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Welcome to Episode 90 of The Non-Anxious Leader podcast. I'm Jack Shitama, and before we get started, I want to share that I have been on hiatus in The Non-Anxious Leader Network. That is a closed community that's free, where we can share and learn about how we are growing as non-anxious leader.

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This weekend I posted a summary of Chapter 2 of my book, If You Met My Family, You'd Understand. This summary was done by a reader of my book who is a college professor and who started a study group to go through each chapter week by week. I'll be sharing one chapter a week in The Non-Anxious Leader Network. These summaries are free and you can listen to each chapter for free on this podcast, starting with Episode 56. I have to tell you, I am amazed and impressed at how well these summaries are done, how well they lay out the information on family systems theory.

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So even if you don't read the book, I think you'll want to have them just as a way to go through the material and process it for yourself. And to get those, you can go to network.thenonanxiousleader.com. And without further ado, here is Episode 90 on self-awareness and intentionality.

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This past week, I joined the book study that I just mentioned in the introduction, and it was great to hear about how people were applying family systems successfully (and sometimes not).

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And if you're thinking that you don't do well at leading through self-differentiation or being a non-anxious leader, there's nothing better than to get together with other people who are trying to do the same. You will be reminded that as often as not we fall into old patterns and that's OK. This episode will help you to figure out how you can make progress.

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Near the end of the study, the leader introduced Chapter 8 from If You Met My Family, You'd Understand, and he shared his beautifully crafted summary. As I mentioned in the introduction, he also noted that he was really not clear on what intentionality meant. I use the phrase that you need self-awareness and intentionality to function as a self-differentiated person and a self-differentiated leader. And he wasn't exactly clear what intentionality meant. And so he took a stab at it. Now, it's not like he didn't Google it and try to figure it out, but if you Google the term intentionality, you will likely get sucked down the rabbit hole of how the term is used in philosophy.

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And if that's the case, you'll have a hard time understanding how this would apply to being a non-anxious leader. I'm always looking for a good topic for this podcast, and I realized that I needed to be clear on what I mean when I say self-awareness and intentionality. I will get to the intentionality part, second, but let's start with self-awareness.

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I'm going to reference an article from the Harvard Business Review called "What Self-awareness Really Is and How to Cultivate It." I will put a link in the show notes. But according to this article, there are two types of self-awareness. The first is internal self-awareness. This is how clearly we know our own goals, values, strengths, weaknesses, etc., as well as their impact on others. And according to this article, internal self-awareness is associated with higher job and personal satisfaction, happiness and social and personal control.

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Just as importantly for the non-anxious leader, it is negatively correlated with anxiety, stress and depression. This type of self-awareness is essential to being a non-anxious presence. It enables us to clearly understand who we are, what we believe and what we are working towards. It helps us to be clear about self-definition as a component of self-differentiation. The second type of self-awareness is external self-awareness. This is the ability to understand how others view us in terms of the same factors already mentioned, such as goals, values, strengths and weaknesses.

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According to the Harvard Business Review, those who have higher levels of external self-awareness are better at showing empathy and perspective taking. I take this to mean that people who have higher external self-awareness are better at showing cognitive empathy, which is the ability to understand where another is coming from, also known as perspective taking. I also take this to mean that those who have higher levels of external self-awareness are better at showing empathic concern, which is the good kind of empathy.

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I break empathy down fully in Episode 35, which I will link in the show notes. An interesting thing that they do in this article is they show a two by two grid that shows different configurations of people based on whether they have higher levels of internal and/or external self-awareness. In the lower left corner of the grid are what they call "Seekers." These are people who have both low internal self-awareness and low external self-awareness. According to the article, they don't know who they are, what they stand for or how others see them. As a result, they might feel stuck or frustrated with their performance and relationships. Now, in family systems terms, we would think of this as people who are not self-differentiated. They're not able to self-define because they don't know who they are, and they're not very well connected emotionally because they don't really understand how other people see them. They don't have enough of an emotional connection to get that honest feedback.

