“Compared with what we ought to be, we are half awake.”

—William James; “The Energies of Men” (1907)

William James was one of the putative grandparents of the modern field of psychology and he highlights a singularly important fact above: that most of us are simply not fully aware and are therefore likely missing half of the show. We talk a lot about a vast 95% of largely untouched cognitive resource which touches on similar territory, yet as we already comment enough about that, here let’s focus on the topic of awareness itself, including how to be more awake and why leaders need to develop themselves in this area.

Awareness is defined as: the quality or state of being aware; the knowledge or perception of a situation or fact; or the knowledge and understanding that something is happening or exists.

Right here is the answer to “why?” if it wasn’t already clear enough. You’re only able to respond wisely to what you’re aware of. Better awareness = better responses. While we all naturally have an ability for it—awareness is factory installed after all—yet importantly, it’s not factory limited, which means it can be significantly enhanced in ways that elevate you from competent to pro, equally elevating your life and leadership mastery in important ways. This means you’re able to make better assessments, better decisions and intuitively manage many (if not all) of life’s situations and challenges with greater ease and skill. Let’s first explore some aspects of awareness, before looking at how we can develop it.

The regular type of everyday awareness is often referred to as situational awareness. You know what’s happening as it’s happening. Here you’re simply in the knowing moment in your life.

The next is known as meta-awareness (sometimes also called meta-cognition) and here is where things get interesting. This is the ability to be aware of your awareness. This is a more expanded experience of life in which you “know that you know”, which includes knowing your thinking process in real time. This isn’t a detached dissociative observing, simply the larger ability to notice both incoming data of life plus all the internalized responses. Just take a moment now and see how your mind is narrowed down to the screen. Now take a breath, soften your vision and let it open up and allow more information in. More of your peripheral vision, the feelings of the body and also the mental impressions (thinking etc.) to just come and go. Great. Now you’re getting it!

Another way to recognize this is in relation to mental wandering. When we’re having an interaction (eg. a conversation with a direct report) and notice we’ve mentally wandered off somewhere else, meta-awareness is what allows us to register what’s happening and then have agency in what happens next. Rather than be unconsciously reactive or mindlessly held prisoner by one’s own own thoughts we come back. Or when we really develop this area we actually get to choose our thinking in real time.

All too often we fall prey to the notion that we are our thoughts and don’t have choices around them, yet this is a fallacy. Our species name is in fact homo sapiens sapiens. The sapiens derives from the latin sapere which translates as “to know”. So our very genus is called “the being that knows it knows”. Meta-awareness is seemingly part of our nature.

However, while we all have an innate capacity for awareness (including meta-awareness), building mastery and developing those abilities, particularly in areas such as meta-awareness, asks for some committed training. Just like building physical mastery means getting into the gym, for this we need a mind and awareness gym. The absolute number one scientifically-proven way to build awareness mastery is through mindfulness training.

Not only will mindfulness training help with your awareness mastery, including meta-awareness, it also builds other crucial capacities of self awareness which form critical allies in leveraging those 95% cognitive resources that conventionally lie outside of the conscious workspace.

Here’s a short clip from scientist Jon Kabat-zinn, the creator of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program at UMass Medical School, on mindfulness.