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

by Tasha Eurich

Second, they had a more self-accepting attitude about rumination in general.

Marcia has learned to ask herself the following question whenever she is about to fall down the rabbit hole: Does anyone else care about this as much as I do? When the answer is no, she tries to let it go. And in fact, 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.

The same is true for adults: a learn-well mindset—that is, channeling our thinking to focus on learning over performance—is not only a great rumination-buster; it has also been shown to improve performance in adults.

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. Research shows that the most effective distractions are those that have a fast and positive reward of some kind, like cleaning, seeing friends, or exercising. (I personally believe that few ruminative episodes can withstand a bike ride on a beautiful, sunny Colorado day.)

Yet upon discovering that 70 percent of our unicorns practiced mindfulness in some form, I was forced to grudgingly check it out.

If introspection means analyzing our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and ruminating means unproductively dwelling on them, mindfulness is the opposite: simply noticing what we’re thinking, feeling, and doing without judgment or reaction. Yet contrary to popular belief, mindfulness and meditation are not always synonymous. People tend to associate mindfulness with yogis or ashrams or silent retreats, but in recent years, it’s come to encompass a much wider range of activities. This is in no small part due to the work of Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, who has been researching the topic since the 1970s. Her work has brought mindfulness “out of the Zen meditation caves and into the bright light of everyday functioning.”

Langer provides a far broader and more practical definition: “the process of actively noticing new things, relinquishing preconceived mindsets, and then acting on…[our] new observations.” So even though meditation is one way to practice mindfulness, it isn’t the only way—and it’s not for everyone. In fact, when asked about meditation in an interview,

There’s a growing body of evidence that mindfulness meditation can save us from the traps of introspection and rumination you read about in the last chapter. In one study, when researchers put people who had never meditated through a 10-day intensive mindfulness training retreat, the subjects were less likely to unproductively introspect compared to a control group, both immediately afterward and weeks later. In contrast, the control group’s introspection levels actually increased.

Although the direct connection between mindfulness and self-awareness is just beginning to be understood, initial research is telling. One investigation of mental health professionals showed that the more mindful among them also tended to enjoy greater self-insight. Some researchers have even suggested that the reason mindfulness reduces stress, anxiety, and depression is because it increases insight.

One way to do this is reframing, which simply means looking at our circumstances, our behaviors, and our relationships from a new and different angle.

Aviana’s flexibility in reframing the loss of her job as an opportunity—rather than staying mired in a mindset of helplessness—dramatically improved both her career and her life.

This is a great story. Woman faces crisis. Woman reframes crisis as opportunity. Opportunity magically appears, just in the nick of time. Reframing was importat, it's what got Aviana started applying for jobs, but reframing isn't and wasn't magic. She could have done all the same things and not gotten a job for months.

looking at both the good and the bad from multiple angles will help you maximize your insight and success.

Our second non-meditative mindfulness tool is comparing and contrasting.

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

So far in this chapter, we’ve explored tools to help us better understand our present (mindfulness, both meditative and non-meditative) and our past (life stories). At this point, then, one important topic remains: How can we become more internally self-aware and successful in the future? Or as one unicorn noted, “It’s not enough to know yourself. You have to set goals and make changes to really live the life you want.” Quite often, the commitment to the process of self-discovery unearths disparities between where we are and where we want or need to be in the future. Let’s say that after some mindful comparing and contrasting, you realize that the company you work at isn’t a good fit for you. Or perhaps charting your life story reveals the importance of family in your life, but your current 80-hour workweeks aren’t in line with that value. 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.

If you want to increase your ability to mine problems for solutions, a simple but powerful tool is the Miracle Question (you might recognize it from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch). Developed by de Shazer and Berg, the Miracle Question produces insight everywhere from the workplace to our home life to the therapist’s couch; it’s even been shown to help golfers reduce jerks in their putting stroke. 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?

part of the reason that the Miracle Question can be so effective is that it forces us to think more broadly about our goals and aspirations, a key pillar in our self-awareness journey. But when it comes to improving our internal self-awareness, all goals aren’t created equal. And just like Carol Dweck and Carol Diener’s learn-well kids, when we express our goals in terms of how we will learn and grow, it opens us up to a whole new level of insight and achievement. In one study, college students were asked to write two paragraphs about a major life goal and how they were trying to accomplish it. Interestingly, when the students described goals involving learning and growth, they demonstrated improved self-awareness, maturity, and well-being nearly four years later.* The sooner we can explore how our challenges can lead to growth, the easier it is to take charge and get what we want out of life.

