A leadership coaching exercise to unlock new self-awareness

I just did a beautiful yoga practice called Self-Love Yoga.

At one point, the teacher said something that soared straight into my heart. (Incidentally, I love it when you’re listening to something and in amongst all the information a certain phrase just seems to leap out.)

She said:

The practice of self-love is the balance of light and dark.

I want to borrow that idea today, and apply it to leadership. Because I believe that the practice of LEADERSHIP is also the balance of light and dark.

Just as there are things out there in the world that feel good / bad / comfortable / uncomfortable / familiar / unfamiliar / in light / in shadow, the same is true inside of your own psyche.

The purpose of leadership coaching is to unlock new leadership capacities within yourself so that you can lead with more impact and effectiveness. And I’ve recently been doing an exercise with clients that I want to share with you.

Grab a piece of paper and divide it into quadrants, as per my brilliant drawing below. You are going to use this to identify characteristics or qualities about yourself. I’ve given some of my own examples to help you.

The two axes are ‘familiar / unfamiliar’, and ‘wanted / unwanted’.

Quadrant 1 = familiar and unwanted. Things you know about yourself that frustrate you and you want to work on / are already working on.

Quadrant 2 = familiar and wanted. The qualities you already know and appreciate about yourself.

Quadrant 3 = wanted and unfamiliar. Qualities you might see in others, and are aware you want to develop in yourself.

Quadrant 4 = unwanted and unfamiliar. This is normally the tricky one. Qualities or ‘capacities’ that you might notice in others and you would NOT want to develop in yourself.

Take some time with this exercise. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Everything that you have written down is part of your psychological make-up. It wouldn’t have come to mind otherwise. And EVERYTHING in life is a balance of light and dark. So have another read through your quadrants, and ask yourself this question:

“What might be the ‘light side’ to one of the qualities in quadrant 4? How might this ‘light side’ actually make me a better leader?”

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Is this a helpful framework?