Characters in Shakespeare reveal to us how personal growth happens

Norman Mailer once wrote that there is a cruel law in life: we are one who changes, and one that pays a lasting price for the same.

As a teacher who teaches leadership in business school, I meet all kinds of leaders every day, and for them this "rule" is real and disturbing. They know what the consequences will be if they don't make changes, but they're not sure what to do to sustain those changes. Is it time to learn how to have a more productive team meeting? Or how to become a better listener? Or take a completely different leadership style and change the ethos of the corporate culture?

While there are no formulaic answers to these questions, there are fundamental factors that make the development of a large number of skills less effective. One of these basic understandings comes from a writer whose works have been reprinted over the past 400 years: William Shakespeare.

In the opening chapter of his book Shakespeare, he writes: "The invention of mankind." Harold Bloom, who taught Shakespeare at Yale for 30 years, mentions that before Shakespeare, the characters in the play may have been revealed, but never formed.

If the characters are already on the table, when they actually take the stage for the first time, we can intuitively feel that they are there. Their authors steal from them a quality that makes them look interesting: the ability to self-enquiry, which may reveal something unexpected, not only for us, but also for themselves. What they teach us is very limited, because they cannot surprise us, and essentially because they cannot surprise themselves. It's similar to a manager in the real world who has just come back from feedback, when he thinks, "Nothing new — it's the same feedback I've heard before," and says to himself, "I guess I'm who I am!" Or, "I have my own way of doing things, but some people agree and some people disagree." ”

Shakespeare doesn't get us out of the trap so easily. He reveals that we are not simply what we say about ourselves, but are made up of many contradictions and unknown parts. As Bloom argues, the characters in Shakespeare take shape in the fact that they themselves have the ability to unconsciously observe their conversations with themselves or others, so they are able to reconstruct themselves. By giving him a rich inner world to his characters, 400 years before Freud, Shakespeare portrayed us with a master-level approach to self-discovery similar to what we modern people call self-discovery. Hamlet is not one, but many. After Hamlet learns of the murder of his father, he creates an extremely impressive monologue to show that he cannot stand his own incompetence. He was so tormented by his own inner contradictions that all he could think of was the two sides of suicide (life or death), perhaps the most prestigious inner monologue in the field of literature.

We are captivated not only by the beauty of the language, but also because we realize that he himself is hearing these words for the first time. No matter how many times we watch this play, we never get tired of it, because in that unfathomable real dilemma, Hamlet is also unusually fragile, and therefore a truly full person.

Through Hamlet and other characters, Shakespeare shows us not only the necessary conditions for human growth—in order to change the self, we must first find ourselves—but also all that growth process hears, sees, and feels. He tells us that when Hamlet is on the verge of collapse, he is able to face the integrity of death with a unified self. Similarly, in the second part of Henry IV, Prince Hal, when he became king, alienated his former supporters ("to assume that I am no longer the same me I was before") and began to complete his unusual transformation from a bohemian prince to King Henry V, the hero of the Battle of Agincourt.

For us, far less than the drastic change of emotion in the fictional characters, the point is not that we can achieve transformation only by thinking about how to commit suicide or ignoring our friends; the transformation is not forward or far away, but the uneasiness stirred up by powerful external challenges in our inner world. Hamlet was able to confront his own inertia and cowardice, he was able to confront it and abandon his promiscuous lifestyle, ushering in a new identity in keeping with the king. Both are only possible if these characters begin to be willing to discover their inner selves.

Shakespeare teaches us that when faced with an uncertain world, self-awareness — which is trumpeted as a quality of leadership — is truly worthy of its name when it is enlightening. The word is enlightening when we are willing to reveal that we know nothing about ourselves.

Growth, then, is not something that can be accomplished by learning new skills to change the self, but by letting go of something to discover ourselves—including some of the ideas we hold dearly about ourselves—to discover who we are likely to be.

Declan Fitzsimons Associate Professor of Research Organisational Behaviour at Inseco International Business School. He conducts research and consultancy work on corporate planning and implementation of "shared leadership".