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In the upper left corner of this grid are people who have high internal self-awareness but low external self-awareness, and these are called "Introspectors." They're clear on who they are, but don't challenge their own views or search for blind spots by getting feedback from others. This can harm their relationships and limit their success.

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In the best case, these are people who are self-defined but who are not emotionally connected enough to really get honest feedback from others, and in the worst case, these are people who are self-defined but don't care about others. They are basically narcissists. So introspectors are people who have internal self-awareness, but not external self-awareness. They are self defined, but are not as well emotionally connected as they need to be.

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In the bottom right hand corner are "Pleasers." These are people who have low internal self-awareness but high external self-awareness, and quoting the article, it says "they can be so focused on appearing a certain way to others that they could be overlooking what matters to them over time." They tend to make choices that aren't in service of their own success and self-fulfillment. And so, as you can imagine, these are people who are not as self-defined but who are more emotionally connected. In other words, they are more focused on relationship pressure, on surrounding togetherness pressure, on the pressure to conform to the norms of the system.

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And then finally, in the upper right hand corner are people who are "Aware." These are people who have both high internal self-awareness and high external self-awareness.

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The article says they know who they are, what they want to accomplish and seek out and value others opinions. This is where leaders begin to fully realize the true benefits of self-awareness. So these are people who are self-defined and who are emotionally connected in a healthy way. When leaders are able to self-define, when they are able to say what they believe while giving others the freedom to disagree, this creates the emotional space where they can get honest feedback.

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When they ask for honest feedback, they are more likely to get it and have that external self-awareness. They're also more likely to be connected emotionally in a healthy way. So that is why both internal and external self-awareness are very important to being a self-differentiated leader.

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The article notes that it's important to understand that both experience and power can hinder self-awareness. Experience can make us overconfident about both our performance and our self-knowledge. And likewise, the more power a leader holds, the more likely they are to estimate their skills and ability, according to the research.

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The article concludes that this is due to two factors. First, leaders have fewer people reporting to them who can give them feedback. And second, because of their power, people are less likely to be honest about their feedback. Now, I would say that pastoral leaders may experience the opposite. They are more likely to get more feedback. And this feedback is possibly going to include a lot of noise from people's own anxiety. But that's a whole other subject.

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The idea here is that we need to be careful about the fact that if we have a lot of experience in a situation in our own family of origin, in a church setting, in our organization, and if we are in a position of leadership, we need to remember that sometimes our judgment can be clouded. Sometimes we are not as self-aware as we think, especially from the external side. Finally, the article notes that not all introspection is helpful in improving self-awareness.

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This isn't because introspection doesn't work. It's because people often do it incorrectly by asking the question "Why?" We don't often know the answer to the question "Why?" because those answers come from our unconscious thoughts and feelings. I often say that we shouldn't ask the question "Why?" when we are listening to others. And this is good advice. When working towards greater self-awareness, don't ask ourselves why. So the better question is "What?" This helps us focus on more objective answers.

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Some examples in the article are instead of asking "Why do I feel so terrible?" ask "What situations make me feel terrible?" Or instead of asking "Why do I always give in?", ask "In what situations do I most often give in?"

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When it comes to anxiety, I often suggest this question: "Who in my family triggers this same type of anxiety?" I find this is helpful when we are trying to get to the root of situations outside of our family that trigger reactive or adaptive responses.

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This is important because we can usually trace these responses back to relationships in our own family of origin in which we are unable to take a non-anxious, emotional stand. To summarize, internal and external self-awareness are important to self-differentiation. To the extent that we can say what we believe while giving others the freedom to disagree, we are more likely to get honest feedback to help us with external self-awareness. And introspection that focuses on facts, not reasons can help us become more internally self-aware.

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Self-awareness helps us work toward being a non-anxious leader because it enables us to self-define in healthy, emotionally connected ways. But to do this fully, we need intentionality.

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The dictionary definition of intentionality is "the fact of being deliberate or purposive." That is, to do things on purpose or deliberately. That is helpful, but it doesn't really explain what it means in terms of being a non-anxious leader.

