Adequate Introspection as a Growth Enabler

After some recent conversations with my colleagues, I'm more and more convinced that identifying and accepting flaws in one's own behaviour and skills is a big requirement for self-improvement. During my life I've met multiple people who tend to find the reasons for failures always from circumstances, environment or from other people. This might be a good psychological coping mechanism for safeguarding one's self-image, but it's also pretty bad for self-improvement. People who do not find anything to improve in their own actions rarely do anything to do things differently. Because why would they? It's the other people who should change.

 

Life is hard if you cannot trust others. 

This might also be related to trust. Probably it's not a good strategy to admit and advertise your weaknesses to people that you do not know well. They may use that information against you. That's why building trust is also key for unlocking personal and shared learning possibilities. 

As an example of how things could optimally go, let's think about a well functioning team. When people trust each other and are ok with showing their own vulnerability, they can expose ideas or plans to others and get feedback.When everybody knows that the team is building something together, it's no longer about individuals and their ideas. Ideas are criticised, bent and stretched and built on top of each other. When the best possible solution is found as a result of combined effort, everybody benefits from understanding it. And everybody grows and learns. This is the one of the biggest benefits of well functioning team.

 In a well functioning team people collaborate.

But everything starts with trust and safety. People need to be able to be vulnerable and tell if they do not know something. If they need to wear a psychological armor all the time, (working) life is hard. As a leader you can enable trust by leading by example. Trust others. Tell if you don't know. Ask seemingly stupid questions (that often are not that stupid. No-one else just dares to ask them.) Before you can trust others, you need to be in peace with yourself. And admit that if things that you participated did not go perfectly, maybe you need to do something differently next time.