After all, part of building insight is learning what methods of self-exploration work best for you.

Journaling is one for me. My journal is the place where I collect the pieces of my life.

If just one of your co-workers had pulled you aside, you’d have been spared the whole embarrassing and costly ordeal.

That's true, but reality is not that simple. One factor that may keep them from telling you important things is the way you responded when they tried. This is even more acute if you're the boss. Then you have some power to make their life hard. That's scary.

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.

All feedback is a gift, so say "thank you." But only some feedback is useful.

The surprising take-home is that even people you don’t know well can be a valuable source of feedback.

Unfortunately, the answer isn’t that simple. Just like we can’t glean total insight just from gazing at our own reflection, looking at ourselves only through the eyes of others doesn’t show us the complete picture, either.

When I did research on top performing supervisors, I learned that the best assessment was a combination of the evaluation of their bosses, their peers and their subordinates.

Put simply, self-awareness is not one truth. It’s a complex interweaving of our views and others’ views of us. Indeed, according to studies on this topic, these two different perspectives, rather than capturing redundant information, may simply capture different aspects of who we are. And as we learned earlier, if we have only internal or only external self-awareness, we’re missing a huge piece of the puzzle. So even though we should take others’ opinions seriously, they also shouldn’t define us or completely override our self-image; the key, as we’ll see, is learning how to evaluate

In this chapter, you’ll learn a few approaches to help you get honest, actionable feedback and develop a richer picture of how you are seen by others. First, we’ll explore the two biggest barriers to developing external self-awareness. Then I’ll show you three methods to help you seek the right kind of feedback, both at work and in your personal life.

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.

And the MUM effect doesn’t just apply to the kind of personal news people withheld from Glen Lester. It also applies to the delivery of uncomfortable or unwanted information about our failings or weaknesses. I recently heard about a work group whose manager abruptly resigned. Upon learning the news, each of his five employees fancied themselves his successor and eagerly awaited their near-certain promotion. Not only did the promotion never come; the group’s senior manager hired someone from the outside. Apparently, unbeknownst to all five employees, none were doing their current jobs acceptably in the eyes of their employer, let alone being considered for a promotion. But had the leader—or anyone—told them? Of course not! If the employees had received feedback, though, they each would have had the chance to improve. Their manager’s avoidance of social discomfort didn’t just hurt their promotion prospects; it hurt the functioning of the team as a whole.

This is qualitativly different from the Glenn example. In that example the people involved didn't know Glenn or the details of the bad news. They couldn't answer his questions if he asked. They also didn't know how he might react. In the example of the boss, we witness a person not doing his job. Part of the job is to give accurate and helpful feedback to team members so they and the team improve. He didn't do that. If you're the new manager coming in, among the first things you must do is tell team members how they were evaulated and get them on the path to improved performance.

And this grim reality can get grimmer at work. When was the last time your boss sat you down to tell you how you could do better? The last time your colleagues gathered—willingly, voluntarily, and of their own initiative—to critique one another so they could improve? The last time you got honest, critical feedback outside an HR-mandated performance review (or sometimes even in one)? Wait, you can’t think of a time where that happened? You’re not alone.

Absolutely true. We don't select managers well. We give them almost no support during the critical role transition. We barely train them. So they figure things out on their own and follow old role models. The Industrial Age wanted supervisors to catch people doing things wrong and fix things. Our age calls for a manager who helps the team and team members succeed. But until we fix the selection, transition, support, and training issues, we'll have to depend on luck to wind up with good bosses.

Our inclination to be MUM actually makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. In the early days of the human race, when survival depended on belonging to a group, upsetting the social apple cart often meant being ostracized and having to go it alone—a fate that could literally mean death.

As DePaulo and Bell conclude, not only are we “practitioners of politeness,” we are especially likely to lie when the other person is personally invested in whatever it is we’re giving them feedback about. Because we don’t want to upset the social apple cart, we politely accept the “face” people present to the world (that is, who we think they think they are) and avoid putting forward information that may challenge it—even if doing so would ultimately be useful.

For Eleanor, Phil’s white lie was an alarm-clock event that catalyzed a critical insight.

And additional insight might be that the group could conduct after-action critiques to learn from their experience.

