“Know thyself” is a famous quote originally attributed to Socrates and later by the 19th century German poet and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Many contemporary authors refer to this quote when punctuating the importance of self-awareness. Indeed, learning how to see yourself as others do is instrumental on the journey of self-improvement. Until we know how we show up, it is difficult to affect or improve our presence. Unfortunately, most people never read the entire Goethe quote. Goethe’s complete quote is translated as, “Know thyself? If I knew myself, I would run away.” This is much more insightful than the partial quote!
Why do most of us try to hide from our real self?
We hide because we are embarrassed. As humans, we tend to key in on the ugliest parts of ourselves, we judge ourselves without compassion and we try to bury any ugliness deep inside so that no one will ever discover it – especially ourselves. The irony is that everyone around us sees us clearly. They know our good, our bad and our ugly. Our teams suffer the consequences of our embarrassment and our desires to bury and hide our bad behaviors.
Executive coaching helps leaders to gain clarity of how they show up at work and achieve goals for personal development. Working with our executive clients we create customized plans to develop skills and behaviors that lead to improved personal performance, helping our clients become the best version of themselves.
Ready to “Know thyself?” Good! Do not run away. Let us help you.
At Dorsey Management Consulting, we help our clients learn new skills and expand their leadership capacity to better lead their organizations into the future. We help leadership teams learn how to work together more effectively and efficiently, enabling them to make sound and timely decisions in pursuit of achieving greater success. We partner with our clients to design and build succession plans and develop their future leaders. We coach executives to achieve higher self-awareness and better leaders of people. We do this in service of learning, helping each of our clients become better versions of themselves and achieving organizational goals.