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by
Tasha Eurich
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June 22 - June 23, 2019
investigations have shown that asking why reduces our satisfaction with the choices we make.
The lesson here is that asking “what” keeps us open to discovering new information about ourselves, even if that information is negative or in conflict with our existing beliefs. Asking “why” has an essentially opposite effect.
So when it comes to internal self-awareness, a simple tool that can have a rather dramatic impact is one I call What Not Why.
Jose, an entertainment industry veteran, hated his job. But where so many people would have gotten stuck thinking, “Why do I feel so terrible?” Jose asked, “What situations make me feel terrible and what do they have in common?”
The bottom line? Why questions draw us to our limitations; what questions help us see our potential. Why questions stir up negative emotions; what questions keep us curious. Why questions trap us in our past; what questions help us create a better future. Indeed, making the transition from why to what can be the difference between victimhood and growth.
Let’s say you’re in a terrible mood after work one day. We already know that asking Why do I feel this way? should come with a warning label. It’s likely to elicit such unhelpful answers as because I hate Mondays! or because I’m just a negative person! What if you instead asked What am I feeling right now? Perhaps you’d realize that you’re overwhelmed at work, exhausted, and hungry. Rather than blindly reacting to these feelings, you take a step back, decide to fix yourself dinner, call a friend for some advice about how to manage your work stress, and commit to an early bedtime. Asking what
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Folly #3: Keeping a Journal
My own research, for example, has shown that people who keep journals generally have no more internal (or external) self-awareness than those who don’t, with one small but important exception that I’ll reveal in a moment. In another study, students who reported keeping diaries showed more self-reflection but less insight—and to boot, the journalers were more anxious.
The resolution lies not in questioning whether journaling is the right thing to do, but instead discovering how to do journaling right. Psychologist James Pennebaker’s decades-long research program on something he calls expressive writing provides powerful direction in finding the answer. It involves writing, for 20 to 30 minutes at a time, our “deepest thoughts and feelings about issues that have made a big impact on [our] lives.” In the 30-plus years during which Pennebaker has been guiding people through this exercise, he has found that it helps virtually everyone who’s experienced a
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In one study, undergraduates who completed Pennebaker’s journaling exercise for just four days had stronger immune systems and fewer doctor’s visits than a control group almost two months later.
As G. K. Chesterton perceptively observed, “Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized”—that is, by examining positive moments too closely, we suck the joy right out of them. Instead, if we simply focus on reliving our happy memories, it’s relatively easy to avoid this trap. Therefore, the first take-home in seeking insight from journaling is to explore the negative and not overthink the positive.
True insight only happens when we process both our thoughts and our feelings.
To ensure maximum benefits, it’s probably best that you don’t write every day. It’s true: Pennebaker and his colleagues have shown that writing every few days is better than writing for many days in a row. “I’m not even convinced,” Pennebaker says, “that people should write about a horrible event for more than a couple of weeks. You risk getting into a sort of navel gazing or cycle of self-pity. But standing back every now and then and evaluating where you are in life is really important.”
Folly #4: The Evil Twin of Introspection
This single-minded fixation on our fears, shortcomings, and insecurities has a name: it’s called rumination, and it’s introspection’s evil twin.*6
This is why rumination is the most insidious of all the follies: not only does it effectively prevent insight, it can masquerade as productive self-reflection.*7 And when it comes to self-awareness, if introspection is disruptive, rumination is disastrous.
As one of our unicorns said, “If we spend too much time scrutinizing what’s in our rearview mirror, we’re certain to crash into a light post.” That’s why research shows that despite incessantly processing their feelings, ruminators are less accurate at identifying their emotions: their minds are so laser-focused on an incident, reaction, or personal weakness that they miss the larger picture.
reminding ourselves that people don’t generally care about our mistakes as much as we think they do was one of our unicorns’ most commonly cited rumination-busting strategies.
Our third rumination-buster is actually a distraction technique. Although this move—hitting pause—feels like the last thing we should do when something is truly vexing us, it’s one of the simplest rumination-busters at our disposal. Instead of replaying our self-doubt on repeat, we can walk away and do something that will take our mind off it.
The fourth tool is the oddly useful method of thought-stopping, which is similar to hitting pause but doesn’t involve actively stepping away; this pause instead takes place internally.
Finally, allow me to introduce our last rumination-busting tool, reality checks,
KEY CONCEPTS AND TAKEAWAYS: CHAPTER 5 Introspection: The process of consciously examining our thoughts, feelings, motives, and behaviors. Rumination: A fixation on our fears, shortcomings, and insecurities The Four Follies of Introspection We can’t excavate our unconscious, no matter how hard we try. Trying to find the “why” behind our behavior isn’t helpful. Journaling isn’t universally effective. Though rumination can feel like a path to insight, it is actually the enemy to self-awareness. How to introspect the right way Choose the right approach: Not all self-reflection is useful. Focus
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The process of drawing novel distinctions is, according to Langer, “the essence of mindfulness.” But what does it mean to draw novel distinctions? In a nutshell, it’s seeing ourselves and our world in a new way.
Our second non-meditative mindfulness tool is comparing and contrasting. When we compare and contrast, we’re looking for similarities and differences between our experiences, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors over time. In particular, this can be a great way to see patterns (one of the Seven Pillars of Insight) that we might not have picked up on in the past.
