INsight/ Discovering Your Shadow

Photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash.

Manila, 16 April 2025 — What presence are you bringing into the meeting room?

Story

It happened this week. During a workshop on shadow work, we learned how our Shadow Self can affect the way we show up as leaders, especially in meetings.

Have you heard colleagues mention that certain leaders bring a positive presence into a meeting? While often said about executives, this can apply to any leader who comes prepared.

Since the dawn of humanity, sages have encouraged leaders to engage in self-cultivation. A century ago, however, psychology’s discovery of the Shadow Self has vastly expanded our ways of practicing self-cultivation.

Challenge

What is the Shadow Self? Carl Jung, a pioneer of modern psychology, described it as “the unconscious aspects of our personality that we repress, reject, or disown.” A Shadow Self is formed when we consider certain qualities, traits, or behaviors unacceptable in our social environment. All humans have them, yet we might not know.

As Jung’s definition implies, people are not conscious of their shadow selves, which like to remain unseen. Yet they do influence how we behave and act in our leadership roles. Our shadow selves prevent us from living and leading as our true selves. Dealing with our shadow selves is, therefore, a key part of self-leadership—the modern term for self-cultivation. 

This week’s workshop was led by Connie Zweig, a psychotherapist and author of several books about working with shadow selves. We learned about several kinds of negative shadow selves, for example, the Critic, Victim, Controller, Addict, Rebel, Coward, Manipulator, Saboteur, and the Perfectionist. Which one(s) sound familiar?

Question

Our question for this week is: What presence are you as a leader bringing into the meeting room? Is it the positive presence of a self-cultivated leader, or a Shadow Self that you are unaware of, or are struggling to deal with?

The leaders we work with in our Grow3Leaders community of practice are focused on showing up with effective leadership behaviors every day. These behaviors are foundational to transforming first and growing leaders around us. And we go further.

We also explore deeper transformation, where leading is not only doing, but also being. Where self-cultivation leads us to developing a positive presence. Discovering and dealing with the Shadow Self that we might be bringing into the meeting room is an integral part of that deeper transformation.

P.S. Our Leader in Transition Coaching Program is an excellent way to start your leadership transformation. If, on the other hand, you prefer to learn in a Community of Leaders, you can start by taking one of our leadership challenges together with three of your colleagues you invite to form a Collab with you.