self-concept, you read some good books, become more reflective and develop a much deeper understanding of where that lack of confidence started for you.
Things go really well for a while, and you’re super glad you did all that work, but really you want to focus on how this specific issue is showing up in your heart-centred work so you decide to work with a coach. With this level of self-awareness, it’s a much different coaching experience that the same version of you working on the first presentation – what worked then, probably won’t work now. The buckling down and doing it worked, so did the protection of becoming an expert, and while the therapy chapter felt like going back to go forwards, it really helped too.
So what’s next?
We can look at this theme – of confidence and voice – across time and across domains of your life (if it’s showing up in one domain, guess what? It’s probably in others too) and envision what the future could look like. We can acknowledge where that lack of confidence began and start to have an awareness of the self developing over time. We can start to bolster a sense of self that can hold the complexity of the history with compassion, the future with intention, and the present moment with clarity, calmness, and compassion. That clarity and compassion could be called wisdom, or experience, or authenticity but the roots are the deepening of self-awareness and complexity.
Self-awareness is not like reading the book about yourself and now you know it. You are complex and dynamic and so is self-development. Along the journey we may work on self-care and self-compassion which only serve to support on the path to deeper self-knowing.
Most of us have a drive to live more authentically, or feel in some way that we’re not quite there yet, or that something is a little bit off or missing. This life journey is complex, and no one gets through it without some real hardships. The work of peeling back the layers, via self-directed learning, therapy and/or coaching is not always easy or smooth, because it’s not a straight-line, it’s a spiral - a spiral of self-awareness that allows us to live with greater authenticity, confidence, and self-compassion.
