Category Archives: Self-Knowledge

Breaking Society

Jared Kush­n­er, Trump’s son-in-law, recent­ly wrote a book called, “Break­ing His­to­ry.” It’s received poor reviews. How­ev­er, I do like the idea behind the title and have stolen it to name this post, “Break­ing Soci­ety” because that is the actu­al con­text for his book, a soci­ety in dan­ger through polar­iza­tion and mis­trust. Although that might seem […]

September 6, 2022 – 3:32 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Changing the World, Conflict, Self-Knowledge, Wounds | Comments (3)

Trust Your Own Judgment

Judg­ment means draw­ing con­clu­sions, mak­ing deci­sions for your­self and act­ing on your best instincts.  Like a lot of lead­er­ship top­ics, it’s about too much or too lit­tle.  Too much trust of self can lead to biased or mag­i­cal think­ing.  Too lit­tle, we’re sim­ply let­ting oth­ers decide.  Some­where in the mid­dle is a sweet spot.  That’s not news but it’s sometimes […]

August 8, 2022 – 2:13 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Consciousness, Journey of Unlearning, Self-Knowledge | Comments (0)

The Master Blows It Out

Lead­ing is more or less drenched in the assump­tions of indi­vid­u­al­ism.  At least in Unit­ed States cul­ture, the tra­di­tion­al belief is that lead­ing oth­ers depends on hav­ing a strong, clear sense of self, one that is more or less unas­sail­able by cir­cum­stances or the arbi­trary per­cep­tions of oth­ers. Even when there is an awareness — […]

November 9, 2021 – 1:05 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Consciousness, Organizational Culture, Self-Knowledge | Comments (2)

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)