More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tasha Eurich
Read between
June 22 - June 23, 2019
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.*1
Whether it’s at work, at home, at school, or at play, we’re quick to accuse others of being unaware, but we rarely (if ever) ask ourselves whether we have the same problem.
The truth is that while most of us think we know ourselves pretty well, this confidence is often unfounded. Researchers have established that our self-assessments “are often flawed in substantive and systematic ways.”
The least competent people are usually the most confident in their abilities.
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. People who are high in internal self-awareness tend to make choices that are consistent with who they really are, allowing them to lead happier and more satisfying lives.
External self-awareness is about understanding yourself from the outside in—that is, knowing how other people see you. Because externally self-aware people can accurately see themselves from others’ perspectives, they are able to build stronger and more trusting relationships.
The bottom line is that to become truly self-aware, you have to understand yourself and how others see you—and what’s more, the path to get there is very, very different than what most people believe. But if this sounds intimidating or untenable, there is good news. My research has shown that self-awareness is a surprisingly developable skill.
Suddenly, I had an epiphany: if I wanted to hack the code of self-awareness, I wasn’t going to find the answer in those who came by it naturally. Instead, I had to find people who had made dramatic, game-changing improvements in self-insight over the course of their adult lives. In other words, I needed to study self-aware people who didn’t start off that way.
We learned that self-aware people possessed seven distinct types of insight that unaware people didn’t. 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).
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).
As we learned earlier, one of the biggest myths about self-awareness is that it’s all about looking inward—that is, insight from the inside out. But armed with only our own observations, even the most dedicated students of self-awareness among us risk missing key pieces of the puzzle.
Sometimes, alarm clock events boost our internal self-awareness by helping us see ourselves in a new or different light; other times, they give us new data on how we’re coming across to the outside world. 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.
The third type of alarm clock event is an everyday insight.
In one study of more than 13,000 professionals, researchers found almost no relationship between self-assessed performance and objective performance ratings.
executives are often rewarded for delusion—for example, overconfident CEOs tend to be paid more than their peers, and as their compensation packages grow, so do their levels of overconfidence.
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.
But here’s what I didn’t tell you about this embarrassing battle and the hopelessly self-deluded man responsible for it. The year was 1754. The place was Great Meadows, located in present-day Pennsylvania. And the colonel was none other than George Washington. The events at Fort Necessity soon snowballed into the Seven Years’ War, and as English author Horace Walpole writes, “The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America [would] set the world on fire.” It would also be the first—and last—time that Washington would ever surrender to his enemy.
One way we can question our assumptions is to get into the habit of comparing our past predictions with actual outcomes.
But what if you want to identify your assumptions in real time rather than in hindsight? Decision psychologist Gary Klein suggests doing what he calls a pre-mortem by asking the following question: “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.”
A second technique to minimize our blindspots is simply to keep learning, especially in the areas where we think we already know a lot.
Finally, we should seek feedback on our abilities and behaviors. Out of all the tools we’ve reviewed so far, objective feedback has the best odds of helping us see and overcome all three blindspots.
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.
“Parents used to give their children common names,” Twenge observes, “so they would fit in. Now, they give their child a unique [one to] stand out and be a star.”
Baumeister dug into the science, and in 2003, he and his colleagues published an unequivocal indictment of almost three decades—and over 15,000 studies—of self-esteem research. Their review was chock-full of evidence that the relationship between self-esteem and success was virtually nonexistent.
The real social ill was that most people felt too good about themselves. And it got worse. Baumeister’s review showed that people with high self-esteem were more violent and aggressive. When their romantic relationships were in trouble, they were more likely to walk away, be unfaithful, or engage in other destructive behaviors. They were also more likely to cheat, drink, and do drugs. All of this was literally the opposite of what the California Task Force had been arguing. Though it’s been decades since Baumeister and his research team uncovered the sham that is self-esteem, we can’t seem to
...more
To quote one such unicorn, a brilliant project manager who recently dealt with a devastating medical diagnosis, “You can visit denial-ville, but you can’t build a house there.”*2
But what we don’t always realize is that paradoxically, an intense self-focus not only obscures our vision of those around us; it distorts our ability to see ourselves for what we really are. Indeed, research has shown that in general, there is an inverse relationship between how special we feel and how self-aware we are.
For example, in a study of tens of thousands of U.S. college students, Jean Twenge and her colleagues found that between the mid-1980s and 2006, narcissism increased a full 30 percent, as measured by statements like “If I ruled the world it would be a better place” and “I always know what I’m doing.”
In a fascinating study, when researchers Charles Ham and his colleagues measured the size of CEO signatures in SEC filings in S&P 500 firms (with a sizable signature being an indicator of narcissism), they found that the larger a CEO’s signature, the worse the company performed on a number of indicators (patent counts and citations, return on assets, revenue and sales growth).
