Awareness and Cycle of Experience

Developing your own awareness skills, understanding the ‘figure’ you are creating and noticing what stage you and others are at in an ‘experience cycle’ will guide you to the right intervention that needs to be made to increase your success. 

The following are definitions of what I mean by ‘figure’ and ‘cycle of experience’.  A ‘figure’ is the image your brain picks out in a situation and can be seen against a background.  To illustrate: if you look at a garden border and focus on a rose, then the rose would be the ‘figure’ and the border its background.  In a leadership context, a figure might be ‘retain my star traders’ or ‘deliver all my projects ahead of plan’ or ‘achieve integrity paying priorities for work in my prison’ or ‘create a global service delivery capability’.  Our minds are always automatically picking out figures against backgrounds in everything we do. The ‘cycle of experience’ describes the stages we go through in any experience and is illustrated below.

The key point about awareness is the picture of reality that you create will often be different to that of others in the system of people you are working with.  Acknowledging those differences and knowing what it means for your figure are key to how successful you can be.  Understanding different perspectives enables you to help the system you are in succeed and by doing so increase your own success. 

Knowing where you are in the cycle of experience, being in the right phase at the right time and progressing in the right sequence are also critical for you.