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Now, if you will go to the philosophy definition, it helps us to understand it a little more clearly, except it does sound like a lot of gibberish. The philosophical definition of intentionality is "the quality of mental states, e.g. thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes that consists in their being directed towards some object or state of affairs." I'm not really going to try to unpack that in terms of philosophy and in terms of self-differentiation, so what I want to do is I want to start with this idea of the difference between intention and intentionality.

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Intention is about motive. It's about what we are trying to do, what is our intent. And we have good intentions often. More often than not, we have good intentions.

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Intentionality is about initiative. It's about being purposeful. It's about being deliberate. It's about being proactive. It's the opposite of being haphazard or random. It is having a plan in mind. It is being able to act with purpose to move things forward.

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To understand intentionality, even in more depth, I want to reference an article from a website called The Coaching Room, and it goes through the differences between wish, will, intention and intentionality. I found this helpful in clarifying my thoughts on how intentionality helps us to be a non-anxious leader. According to this article, a wish has a future orientation to it, and by its very nature, it carries meaning for the one wishing. When we wish for something, there is meaning in what we wish for.

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Will is about moving in the direction of a wish. So will is about action taken. Together, wish brings imagination and will brings self-direction.

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Intention brings purpose and design. So we might wish for something. We might have the will to act. And intention gives us the purpose, the reason why we want to do this.

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Intentionality provides the context or the framework or the structure that gives meaning to our experience. Intentionality is bigger than wish or will or intention because it is the overall framework in which these things occur. Intentionality is a higher level or a higher order of thinking.

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For example, one way that we use intentionality in terms of being self-differentiated is to focus on emotional process and not content. It gives us that framework to see the emotional process that is going on in a situation rather than being drawn into the content in reactive or adaptive ways.

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According to this article, intentionality is the foundation for will and decision. It actually is what prepares us for it and then actually helps us to do it in the moment.

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Interestingly, the article references Soren Kierkegaard. If you listen to the very end of the outro of every podcast episode, I say, "Go be yourself." That's a nod to Soren Kierkegaard, who famously said, "Now, Lord, with your help, I shall become myself." Kierkegaard calls intentionality the constructive use of normal anxiety.

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He says that between potentiality and actuality is anxiety, and that anxiety is actually what gives us the energy to act or to respond. If we don't manage that anxiety in a healthy way, then we will end up being reactive or adaptive.

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Intentionality enables us to see the broader picture of what is going on in the situation. It also enables us to prepare in advance by studying family systems theory, by being reflective about being self-aware both internally and externally. And this creates an intentionality of a family systems perspective that when we are in that anxious moment, we are best able to say, "How can I respond in a way that will be helpful? How can I respond in a way that will be self-differentiated? How can I respond in a way that will create emotional space for this interaction?" To me, that's what intentionality is. So self-awareness and intentionality go hand in hand.

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Each helps us work towards greater self-differentiation in both preparation and actual behavior. Becoming more self-aware, both internally and externally will help us reflect on what is going on in the systems in which we function. Likewise, intentionality provides a framework, a context for what it means to be self-differentiated, what it means to be a non-anxious leader and to lead through self-differentiation. This is the proactive part of intentionality because it helps us to prepare for our most anxiety-producing situations. When we get in those anxiety-producing situations, it can help us to understand what is going on inside of us and externally.

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We can then process this information within the framework, the intentionality of emotional process, of family systems theory, of what it means to be self-differentiated, not just the content of the situation. In fact, when we have intentionality in the family system sense, in the sense that I'm using it, we will be able to avoid content, when emotional process tells us that something else is going on.

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In closing, this is why I believe self-awareness and intentionality are so important for us to grow as non-anxious leaders. It is helpful, both prior to those anxiety-producing moments and as we go through them. As I shared with the book club this past week, as often as not, we don't do as well as we would have liked in those situations. But being reflective, processing through, is that self-awareness and intentionality that will help us to do better the next time.

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We're never going to get there, but we can always grow as a self-differentiated non-anxious leader.