«It is our ontological insufficiency — that part of us for which we irrevocably need relationships with others — that requires the work of inner reflection to be integrated through the encounter with other perspectives, which expand our thinking toward other visions and other possible interpretations of experience.»
Luigina Mortari
Human beings have not always had to manage themselves and take care of themselves. In the early stages of history, someone held this role for them — someone took care of them and governed their lives. Plato recounts, in Statesman, a time in which humans lived in bliss, when the gods were concerned with them and ensured that the universe responded to a principle of order. This magical time came to an end when Cronus and the other gods decided to withdraw. From that moment on, humans were asked to take care of themselves, in full autonomy.
The abilities activated by Self Management can be expressed and realized both in professional and personal contexts. They are needed at work to manage time and objectives, to make things happen and ensure that activities function. They are needed in private life to look at our emotional experience, to give meaning to our actions, and to play a role in shaping our future.
Self Management is often associated with the concept of resilience — the ability to face adversity with a positive spirit and react quickly — echoing the well-known saying “it is not important to fall, but to know how to get back up.” I believe that, at times, within pain it is important to learn how to remain, without a rushed search for well-being or a reactive response aimed at avoiding the more difficult emotions.
When I read The Palliative Society: Pain Today by Byung-Chul Han, I reflected on this belief — increasingly pervasive, especially in organizational contexts — that Self Management is a necessary skill to be trained in order to pursue, sometimes in a prescriptive way, happiness and motivation, giving meaning to the self and to our relationships. Thus, coaching and personal development paths are often designed to alleviate states of discomfort, to exit situations of individual suffering. But, as the South Korean philosopher states:
“Pain sharpens the perception of the self. It contours the self. It draws its boundaries. We also owe to pain our sense of existence.”
Self Management, therefore, as the possibility to also train the capacity to understand and tolerate pain, to remain within frustration, to welcome the most unpleasant emotions, while at the same time maintaining centeredness within oneself and connection with others.
To be capable, then, of understanding oneself and accepting even the inevitable suffering — not as a form of self-complacency, but as an opportunity to seek well-being and fulfillment also from other perspectives. This is not a hymn to pain: I have always supported the need to have moments of lightness available within one’s work context. Yet pain, as Byung-Chul Han insightfully reminds us, is capable of generating transformation; it shapes the spirit and allows us to produce personal and historical revolutions, unlike the tendency to cling only to the positive.
This alone already represents a point of arrival, or at least an advanced stage of self-management, of Self Management. Before accepting and welcoming pain, there is the indispensable exercise of knowing oneself. I recall (having recently revisited it with one of my daughters) that for Socrates, taking care of oneself and knowing oneself were not two coinciding practices, but one was preliminary to the other.
I often find myself repeating, especially in my role as a coach, that there are limits within this practice, and that recognizing these boundaries allows us not to fall into the temptation of assuming a “harmful illusion of omnipotence,” as defined by Luigina Mortari in Avere cura di sé. And already seeing and accepting these limits can mean experiencing pain, with the natural finiteness of our possibility to know ourselves.
I have often asked myself whether I was doing enough for people (in relation to accepting one’s own limits), whether what they were asking me to be for them – my role as a guide – was adequate to their expectations and capable of generating real change.
In response to this question, I have committed to shifting the focus from “what I could do” to “how to nurture their real and living intention to grow,” working together with them on that vital energy which, when intentionally cultivated, gives shape to one’s existence and builds our passion for the search for meaning.
Yes, also in the professional context.
Precisely there, where the expression Self Management seems – and perhaps is meant – to be primarily understood (or misunderstood) as the ability to achieve one’s goals, possibly also with excellence in the result. After all, our society is increasingly characterized as a performance-driven society, borrowing this expression from Maura Gancitano and Andrea Colamedici. But Self Management means, starting from the origins of Greek thought, taking care of one’s own feeling and thinking.
In organizational and social contexts, which are based on interdependence between people, this exercise then becomes the foundation for building positive, solid relationships, where each person recognizes themselves and recognizes the Other.
Having the ability of self-understanding represents the sufficient and necessary condition to create true and stable connections with others. This does not mean eliminating the pain that sometimes exists in certain relationships, but being able to create a space to welcome differences and work toward integration. If we think of Self Management as a transformative action, then considering the Other becomes a necessary step: there can be no authentic knowledge, nor functional self-management, without also being nourished by what exists outside of us.
