Insight: Why We Are Less Self-Aware Than We Think—and What to Do About It

by Tasha Eurich

self-awareness is, at its core, the ability to see ourselves clearly—to understand who we are, how others see us, and how we fit into the world

The least competent people are usually the most confident in their abilities.

Sometimes we lack clarity about our values and goals, causing us to perpetually make choices that aren’t in our best interests. Other times, we fail to grasp the impact we’re having on the people around us, alienating our colleagues, friends, and families without even knowing it.

Internal self-awareness has to do with seeing yourself clearly. It’s an inward understanding of your values, passions, aspirations, ideal environment, patterns, reactions, and impact on others.

External self-awareness is about understanding yourself from the outside in—that is, knowing how other people see you.

self-awareness isn’t a one-and-done exercise. It’s a continual process of looking inward, questioning, and discovering the things that have been there all along.

people who have a clear understanding of themselves enjoy more successful careers and better lives—they’ve developed an intuitive understanding of what matters to them, what they want to accomplish, how they behave, and how others see them.

They understood their values (the principles that guide them), passions (what they love to do), aspirations (what they want to experience and achieve), fit (the environment they require to be happy, energized, and engaged), patterns (consistent ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving), reactions (the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that reveal their strengths and weaknesses), and impact (the effect they have on others).

Indeed, developing a core set of principles that guide how we want to live our lives is a first and critical step in becoming self-aware. In particular, values define the person we want to be and provide a standard for evaluating our actions.

One young professional, for example, has his list of values pinned to his refrigerator: each evening while he’s cooking dinner, he evaluates how well his actions that day mirrored them.

“The goals aren’t important,” his investor said. “What’s important is the process of getting there.”

Instead of asking, “What do I want to achieve?” the better question is, “What do I really want out of life?” While goals can leave us feeling deflated and disappointed once we’ve achieved them, aspirations are never fully completed; we can get up every morning feeling motivated by them all over again. And even if we aren’t in the enviable position of being able to quit our job and travel the world, we can all live better lives by understanding what we want to experience and accomplish while we’re here on this planet.

when we examine our reactions, we don’t just uncover our weaknesses; sometimes we can discover strengths we never knew we had.

the team’s resentment mounted, causing them to dig their heels farther into the already shaky ground.

The key skill we must develop to read our impact is perspective-taking, or the ability to imagine what others are thinking and feeling (this is different from empathy, which involves actually experiencing others’ emotions).

To successfully take others’ perspectives in highly charged situations, Weissbourd advises, we should start by “zooming in” on our perspective to better understand it. So I zoomed in: I’m hungry, tired, and furious at the airline for its mechanical ineptitude. Next, we should “zoom out” and consider the perspective of the other person. When I imagined what Bob was experiencing, I thought, Poor Bob. I wonder what his day has been like.

The bottom line is that self-awareness isn’t one truth. It’s a complex interweaving of information from two distinct, and sometimes even competing, viewpoints. There is the inward perspective—your internal self-awareness—and the outward perspective, external self-awareness, or how other people see you.

“When the winds of change rage, some build shelters while others build windmills.” Where most people choose to hide or run for cover, self-awareness unicorns use their experiences to help power and fuel their internal and external self-knowledge.

research shows that they have a unique ability to recognize and learn from alarm clock events: situations that open our eyes to important self-truths.

We’ve uncovered three general categories of alarm clock events. The first is new roles or rules. When we are asked to play a new role at work or in life, or play by a new set of rules, it stretches our comfort zone and demands more from us, and therefore can supercharge our self-knowledge.

The second type of alarm clock event is an earthquake. Earlier, we read about Susan, a unicorn who achieved a new level of self-knowledge after being fired from her job. This is an example of the kind of event that, because of its significance and severity, shakes us to our core.

But by definition, earthquake events also run the risk of paralyzing us, suppressing our emotional agility and making it that much harder to absorb what we’ve learned about ourselves, much less channel it productively. As management professor Morgan McCall observes, the emotionally laden nature of these situations tempts us to distance ourselves from them: we may get defensive, blame others, become more cynical, overcompensate, shut down, or give up. To protect against this, as McCall and his colleagues advise, “we must absorb the suffering rather than react to it.”

The third type of alarm clock event is an everyday insight. One common assumption is that self-awareness is only earned through dramatic, earth-shattering events—but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Surprisingly, by a margin of two to one, our unicorns reported having gained the most insight from more mundane situations. They mentioned instances when they suddenly saw their behavior in a new light, whether it was through an overheard conversation, an offhand comment, or even a bit of unexpected recognition.

