I have been deeply appreciative of the interest people have shown in my recent post connecting Gestalt theory and practice with vertical development and leadership.
It has encouraged me to continue sharing some of the consequential things I have come to understand about the importance of using and working with awareness.
When making a decision, it can feel completely reasonable to organize that decision within an existing frame of awareness—while remaining unaware of the possibilities that frame is excluding.
That is where awareness becomes a developmental issue, not simply a reflective one.
More than two thousand years ago, the words “Know thyself” were associated with the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
The invitation toward self-awareness is hardly new.
And yet, it remains remarkably difficult.
Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich and her research team found that while approximately 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only about 10–15% actually meet the criteria for self-awareness.
That gap is important to understand. Eurich describes self-awareness as having two dimensions: knowing ourselves and understanding how others experience us. Introspection alone is not enough; awareness also requires feedback, curiosity, and a willingness to discover what our own perspective may be preventing us from seeing.
The developmental challenge is not simply to become more introspective.
It is to become capable of seeing more of what is already there—and more of what we have learned not to notice.
A Gestalt lens helps us understand how this can happen when we have adaptively filtered experience. We may move out of awareness what feels irrelevant, uncomfortable, threatening, inconvenient, or simply unhelpful to the task at hand.
This adaptive resistance can serve a necessary function.
We adjust in order to protect ourselves, preserve relationships, manage uncertainty, or maintain a workable sense of equilibrium.
The difficulty comes when an adjustment that once served us becomes habitual and begins to interfere with new goals or possibilities.
Then the old pattern—once an intelligent response—can begin operating outside awareness.
We may no longer recognize how an outdated way of managing boundaries, relationships, conflict, uncertainty, or difference is blocking movement toward what we say we want.
This is where vertical development adds another important dimension.
Vertical development helps us understand that, over time, we can become inhabitants of a particular way of seeing and making meaning.
We become fluent in a perspective that dominates, organizes, and explains how we make meaning in our world.
And precisely because that perspective feels familiar, competent, and sensible, we may become less aware of the perspectives we are excluding.
For leaders, this can become costly.
A leader may remain loyal to a way of doing business because it worked before and therefore feels like “the right way.”
Certainty can reduce curiosity.
Expertise can become defensiveness.
Decisiveness can become rigidity.
Loyalty can become conformity.
A strong focus on results can make relational or systemic consequences harder to see.
And a leader who cannot see beyond the framework that once made them successful may struggle to recognize new possibilities for innovation, collaboration, managing difference, or responding to complexity.
I am reminded of an operational manager who was asked to onboard a new divisional leader.
She had been hired because she was innovative, highly capable, and known for an expressive and influential leadership style.
The operational manager was himself a strong performer. Yet he struggled to understand—and perhaps to value—the very different style, presence, and way of influencing that this new leader brought to the team.
When a stressful moment of difference emerged, rather than slowing down to explore what was happening, he concluded that she was not the right fit and supported her departure from the team.
From within his own frame, the decision made sense.
He believed he was acting in the best interests of the team.
But what was missing was a deeper inquiry:
What was he seeing—and what was he not seeing?
What assumptions about leadership, fit, and effectiveness were shaping his judgment?
Was the discomfort signaling a genuine problem—or simply difference?
What might the team have learned if the tension had been explored rather than resolved through removal?
The investment in a highly capable leader was lost.
But so too was an important developmental opportunity: to work with difference, expand the team’s repertoire, and question an established view of leadership, perspective, and choice.
This is one of the costs of limited awareness.
And this brings me back to the relationship between Gestalt practice and vertical development.
Gestalt helps us ask:
What is happening now?
What am I noticing?
What am I not noticing?
What has emerged that needs attention?
What remains in the background?
How am I making meaning of what I notice?
Vertical development takes us another step.
It asks us to examine not only what we see, but the structures through which we are seeing.
Our assumptions.
Our loyalties.
Our expertise.
Our habitual interpretations.
Our preferred ways of making meaning.
The developmental question is no longer simply:
What does this leader need to know?
It also becomes:
What might this leader need to become able to see?
What assumptions am I living inside?
What perspectives am I filtering out?
What might become possible if my awareness expanded?
This is where I believe Gestalt practice and vertical development make an important contribution to leadership practice today.
Gestalt strengthens our capacity to become aware of self, others, and the wider field.
Vertical development helps us examine—and potentially expand—the meaning-making structures through which we interpret that field.
Together, they invite leaders toward a greater capacity to:
notice,
hold,
question,
and choose.
And when awareness expands, so can perspective.
When perspective expands, choice expands.
And when choice expands, more adaptive leadership becomes possible.
Perhaps the developmental invitation for leaders today is not simply more knowledge—but a broader way of seeing, relating, and responding.
