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

by Tasha Eurich

It is most perilous to be a speaker of Truth. Sometimes one must choose to be silent, or be silenced. But if a truth cannot be spoken, it must at least be known. Even if you dare not speak truth to others, never lie to yourself. —FRANCES HARDINGE

There is strong scientific evidence that people who know themselves and how others see them are happier. They make smarter decisions. They have better personal and professional relationships. They raise more mature children. They’re smarter, superior students who choose better careers. They’re more creative, more confident, and better communicators. They’re less aggressive and less likely to lie, cheat, and steal. They’re better performers at work who get more promotions. They’re more effective leaders with more enthusiastic employees. They even lead more profitable companies.

on. After so many years of researching the subject, I would go so far as to say that self-awareness is the meta-skill of the twenty-first century.

For most people, it’s easier to choose self-delusion—the antithesis of self-awareness—over the cold, hard truth.

party. Yet there’s something else we all need to consider. As the Bible asks, “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:4). 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. Case in point: in a survey that I conducted among potential readers of this very book, a full 95 percent reported that they were either somewhat or very self-aware!

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.

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

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.

As we began our search for these self-awareness savants, my research team and I adopted two stringent and unwavering criteria. The first was that they had to be high in both types of self-awareness—internal and external—as rated both by themselves and someone who knew them well. Second, they needed to have begun their adult lives with low to moderate levels of self-awareness but dramatically improved it over time, again as rated by themselves and someone who knew them well.*4

others. That’s the thing about unicorns—they know that 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. Florence Ozor, and others like her, are a study in the transformative power of self-awareness.

it. For that reason, the central purpose of my research has been to help people increase their self-awareness in service of their personal fulfillment and professional success.

I wrote Insight for anyone who wants to make the leap from self-blindness to self-insight, and in turn reap the rewards of smarter choices, stronger relationships, and a better life.

I’m hoping that this book will be a powerful wake-up call to three simple facts: that self-awareness is the exquisite foundation to a life well lived, that it is possible to make the journey, and that the courage and effort it takes to get there are well worth it.

KEY CONCEPTS AND TAKEAWAYS: CHAPTER 1 Self-awareness: The will and the skill to understand who we are, including things like our values, patterns, and impact on others (internal self-awareness) and how others see us (external self-awareness). Self-delusion: The opposite of self-awareness, where we avoid—or can’t see—the truth about ourselves. Self-awareness unicorns: People who have made transformational improvements in their self-awareness. Insights: The “aha” moments in our self-awareness journey.

I’m often asked how self-awareness is related to emotional intelligence. The simple answer is that whereas emotional intelligence is primarily about awareness and regulation of emotions in ourselves and others, self-awareness is a much broader term: it covers our internal characteristics that go beyond emotions—our values, passions, aspirations, fit, patterns, reactions, and impact on others—as well as how we’re seen by other people.

What’s more, it shows that while setting goals is relatively easy, they don’t always lead to true insight or perfect happiness. 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.

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).

Richard Weissbourd called “Zoom In, Zoom Out.” 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.

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.

But the truth is that for all seven pillars, it is critical to gain both an internal and external perspective.

so. There’s a wonderful Chinese proverb that says: “When the winds of change rage, some build shelters while others build windmills.”

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. At work, for example, this can be things like job changes, promotions, reassignments, new responsibilities, or joining a new group or organization. In particular, our first leadership experiences are especially ripe opportunities for insight—in fact, when the American Management Association surveyed 700-plus CEOs, they saw these early formative experiences as the most important learning events of their careers.

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. Other examples might be the death or illness of a loved one, a divorce or the end of a relationship, or any serious failure or setback. Because earthquake events are so life-shattering, they all but force us to confront the truth about ourselves.

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.

KEY CONCEPTS AND TAKEAWAYS: CHAPTER 2 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)

According to behavioral economist and Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman, human beings possess an “almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”

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.*2

And the more we ignore The Three Blindspots, the more pernicious they become.