Seven Pillars of Insight: Values: The principles that guide us Passions: What we love to do Aspirations: What we want to experience and achieve Fit: The environment we require to be happy, energized, and engaged Patterns: Our consistent ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving Reactions: The thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that reveal our strengths and weaknesses Impact: The effect we have on others Perspective-taking: The ability to imagine what other people are thinking and feeling Tool: Zoom In, Zoom Out Alarm clock events: Situations and events that open our eyes to new self-insights. New roles or rules: (things that stretch us outside our comfort zone) Earthquake events: (acute events that shake us to our core) Everyday insights: (seeing our behaviors in a new light)

Research suggests that we tend to think we’re smarter, funnier, thinner, better-looking, more socially skilled, more gifted at sports, superior students, and better drivers than we objectively are.

At work, for example, employees who lack self-awareness bring down team performance. Empirical research has shown that the unaware reduce decision quality by an average of 36 percent, hurt coordination by 46 percent, and increase conflict by 30 percent.

Overconfidence can also blind managers to their employees’ brilliance, causing them to underestimate their top performers’ contributions.

And as their power increases, so does their degree of overestimation. Compared to managers and front-line leaders, for example, executives more dramatically overvalue their empathy, adaptability, coaching, collaboration, and (ironically) self-awareness skills. What might be even more shocking, though, is that compared to their less experienced counterparts, experienced leaders are more likely to overestimate their abilities. Similarly, older managers tend to misjudge their performance relative to their boss’s ratings of them far more than their younger peers do.

First, senior positions are often complex, with murky standards of performance and subjective definitions of success. Second, above a certain level, there usually aren’t reliable mechanisms to supply honest feedback sufficient for gauging performance on these more subjective measures. Making matters worse, many powerful people encircle themselves with friends or sycophants who don’t challenge or disagree with them. As professor Manfred Kets de Vries put it, they’re surrounded by “walls, mirrors and liars.” And finally, executives are often rewarded for delusion—for

Making matters worse, the least competent people tend to be the most confident in their abilities, a finding first reported by Stanford psychology professor David Dunning and then-graduate student Justin Kruger. Their research revealed that participants who performed the worst on tests of humor, grammar, and logic were the most likely to overestimate their abilities.

But when people are steeped in self-delusion, they are usually the last to find out.

In the absence of a committed effort to build self-awareness, the average person makes only meager gains as they grow older.

“top-down thinking” (I call it Knowledge Blindness)—which is our first blindspot. In a series of studies, they discovered that the opinions we have about our abilities in specific situations are based less on how we perform and more on the general beliefs we have about ourselves and our underlying skills.

So even when we think we’re carefully deliberating a certain question, we’re actually making more of a gut decision. According to Daniel Kahneman and other researchers, our brains secretly and simplistically morph the question from “How happy are you with life these days?” into “What mood am I in right now?”

The main danger of Emotion Blindness is that we often make decisions, even important ones, from a place of emotion without even realizing it.

Which brings us to Behavior Blindness, our final blindspot. It’s also one that most of us experience far more often than we realize.

When it comes to the way we see ourselves, we must be brave enough to spread our wings, but wise enough not to fly too high, lest our blindspots send us soaring straight into the sun.

Through examining our assumptions, constantly learning, and seeking feedback, it’s possible to overcome a great many barriers to insight.

The first step is to identify our assumptions.

when something doesn’t go the way we want or expect, we typically assume that the cause exists in our environment.

One way we can question our assumptions is to get into the habit of comparing our past predictions with actual outcomes.

Every time he would make an important decision, he would write down what he expected to happen. Then, he would compare what actually happened with what he had predicted.

“Imagine that we are a year into the future—we have implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Write a brief history of that disaster.” This process tends to reveal potential pitfalls in a way we’d rarely consider otherwise.

A second technique to minimize our blindspots is simply to keep learning, especially in the areas where we think we already know a lot.

the more I think I know, the more I need to learn

Finally, we should seek feedback on our abilities and behaviors.

we need to surround ourselves with those who will tell us the truth. We need colleagues, family members, and friends who will (lovingly) knock us down a peg when we’re getting too big for our britches.

Steve disease: A condition where we believe ourselves to be smarter, funnier, thinner, better-looking, more socially skilled, athletic, and better drivers than we actually are. Dunning-Kruger Effect: The least competent people tend to be the most confident about their abilities and performance. Braver but wiser: The decision to discover the truth about ourselves on our own terms, along with a positive mindset and a sense of self-acceptance. The Three blind spots: We can’t always assess what we know (Knowledge Blindness), how we feel (Emotion Blindness), or how we’re behaving (Behavior Blindness). Overcoming blind spots Identify our assumptions. Confront our assumptions. Keep learning—especially in areas where we think we know a lot. Seek feedback from others.

Though it’s been decades since Baumeister and his research team uncovered the sham that is self-esteem, we can’t seem to shake our obsession with getting more of it. Why? It’s far easier to feel wonderful and special than to become wonderful and special.

A good rule of thumb is that when we need to bounce back from constant challenges, or where we can succeed through sheer persistence, the Feel Good Effect can be helpful. This is especially true in professions like acting, where rejection is part of the job description. It can also be true in the “publish or perish” world of science.