Self-Awareness: Or Why You’re Probably Just Fondling the Elephant’s Tail

Let’s talk about self-awareness.

Not the kind where you realise mid-meeting that you’ve been on mute for six minutes. I mean the real kind – the kind that actually matters. The kind that makes you stop building a life that looks good on LinkedIn but secretly makes you want to live in a remote yurt and scream into the wind. Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: you can’t grow what you don’t know. And most of us? We’re basically trying to install a home theatre system in a house we’ve never walked through.

For me, the wake-up call came dressed as a casual remark from a boss. I was furiously trying to be good at everything – Excel formulas, compliance documents, filing systems named “Final_Final_THISONEv3” – when he looked at me and said: “Stop trying to be good at the things you’re crap at. Focus on what you’re great at and build from there.” At the time, I smiled and nodded, pretending like I understood, but internally I was still trying to become the kind of person who enthusiastically colour-codes PowerPoint slides.

It would take a few more years – and one seismic moment of clarity – before that breadcrumb really meant something. That moment arrived in the form of Judith Haupt, founder of Contract-SA, and a woman who could probably psychoanalyse a houseplant. Judith was brought in to do Enneagram profiling with senior leaders. I expected something light. You know: “You’re an extrovert! You like long walks and Thai food!” Instead, it was like someone had printed out the inner workings of my psyche, wrapped it around a brick, and thrown it at my head.

The Enneagram isn’t your average personality test. It doesn’t just tell you how you behave; it tells you why you behave the way you do. It drills down to your core motivations – what you crave, what you fear, how you manipulate the world (often unintentionally) to get your needs met. Mine hit like a freight train. I wasn’t just learning that I liked people; I was learning that I leaned on them. That under stress, I became charming to a fault, persuasive, even a little manipulative – not out of malice, but as a survival strategy. It was uncomfortable. And wildly useful.

That was the beginning of me embracing the idea of the “incomplete leader.” Somewhere along the way, we were all sold this nonsense that great leaders are complete packages. You’re supposed to be visionary and operational, inspirational and meticulous, bold and cautious. It’s like expecting a Labrador to do your taxes while giving a TED Talk. But real leadership isn’t about being everything – it’s about knowing what you’re not, and building a team that complements you. I suck at details. Ask me to proofread a policy doc and I will be stepping in front of the next passing bus. But give me big-picture problems, strategic chaos, or a whiteboard, and I come alive. Once I stopped pretending I could be the detail guy, things actually started to work.

But here’s where things really got interesting.

I picked up a book called The Four-Way Path, based on Hindu philosophy. It talks about four goals we should all strive for – virtue, prosperity, love, and freedom – and the idea of finding balance between them. But it was one parable in particular that snapped my perspective into focus.

An elephant arrives in a small village. Four blind men gather around to inspect it. One touches the trunk and says, “It’s a snake!” Another grabs a leg and says, “No, it’s a tree!” A third strokes an ear and says, “It’s a fan!” And the fourth grabs a tusk and says, “It’s a spear!” A sighted villager walks by and says, “You’re all kind of right—but also wildly wrong. You’re describing fragments of something bigger you haven’t seen in full.”

That’s us. All of us. Especially at work. Especially in leadership. We go through life lovingly fondling different parts of the elephant, confidently shouting “TREE!” when we’re really holding a leg. We only know what we know – and what we don’t know might be the very thing holding us back.

That’s what self-awareness is: the ability to step back and realise you’re holding the tail, not the whole animal. And the more your career develops (hopefully), the more you begin to realise just how little you actually know – and how much there is still to learn. That’s when things start to shift. That’s when real self-awareness kicks in. When you stop trying to be right and start being curious.

Right now, I’m deep into Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal, and it hits this point again and again. Society doesn’t particularly care who you are. It cares that you function. So we’re all shaped – by school, by work, by culture – into obedient little puzzle pieces, told to fit in and shut up. You learn to perform instead of discover. You learn to adapt, not understand. And then you wake up one day wondering why you’re exhausted.

In my case, I eventually figured out I’m ADD. But I thrive in numbers and patterns. Give me a spreadsheet full of market data, and I’m as happy as a squirrel in a peanut butter factory. But ask me to do the same thing, at the same time, in the same way, every single day? My brain throws a tantrum. And that’s okay. Some people love repetition. Some people need it. The trick is knowing what fuels you. And building a life that doesn’t feel like a performance review from a job you don’t want.

And once you start aligning your wiring with your work? You get something magical: flow.

Matthew McConaughey calls these “Greenlights” – moments when everything just works. When time disappears. When you’re not trying to do the thing – you are the thing. For me, writing posts like this brings flow. I lose track of time. I forget to blink. My coffee goes cold. And I feel like I’m doing what I was actually put here to do.

So how do you get there?

Start by asking people who know you well what they think your natural talents are. Don’t ask your performance review. Ask your partner. Your friend. That colleague who’s seen you operate at your best. Pick two or three strengths and start poking them. Test them. Stretch them. See what gives you energy – and what drains it.

Because once you figure out what you’re great at – not just what you’re good at – you unlock a kind of progress that’s sustainable. Energising. Honest.

And if this resonates with you – if you’re starting to realise you’ve been holding the elephant’s tail while calling it a career – and you want to explore how to build from self-awareness into sustainable growth, get in touch.

There’s a lot more to the elephant. I’d love to help you see it.