Professor David Dunning (who first showed us that the least competent people are the most confident) has spent most of his career trying to understand why we’re so terrible at evaluating our own performance. Though there is admittedly no satisfying single explanation, Dunning and his colleague Joyce Ehrlinger uncovered the powerful influence of something they call “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.

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.

As historian W. W. Abbott put it, “more than most, Washington’s biography is the story of a man constructing himself.”

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.

Indeed, the commitment to learn and accept reality is one of the most significant differences between the self-aware and everybody else. The self-aware exert great effort to overcome their blindspots and see themselves as they really are. Through examining our assumptions, constantly learning, and seeking feedback, it’s possible to overcome a great many barriers to insight. Although it would be unreasonable to try to eliminate our blindspots altogether, we can gather and assemble data that helps us see ourselves and the impact of our behavior more clearly.

The first step is to identify our assumptions.

As Harvard psychologist Chris Argyris explains in his must-read book Increasing Leadership Effectiveness, when something doesn’t go the way we want or expect, we typically assume that the cause exists in our environment. Surely there was a screw-up in the puzzle factory, or the missing pieces somehow got lost on their way out of the box. The last place

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

A second technique to minimize our blindspots is simply to keep learning, especially in the areas where we think we already know a lot. In their landmark 1999 study, David Dunning and Justin Kruger found that when overconfident poor performers were trained to improve their performance on a task, not only did they improve, so did their awareness of their prior ineffectiveness.

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

KEY CONCEPTS AND TAKEAWAYS: CHAPTER 3 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.

THE CULT OF SELF The Sinister Societal Roadblock to Insight

Whether you know it or not, a powerful cult is trying to recruit you. Cults tend to show a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing, and this cult has chosen an irresistible figurehead: you! Frankly, it’s easy to see why the promise that the Cult of Self makes can be too tempting to resist. It lulls us into thinking that we are unique, special, and superior. That our needs matter more than everyone else’s. That we’re not subject to the same rules as others. That we’re deserving of things simply because we want them. No wonder the Cult of Self has successfully recruited so many of our neighbors, friends, and colleagues—perhaps it’s even succeeded in luring you. The last chapter was about our internal roadblocks; in this chapter, we’ll discover this insidious societal obstacle. Perhaps more importantly, we’ll learn several methods for resisting its siren song—or breaking free if you’re already ensnared.

TURNING THE TIDE: FROM EFFORT TO ESTEEM

Excellent section. See also David Brooks book, The Road to Character

In fact, the task force was forced to grudgingly admit in its own report that “the associations between self-esteem and its expected consequences are mixed, insignificant, or absent” and that there was no relationship “between self-esteem and teenage pregnancy, self-esteem and child abuse, self-esteem and most cases of alcohol and drug abuse.” Yet in a statement of stunning disregard for the scientific method, Vasconcellos disavowed the task force’s findings, saying “we all know in our gut that it is true.”

It’s far easier to feel wonderful and special than to become wonderful and special.

Comedian George Carlin has a great bit about this. “No child these days,” he says, “gets to hear these all important character building words: ‘You lost, Bobby. You’re a loser, Bobby.’ They become used to these kid gloves and never hear the truth about themselves until they’re in their twenties, when their boss calls them in and says, ‘Bobby clean the s*** out of your desk and get the f*** out of here, you’re a loser!’ ”

And alas, such unwarranted optimism persists even in the face of cold, hard truths. Management professors Thomas Åstebro and Samir Elhedhli reviewed data collected by the Canadian Innovation Centre, a non-profit that helps entrepreneurs bring their ideas to market. The program evaluates new business plans and subsequently assigns companies a grade from A to F; on average, and more or less consistent with real-world failure rates, 70 percent are given a D or F. But almost half of these entrepreneurs persisted anyway. Many even doubled their efforts, wrongly thinking that hard work could improve the viability of their unviable business. In literally every case, it didn’t.