The Unusual Challenge of Spatial Awareness

Walking around New York City can be annoying. When I think about our lives here, I think about the crowded streets and subway stations more than anything else including the famous sites and tall buildings.

New Yorkers get a bad wrap for their frumpy demeanor. But the thing that is annoying about traversing New York is how much people struggle with spatial awareness. You don’t see this so much on the road. People are constantly measuring where their vehicle can fit and the effects of turning and shifting. But when you are walking, and the result of collision is less severe, we let down our guard and lose our perspective.

Seeing Space

What I mean by spatial awareness is things like the following: a tourist who stands at the top of the subway station steps while dozens of people adjust to crowd around him; people who lean their whole body against the pole in a crowded subway, while people are searching for a handhold; and the family who walks down the sidewalk holding hands four people wide.

Of course, these are the types of things that are annoying when others do it. Yet, we are all guilty. I do it as much as most New Yorkers.

The practice of taking up more space than is necessary (or being unaware of your movements, positioning, and pace in relation to others) affects the ways we move and relate to one another. It is a matter of perception. And try as we might, these little moments are instances where our perception slips into one focused on ME. We care little about how what we are doing changes the trajectory of another person’s day. We hardly even notice.

To be fair, we see positive manifestations of this every day as well – people opening doors for one another, positioning themselves kindly on the crowded trains or giving up a seat to pregnant riders, etc.

What we do impacts those around us. And that is a very easy thing to forget. It is very easy to focus on what we want to do, scratching whatever itch we feel on our own selves. It is so easy to forget or dismiss the fact that who we are and what we do matters to the world around us.

Making Space

People thrive when they are given the freedom to do so. When they take ownership for their lives and their journey. I often think about my job as helping students do what they truly want to be doing.

Leadership is about spatial awareness. It is about taking up the space we are in properly. Acknowledging we have a right to our space just like everyone else. And in doing so, by being aware of who we are and what we are truly after, we give people a kind of permission to do the same.

Leadership is not about getting people to do what they ought. It is about influencing people toward their best lives. And, just like commuters in New York, we are often unaware of how the space we occupy is inappropriate or sometimes downright dangerous. We are unaware of how we are limiting and affecting others by our lack of self-awareness.

The cure is consideration. We won’t get it right. The world is too crowded for us to dance through it without stepping on some toes. But we’ve got to learn how to get out of our own way, and out of others’ as well.