I’m back with Mosaic Perspectives, and I plan to grow it steadily. After a needed break, this September edition dives into self-awareness — what it means to me personally and how it plays out on a global scale among nation states.

The power of reflection like a hermit — And why it matters for our economy

Many of us think we know ourselves — but research says otherwise.
Organizational psychologist Dr. Tasha Eurich found in a series of surveys that while 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only 10–15% truly are. This “self-awareness gap,” she explains, comes from people confusing awareness of their skills with true self-awareness. And it matters — not just for happier lives, but as the quiet engine behind strong economies.

So, what is true self-awareness? For Eurich, it is the ability to see ourselves clearly, understand our internal values and mindsets, recognize how others see us, and know how we fit into the world.

Other scholars, like resiliency and wellness expert Robyne Hanley-Dafoe, define it as the practice of honestly and compassionately understanding your whole self — strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors — without self-criticism or self-deception.

Nervous system and hormones

But for me, self-awareness goes even deeper when we factor in how our nervous systems react to stimuli. Each of us carries a unique nervous system, shaped by genetics, early life experiences, ongoing stressors, and social interactions — all influencing the structure and regulation of our neural pathways.

For example, studies show that people with high sensory processing sensitivity (the Highly Sensitive Person construct, or HSP) display heightened brain activity in attention and sensory regions, deeper processing of stimuli, and greater susceptibility to overwhelm.

And then there’s our biology. As a woman, I feel my hormones intensely — and I’ve learned the hard way that they don’t define me. I once noticed how my thoughts about “cute, chubby babies” peaked during ovulation. Evolutionary psychology suggests women may unconsciously prioritize reproductive goals during their fertile window, though the theory remains hotly debated. For me, it was a lesson in discernment: nature moves through me, but I still hold agency. I am not my hormones. I am not my thoughts. I am not my culture — though I carry the beauty of them all, from Iraqi to North American, and the places I’ve called home like Kuala Lumpur and Dubai.

Valuing the Hermit path

Through this process of unraveling, I came to value the Hermit’s path.

The Hermit, cloaked and holding a lantern, is a tarot archetype of solitude, wisdom, and reflection. Therapists sometimes even use tarot imagery as a tool for self-analysis, with client consent. What matters most is that the Hermit mode creates space to discover who we truly are beneath the noise — including the noise of who we think we are.

From this space, self-awareness becomes transformative. It helps us move toward environments aligned with our values. It sharpens our ability to recognize triggers, compassionately work on weaknesses, and intentionally highlight strengths. It also helps us draw boundaries, since we better understand how others see us.

For me, the realization was stark: denying my creative energy means stagnation. That’s why I created Mosaic Perspectives — a canvas to weave concepts, stories, and reflections. Creativity is not a luxury; it’s the same engine that drives economies. The ability to imagine, to think outside the box, to innovate. All of it begins with self-awareness.

After all, what is the likelihood that an innovator is out of touch with who they truly are? And what is the likelihood that someone living a dull, muted life is disconnected from their authentic self?

In many places, simple acts of self-actualization, choosing your beliefs, being who you are — are still forbidden. Yet the truth remains: self-awareness births authenticity. Authenticity unlocks creativity. And creativity fuels economies.

That is why I step now into the Fool’s journey — to risk, to dream, and to attempt authenticity after walking the Hermit’s solitary path.

Self-awareness and the disparity of vision — from survival to the dying Euphrates

(Be warned, this article may be too jumbled up in geographies, but that’s who I am.)

There’s a divide we rarely name: the ability to think beyond survival and craft a vision for the future.

This realization came to me gradually, after years of pattern recognition. At some point, the fragments clicked into a coherent picture: those who plan through vision create and prosper, while those trapped in survival remain stuck.

It first started in my early 20s, while living in Dubai, I had two friends who became my informal teachers. Both were talented painters. But more than their art, what struck me was how every word, every gesture seemed infused with a vision of the lives they wanted—marriage, career, lifestyle.

