INsight/ Third to First

Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash.

Manila, 13 April 2022 — What piece of your ‘I’ do you want to reclaim and reintegrate?

Story

It happened a century ago. In 1924 and 1925, James and Alix Strachey, a husband and wife team, came out with their first translations of works by Sigmund Freud into English, thereby expanding the international fame of the psychoanalyst from Vienna. The Stracheys were psychoanalysts too, and they would continue with their monumental task until they completed editing Freud’s entire psychological works between 1953 and 1974. Their compiled Standard Edition is known among psychologists around the world. And so is an annoying mistake they made. 

You may have heard or read that Freud introduced the (Latin) terms Id and Ego in his work. However, he didn’t. Those terms were inserted into the translation by the Stracheys, who thought that it would make Freud sound more scientific. And while it might have had that effect for some, Freud preferred, for a good reason, to use the simple and straightforward terms of das Es (It) and das Ich (I) in his original work written in German. And why, you might wonder, is that important for our exploration of leadership at the present time? 

The story has value for us today because Freud, with his famous statement “Where It was, there I shall become,” pointed to a phenomenon that can happen inside the human mind, where a piece of the ‘I’ can easily get disowned and projected onto others and the wider world, to become an ‘It’. By working with Freud, his clients were able to regain a healthy and whole sense of self by reclaiming and reintegrating their disowned and projected pieces back into their ‘I’. Today, that insight is critically important to leaders who want to avoid the trap of blaming others and circumstances for their difficulties and instead take it upon themselves to make change happen. 

Challenge

In Integral Life Practice, we refer to the reintegration of pieces of ‘It’ into ‘I’ as shadow work. Psychoanalysis is one of the many ways available to us today to work on our shadow and shift pieces of ‘It’ back into ‘I’. As humans, we all have shadow material to work with, as who we are today is inevitably the result of less-than-ideal choices we made in the past.

Freud’s example shows us the importance of being able to shift from a third-person (It) to a first-person (I) perspective, just as he was helping his clients to do. Leaving important pieces of our personality (I) projected onto circumstances in our Observed World will hold us back from growing our leadership. And the same goes for the pieces of ourselves that we have lost by projecting them onto other people, often those who have played an important role in our life. Leadership, therefore, is often about taking things personally, to invoke a shift to a first-person perspective, to move from object to subject.

A contemporary way of saying this was voiced by Seth Godin, a marketing specialist and one of my mentors on the leadership journey. Godin says that for a leader, it’s always your turn. That way, leaders won’t blame others and circumstances for their challenges. They always think about what they can do. This insight is what made me choose TransformationFirst.Asia as the name of our leadership practice. It reminds me every day that whatever the circumstances, my first question will be about what I can contribute to improve a situation by transforming myself first.

Question

You might think that this talk about moving to a first-person perspective carries a risk of self-centeredness, selfishness, or worse. What we are looking at, however, is the importance of inhabiting our I-space in a wholesome and responsible way, to embody a full and deep sense of what is sometimes referred to as I AM-ness. In doing so, we let our Small Self grow into our Big Self, often called our true self.

Growing as a leader means to grow in I AM-ness as well as in connectedness with our fellow humans and the world in which we live. By practicing to expand our awareness day by day, together with other leadership behaviors, we learn to fully inhabit the three worlds of this life: our Personal World, Social World, and Observed World.

Taking full responsibility for our leadership growth and journey means that we will need to do some shadow work to reintegrate what we lost and disowned as ‘It’ during the earlier years of our life. Inspired by Freud’s example, we can reclaim “where It was, there I shall become” and keep growing from there. Hence, my question for you this week is: what piece of your personality, your ‘I’, have you lost over time — perhaps in your relationships — and want to reclaim and reintegrate into yourself to grow as a leader?