Researchers have discovered that people who use social media generally fall into one of two categories: 80 percent are so-called “Meformers,” who like to post messages that are all about telling everyone about what is going on with them. The remaining 20 percent are “Informers,” who tend to post non-self-related information—this could be things like helpful articles, amusing observations, funny videos, etc. Informers tend to have more friends and enjoy richer, more satisfying interactions than Meformers.
Yet the virtue of humility is often the exception rather than the rule in our Cult of Self society—both in the world of business and outside it. I see three reasons for the sad state of affairs. First, people often confuse humility with low self-worth, and thus label it as undesirable, even though the opposite is true—because it means appreciating our weaknesses and keeping our successes in perspective, humility is actually a necessary ingredient for self-awareness. The second reason humility is in short supply is that to gain it, we must tame the powerful beast at the epicenter of the Cult of
...more
Thankfully, the alternative to boundless self-esteem doesn’t have to be self-loathing but rather self-acceptance—our third approach to fighting the Cult of Self. Where self-esteem means thinking you’re amazing regardless of the objective reality, self-acceptance (also called self-compassion by some researchers) means understanding our objective reality and choosing to like ourselves anyway.
So how can you increase your self-acceptance? One approach is to better monitor your inner monologue.
Resisting the Cult of Self Be an informer, not a meformer: Focusing less on ourselves and more on engaging and connecting with others Cultivate humility: Admit to our failings and put our successes in perspective Focus on self-acceptance over self-esteem: Know our flaws and choose to like ourselves anyway Tool: Monitor your inner monologue
The act of thinking about ourselves wasn’t associated with knowing ourselves. In fact, in a few cases, he found the opposite: the more time the participants spent introspecting, the less self-knowledge they had (yes, you read that right). In other words, we can spend endless amounts of time in self-reflection but emerge with no more self-insight than when we started.
Just like Karen, most people believe that the answers to our inner mysteries lie deep within us, and that it’s our job to uncover them—either on our own or with the help of a therapist or loved one. Yet the assumption that introspection begets self-awareness is a myth. Unquestionably, Karen approached her introspective exercise with the earnest goal of better understanding herself. But without her realizing it, the process became what self-awareness researcher Timothy Wilson calls “disruptive.” Continually asking herself why her birth parents gave her up is the wrong question: not only is it
...more
The problem with introspection, it turns out, isn’t that it’s categorically ineffective, but that many people are doing it completely wrong.
Folly #1: The Myth of the Padlocked Door (or Why We Can’t Excavate Our Unconscious)
Psychologist Todd Dufresne, for example, didn’t hedge his bets about Freud when he concluded that “no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every important thing he had to say.” Freud has been appropriately criticized for failing to scientifically test his approach. Many contend that his methods were ineffective at best, and that he may have actually worsened some of his patients’ mental health. And while much of Freud’s work has been largely discredited, his enduring influence on our assumptions about introspection simply cannot be overstated.
What’s more, as counseling psychologist Jennifer Lyke points out, the most important predictor of success isn’t the technique the therapist uses, but the relationship she has with her client.
“The danger of too much introspection in therapy,” Dr. Lara Fielding, a Los Angeles–based clinical psychologist, says, “is that we spin a story that gets us stuck.” In other words, rather than getting wrapped up in how broken we are, we should be focusing on what we can learn and how to move forward.
Another tip is to adopt a flexible mindset, which is applicable both within and outside the confines of a therapist’s office. A flexible mindset means remaining open to several truths and explanations, rather than seeking, as Freud often did, one root cause to explain a broad range of feelings and behaviors. This involves letting go of a desire for something that Turkish psychologist Omer Simsek calls the need for absolute truth.
Yet paradoxically, the search for this kind of rigid and unequivocal certainty about ourselves is the enemy of internal self-awareness. Why? It blinds us to the many nuances in how we think, feel, behave, and interact with the world around us. It can also have unintended consequences such as depression, anxiety, and rumination (which we’ll return to shortly). And, counterintuitively, my research shows that when self-aware people let go of this need, the more self-aware they become, whether or not they seek therapy.
As one unicorn put it, a therapist’s value is in “holding a mirror to our thoughts, feelings and behaviors.” More broadly, introspection should be a process of open and curious exploration rather than a search for definitive answers.
Folly #2: Why Not Ask Why?
Though most of us think we’re a credible authority on our thoughts, feelings, and behavior, there is a stunning amount of evidence showing that we’re often remarkably mistaken.
In other studies, research had shown that people tend to prefer products on the right side of a display. And this study was no exception. Even though every pair was identical, people chose the pair on the right at a rate of four to one.