So try taking five minutes every evening—whether it’s during your drive home, while unwinding after dinner, or after you climb into bed—to mindfully ask yourself: What went well today? What didn’t go well? What did I learn and how will I be smarter tomorrow?
Psychology professor Dan McAdams has been prolifically researching life stories for more than 30 years. The approach that McAdams and his colleagues use to help people compose their life stories goes something like this: Think about your life as if it were a book. Divide that book into chapters that represent the key phases of your life. Within those phases, think of 5–10 specific scenes in your story—high points, low points, turning points, early memories, important childhood events, important adulthood events, or any other event you find self-defining. For each, provide an account that is at
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Research shows that self-aware people tend to knit more complex narratives of their key life events: they are more likely to describe each event from different perspectives, include multiple explanations, and explore complex and even contradictory emotions.
At the same time, we also want to seek something called thematic coherence. When we’re able to find consistent themes across multiple important events of our lives, we can glean surprising self-insights—like
Whereas people with “contamination sequences” see a pattern of good things turning to bad ones, people with “redemption sequences” believe that bad things can turn to good.
Quite often, whether we choose to act on our newfound self-insight is the difference between success and stagnation.
Yet not only does focusing on solutions—a technique called solutions-mining—help us reach our goals in record time; it has the surprising benefit of helping us think less but understand more.
Developed in the 1980s by married couple Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, an approach called Solutions Focused Brief Therapy has produced dramatic improvements in things like depression, recidivism, stress and crisis management, and psychological and social functioning in populations such as parents, prisoners, adolescents with behavior problems, healthcare workers, and couples struggling with their marriages. And for our purposes, the approach has also been associated with greater insight and psychological growth.
So what is the Miracle Question, exactly? Imagine that tonight as you sleep a miracle occurs in your life [that] has completely solved this problem….Think for a moment…how is life going to be different now? Describe it in detail. What’s the first thing you’ll notice as you wake up in the morning?
There’s an old science-backed adage that the words of a drunk person are the thoughts of a sober one.
If internal self-awareness means gaining insight by looking inward, external self-awareness means turning our gaze outward to understand how we are seen. And no matter how hard we try, we simply cannot do this on our own. Unfortunately, though, learning how others see us is usually thwarted by one simple fact: even the people we’re closest to are reluctant to share such information.
The saying that “feedback is a gift” is such a painful cliché that we often forget how true it really is. And we need this gift for one simple reason: other people generally see us more objectively than we see ourselves.
The surprising take-home is that even people you don’t know well can be a valuable source of feedback.
To describe this tendency, Rosen and Tesser coined the term MUM Effect, which stands for keeping Mum about Undesirable Messages. Their findings—confirmed by many subsequent studies—show that when we’re in possession of information that might make someone uncomfortable, we tend to choose the path of least resistance: we simply decide to say nothing.
Studies show that self-aware leaders are more successful and promotable, and some research has even shown that self-awareness is the single greatest predictor of leadership success. The problem is, the higher up you are on the corporate food chain, the less likely you are to be self-aware, an affliction that’s been labeled CEO Disease.
Because asking for feedback makes us uncomfortable, we prefer to find ways to justify our willful ignorance. In my experience, there are three primary excuses we make, and because they are designed to help us feel better about keeping our heads in the sand, I call them the Ostrich Trinity.
Let’s start with the first excuse: I don’t need to ask for feedback.
Sometimes, though, we do want to ask for feedback, but we’re worried that doing so would convey weakness or come at a cost. This second excuse, however—I shouldn’t ask for feedback—is equally unfounded.
The final excuse in the Ostrich Trinity is perhaps the most understandable: I don’t want to ask for feedback.
As U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once opined, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.”
Now, before we look at who we should turn to for feedback, let’s start with who we shouldn’t turn to. The first category, unloving critics, are the type of people who would criticize everything we do:
On the other end of the spectrum, the second source to avoid are uncritical lovers.
So if we shouldn’t ask for feedback from unloving critics or uncritical lovers, who should we ask? The answer is loving critics: people who will be honest with us while still having our best interests at heart.
While the RIGHT method can certainly be applied to this sort of feedback, there is another slightly simpler method for learning how we show up in the personal realm. I call it the Dinner of Truth, and if that sounds slightly ominous, that’s because it is. Yet for those who make the brave choice to try it, the Dinner of Truth can have an astonishing impact not just on our external self-awareness, but on our most important personal relationships.
So how can we use the Dinner of Truth to produce our own radical insight? Here are Misner’s instructions: Contact a close friend, family member, or mentor—someone who knows you well and with whom you want to strengthen your relationship. Invite this person to a meal. During the meal, ask them to tell you the one thing that annoys them most about you. But first, tell the person why you’re doing this, that nothing is off-limits, and that you aren’t allowed to answer defensively—only to listen with an open heart and mind.
And if you set yourself up for success, the conversation will probably go more smoothly than you think. First, Misner says, mental preparation is key. Spend some time trying to anticipate what might be said and bracing yourself for the worst-case scenario. Second, make a decision about how “deep” you want to go. The closer we are to the person we choose, the more insight we stand to gain, but the scarier the conversation might be. Third, Misner warns his students that the person you ask might not be ready to open up to you right away; if that’s the case, he suggests reminding them that this is
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