We were the same age, but they were light-years ahead of me. I was carving out a career, too, but in survival mode on steroids. To be fair to myself, I had lived through war, sanctions, and the dislocation of fitting in as a new Canadian before moving to Dubai on my own.

Today, those two women are thriving—one a director at a healthcare tech company in California, the other a highly esteemed panelist on women’s empowerment in Dubai. They embodied, in miniature, what I would later recognize as the true global divide: a visionary gap.

Oil companies are visionaries. 

Years later, one moment of greater clarity was when I discovered a key aspect about oil companies that added more depth to this visionary gap. Oil companies are future-oriented. Wide-scoping. Hiring the sharpest, most well-rounded minds to peer into the crystal ball—objectively and scientifically.

In 1982, Shell hired Peter Schwartz, a futurist trained as an aeronautical engineer who also studied Tibetan Buddhism. By then, climate change and emissions were already built into Shell’s scenarios. “We would decarbonize over time—for many reasons, climate among them,” Schwartz later told McKenzie Funk, author of Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming, a book published in 2014. That foresight was part of Shell’s move into natural gas, seen as less carbon-intensive than oil.

Before joining Shell, Schwartz worked at the Palo Alto think tank SRI International, where he helped design one of the first large-scale climate models. SRI was the same institution that created the computer mouse and developed “Values and Lifestyles” (VALS), a marketing framework that transformed how advertisers understood consumers. By the time Schwartz arrived at Shell, climate change already seemed inevitable — and the company was planning accordingly.

Micro and macro jumble 

This is when the holistic picture becomes more crystallized. My friends were the micro. Multinational corporations or nation-states are the macro. The pattern is the same: some are visionary, revising long-term goals continuously. Others are paralyzed by trauma, stuck in reactive survival.

This is why my first article for Mosaic Perspective was attempting to explain why, for instance, Iraq–the country of my origin and what I used to focus on during my MENA reporting days—lacked an economic vision, unlike Malaysia and the UAE, two other countries where I saw economic visions transform these two states. During a 2020 interview, a U.S. economist, Frank R. Gunter, who authored a book about Iraq’s economy following his role as senior civilian economics adviser for Multinational Corps—Iraq at Camp Victory, Iraq (July 2008—July 2009), shocked me when he told me it was really fear that didn’t allow Iraqi economists to speak their mind. This response doubled down on trauma as a cause and tied the knots further.

Now, I am no longer feeling fazed when reading about Iraq’s Ministry of Water Resources officially warning in 2021 that the Tigris and Euphrates could dry up completely by 2040. 

And when reading about Turkey, in contrast, I was no longer surprised to learn that it had been pursuing its long-term energy independence and had been studying how rivers, including the Euphrates, could contribute to energy production as far back as 1936.

The Euphrates originates in Turkey, flows through Syria, and then through Iraq. Turkey, Syria, and Iraq all signed the Paris Agreement in 2021. Yet the river is withering under multiple pressures: climate change, persistent droughts, and declining rainfall. Add to that the Atatürk Dam, one of 22 built under Turkey’s Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) beginning in the 1980s. Designed for irrigation and hydropower, the dams significantly reduced downstream flow.

Could Iraq or Syria have escaped this predicament if they had their own “Schwartz”? Maybe. But war and trauma suffocate vision. Visionary minds rarely rise when survival consumes the national psyche.

Even beyond the Middle East, it’s billionaires — buoyed by their wealth and full agency — who are buying lush green land in New Zealand and Hawaii as climate change advances.

Even when tapping into democracies. Trauma still lingers and sets visionaries and those without it apart at a micro level, hence the term, financial therapists, which I learned about after writing on financial trauma in 2023.  And the story continues, a March 2025 poll by Ipsos found that 51% of Canadians have a financial plan, which includes both formal and informal planning. This is all happening against the backdrop of increased debt incurred by Canadians, while Canada ranks fourth globally in financial literacy.

The story of surviving continues to linger, spread across a spectrum, with the most unfortunate still trapped in trauma. Or maybe it’s time to change the script and begin to become true visionary creators.