Category Archives: Self-Knowledge

The Reason for Evil

Gwen Adshead begins her recent book, The Dev­il You Know: Sto­ries of Human Cru­el­ty and Com­pas­sion, with an epi­graph from Carl Jung: “The rea­son for evil in the world is that peo­ple are not able to tell their sto­ries.” As a foren­sic psy­chol­o­gist and psy­chother­a­pist she’s heard some unimag­in­able ones — from decades of listening […]

August 6, 2021 – 10:55 am | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Conflict, Openness, Self-Knowledge, Wounds | Comments (4)

On Organizational Anger

There is a form of orga­ni­za­tion­al anger that all lead­ers need to under­stand. It is not the hos­tile out­burst of an aggriev­ed staff mem­ber, though this may be a symp­tom just as a shoot­er in a pub­lic place can be a symp­tom of a broad­er social despair. It is not the same as deal­ing with […]

March 30, 2021 – 3:07 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Conflict, Love, Self-Knowledge, Trust | Comments (0)

How you do one thing is how you do everything

The oth­er day I hap­pened to read a blog post on frac­tals and human behav­ior, one that includes this provoca­tive title line — a line that seems at first glance too sim­ple for the com­plex­i­ty of our lives but also some­how holds an intu­itive truth. Our self-aware­­ness is built on a sense that we are […]

March 3, 2021 – 2:34 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Self-Knowledge, Transformation | Comments (0)

Building Self-Trust

High self-trust is a essen­tial to lead­er­ship. At a bare min­i­mum we need it because lead­er­ship often demands we han­dle tense or sen­si­tive sit­u­a­tions and poten­tial­ly must make unpop­u­lar deci­sions. Some­times we must influ­ence not only our­selves but a team or sev­er­al teams or a whole orga­ni­za­tion.  I use this word, self-trust, instead of self-confidence […]

December 18, 2020 – 4:24 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Consciousness, Openness, Self-Knowledge | Comments (2)