Morpheus May Have Been Shadow-Banned
The research says 13% of senior leaders are self-aware. What actually develops self-awareness — and why more content will not.
Last week, I wrote a short LinkedIn article about self-awareness. Any reasonable person would consider the topic covered and move on with their life (and the post performed really badly compared with my other posts).
(Un)fortunately, I have Persister as my PCM Base. Those familiar with the PCM – Process Communication Model® will understand the problem… I must question it, find more research, approach it from three additional angles and possibly annoy everyone until the subject is properly closed.
And of course there is also another possibility… perhaps Morpheus has recruited me :) I am not much of a conspiracy theorist. I prefer explanations that do not require secret groups meeting in dark rooms. Although, lately, reality has been gently testing that position.
Anyway, here we go again.
Welcome back to the desert of the real.
The Self-Awareness Numbers Are Not Getting Better
In my previous text, I referred to research led by organizational psychologist Dr. Tasha Eurich. After four years, ten investigations and almost 5,000 participants, her team concluded that around 95% of people believe they are self-aware.
Only 10–15% appear to meet the set criteria.
Disturbing. But perhaps this was only one study. One methodology. One overly pessimistic psychologist having a particularly bad decade.
Then I found a Heidrick & Struggles analysis based on more than 75,000 assessments of senior executives.
Their number?
13% demonstrated what the researchers described as true self-awareness.
Different population. Different methodology. Yet a remarkably similar signal. And these were not people without access to personal development. They were senior executives who had completed assessments, coaching, 360-degree feedback and probably enough PPT presentations about emotional intelligence to last several lifetimes.
Still… it’s only 13%!
Of course, these figures are not a universal law. The concept is difficult to define and measure, and each result partly reflects the instrument and threshold used. But the direction is difficult to ignore… power often reduces access to the very feedback that could correct a leader’s internal story.
And other research makes the picture even less comfortable.
Emily Pronin, Daniel Lin and Lee Ross added another layer with what they called the bias blind spot: we recognize biases much more easily in other people than in ourselves. Paradoxically, our belief that we see reality without distortion may come from having limited direct access to our own cognitive and motivational processes. We see only their final output, which simply feels true.
In ourselves, we look for bias through introspection… which reveals little. In others, we see behavior. So their distortions appear obvious, while ours remain invisible.
They are defending their ego. We are defending an important principle.
They are controlling. We are committed to excellence.
This may be one of the great ironies of personal development: learning the language of psychology does not necessarily free us from self-deception — it only makes our self-deception more sophisticated.
So, What the Hell Are We Doing?
For God’s sake, if self-awareness is the foundation of leadership, what exactly are we building? Almost every leadership model and program includes it. We assess it, teach it and put it on slides next to authenticity, empathy, vulnerability, purpose and values. And yet the numbers remain stubbornly low.
Can more training help? Yes.
But probably not in the way we usually imagine.
Training can introduce a language or a new perspective. It can create the first crack in the story we tell about ourselves. But information about ourselves is just part of self-awareness.
- Knowing your personality type is not the same as noticing the moment you enter your stress pattern.
- Naming your values is not the same as following them when doing so has a real cost.
- Understanding your leadership blind spots is not the same as recognizing one while it is distorting an important decision.
- Even 360-degree feedback produces relatively small average improvements.
Change is more likely to happen when people believe it is necessary, when they want feedback, when they set specific goals and work on their behavior over time. In other words:
The assessment, feedback and training are not the transformation. They are invitations.
Real change is part of a personal leadership journey… when reality challenges the identity we have spent years constructing and we choose not to run back to the safety of the old story.
What Actually Develops Self-Awareness?
This capacity cannot be developed through introspection alone. Development of self-awareness seems to require four conditions.
First, we need enough inner silence to notice what is happening before we explain it: tension in the body, an emotion we are intellectualizing, the impulse to interrupt, the moment curiosity disappears and defense takes over.
Second, we need other people… not only those who support us, but those who experience the consequences of our behavior. Especially people with less power than we have. The higher leaders move, the more carefully people speak around them. Eventually, they may become surrounded by people who confirm their self-image (or who have simply learned that challenging it is not worth the price.)
Third, we need reality. Difficult decisions. Conflict. Failure. Unexpected events. Moments in which our well-rehearsed identity no longer works. We discover the strength of our values when living by them costs us something.
That is why self-discovery (including coaching) is rarely a comfortable experience!
Finally, we need time. Self-awareness is a capacity we practice (not the insight we collect).
What Is The Real Problem?
We do not lack information about ourselves. The personal development industry has produced enough books, models, courses and inspirational quotes to cover every office wall on Earth. What we are losing are the conditions in which accurate self-perception can develop:
- Attention.
- Silence.
- Honest feedback.
- Contact with reality.
… and then we added the digital world.
- Self-awareness requires attention. The digital world competes for it.
- Self-awareness requires silence. The digital world offers an escape from it within two seconds.
- Accurate perception requires honest feedback. The digital world frequently replaces it with likes, views, comments and algorithmic validation.
- Knowing ourselves requires contact with our actual behavior. The digital world allows us to build, edit and repeatedly reinforce a curated version of who we are.
The question is what kind of relationship with ourselves that technology trains. Are we using it intentionally? Or does it remove every unstructured moment in which something uncomfortable might have reached our awareness?
Perhaps Morpheus was not defeated… most probably he was simply buried beneath notifications, filtered out by the algorithm and shadow-banned for low engagement.
The Future of Leadership Development
If self-awareness is truly the foundation of leadership, then the future of leadership development cannot simply be more content. Leadership development needs fewer comfortable explanations and more carefully designed low-risk, high-tension experiences. It must make our stories meet evidence:
- Our body.
- Our choices.
- Our relationships.
- Our impact.
It is easy to explain away one uncomfortable fact. It is much harder when four of them point the same way.
This is the design principle behind My Leadership Journey, not more content, but a structured encounter between the story a leader tells and the evidence their life and leadership keep producing. Safe enough to stay in. Honest enough to change something.
Welcome back to the desert of the real.
Written by Pedja Jovanović
Pedja Jovanović is the Founder of Atria Group International and Co-creator of My Identity Journey and My Leadership Journey. He works internationally with senior leaders, founders, and executive teams navigating growth, complexity, and transformation, combining cognitive, embodied, and intuitive approaches to leadership development.
