Anderson

Emily Anderson

Professor Harris

UNIV 392

June 13th, 2018

Prompt 1

Self-awareness is widely recognized as being an incredibly important part of leadership.

Knowing one’s strengths, weaknesses, values, and priorities is integral to crafting one’s

leadership style and characteristics. Without self-awareness, a leader ultimately becomes

ineffectual. Ignatius of Loyola and Plato differ in how they approach the results of self-

awareness in several ways. For Ignatius, self-awareness is individualistic and reflective. While

there are definitive reflective attributes of Plato’s view of self-awareness, Plato sees self-

awareness as something that must be brought upon others so that they might realize the truth

about themselves.

Self-awareness, in the Ignatian style, comes at the forefront of leadership. It is integral to

becoming successful- at academic, corporate, and spiritual levels. Once one knows the basic

strengths, weaknesses, and values that one possesses, then they will be able to examine

themselves more thoroughly. Experience begets reflection, and reflection begets action. How

people become self-aware is a result of the experiences that they have had, and the reflection that

ultimately follows. As an end goal, Ignatius believed that leaders could not become self-aware as

a result of a push from anyone else. According to Lowney, “leaders must largely mold

themselves” (97). One can only know themselves from the experiences that they have had.

According to Ignatian thought, self-awareness cannot be a result of any other experience that one

has not personally had.

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Plato differs in a few ways. First and foremost, Plato feels that self-awareness is not simply

achieved by reflection. Rather, people living in ignorance of truth must be forced into it. One

cannot achieve proper self-awareness if they are unable to understand their surroundings.

Instead, those who have reached enlightenment must guide those who have not. In The Allegory

of the Cave, Plato shows this through people who have been kept in darkness. In his depiction of

the person who returns to darkness after being exposed to light and the real world shows how it

is the duty of leaders to help others seek awareness of themselves rather than simply reflect on

what little they know themselves. To Plato, if people were to only live of their own experiences,

they would know very little about themselves. It is through shared experiences and knowledge of

others that we can be truly self-aware.

With both Ignatius and Plato, one of the main end goals of self-awareness is leadership. For

Ignatius, this leadership comes from introspection and knowing oneself fully so that one might

be successful. Leadership, to Ignatius, is meant to help one understand the world that they are in.

Through self-awareness, leadership becomes more sustainable. Plato sees leadership as guiding

others to truth, even if it is rather forceful. However, Plato acknowledges the fact that truth is an

incredibly nuanced term that means different things to people of different experiences. True

leadership lies within self-awareness, and cannot exist without it. If leadership is not coupled

with self-awareness, it breeds only ignorance and deception- and while Plato and Ignatius might

have some differences in dogma, I think that they would both agree upon that.