Pixar president Ed Catmull has witnessed this reluctance to speak truth to power firsthand.

The Catmull example is excellent. It's taken from the book, Creativity Inc which has a lot more really helpful stuff.

If the first barrier to external self-awareness is other people’s reluctance to tell the truth, the second is our reluctance to ask for it. Most of us, at least intellectually, know we should be seeking more feedback than we are currently. Yet our emotions can still stop us in our tracks. 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. But luckily, pushing past these excuses is absolutely possible, and it requires just one simple decision: to seek out the truth on our own terms rather than leaving it in other people’s well-meaning (but MUM) hands.

Let’s start with the first excuse: I don’t need to ask for feedback.

And it seemed to work. At least at first, as he basked in the success of creating Volvo’s innovative team-based craftsmanship model. But this success would soon sow the seeds of his undoing. In the years that followed, Gyllenhammar’s head grew in lock-step with the company’s profits, earning him the nickname “The Emperor.” His hubris, overconfidence, and refusal to take advice from anybody led him to pursue risky deals with paltry returns, and inexplicably, he often bragged about them to the press. In later years, as Volvo was reporting losses and closing plants, Gyllenhammar was Scandinavia’s highest-paid executive. And because he had seeded Volvo’s board with personal friends, it seemed all but certain that his decisions would go unchallenged.

In Greek tragedy, hubris was followed by nemesis. Jim Collins book, How the Mighty Fall covers this in detail

Whether or not we run a multibillion-dollar company, protecting our fragile egos by deciding we are right and others are wrong can be risky. The good news is that pushing past the first excuse of the Ostrich Trinity is fairly simple: we must decide to pull our heads out of the sand and recognize that others’ opinions are just as important for insight as our own.

This second excuse, however—I shouldn’t ask for feedback—is equally unfounded. One study showed that 83 percent of top-performing leaders regularly solicit feedback, compared to just 17 percent of the worst-performing ones. If anything, we are socially and professionally rewarded for seeking critical feedback; leaders who do are seen as more effective, not just by their bosses, but by their peers and employees (those who seek primarily positive feedback are seen as less effective). And not surprisingly, nearly three-quarters of our unicorns reported having a proactive strategy to get information from people who will tell them the truth. So if we take a page from their book and muster the courage to do so, we’ll be rewarded with a new perspective on how we can improve.

The final excuse in the Ostrich Trinity is perhaps the most understandable: I don’t want to ask for feedback. I’m sure you know that feeling—it’s the dread that overtakes you when walking into your performance appraisal with your boss, or sitting down for a marriage counseling session, or having the first conversation with a friend or colleague after you’ve had a conflict. But while most people are afraid of feedback, surely the ease with which our unicorns hear it should serve as inspiration for the rest of us, right? As it turns out, they have the same reactions that we do. One sales executive quipped, “Are you kidding me? I hate hearing that I’m not perfect!” But what makes unicorns truly special is the fact that they push through this fear, defensiveness, and vulnerability and go for it anyway. As

The first method, 360-degree feedback, is seemingly ubiquitous in modern organizations. With a rich history dating back to the 1950s, it’s designed to provide insight into how we’re seen not only by our managers, but by a variety of groups, like direct reports, peers, clients, or board members. (It’s called a 360 because we’re getting data from all directions.) Recent technological advances have made 360s more accessible for workers in companies large and small, while the simultaneous growth of my field, organizational psychology, has made them increasingly popular. And nowadays, depending on who you ask, anywhere from 30 percent to 90 percent of organizations use this tool in one way or another.

Because responses are averaged across respondents, people can provide their feedback without fear that it will come back to bite them. This is particularly true for leaders whose subordinates fear the repercussions of being brutally honest; luckily, the MUM effect usually disappears when feedback can’t be traced back to us.

The second advantage of 360s is that they show us how our self-views stack up against others’ views of us.

about?’ but if…you find several people have said it, you’ve got to face the facts: either it’s simply true, or it’s their perception of you, which is just as important.”

An excellent book on how to deal with others' perceeptions of you is Laura Huang's Edge

Despite the clear benefits of 360s, they also come with a few disadvantages that prevent them from being the “be-all, end-all” route to external self-awareness. First and foremost, because most 360s are numeric, it can be difficult to interpret our results in a meaningful or actionable way.

It was an astute question that illustrated an unfortunate truth about feedback: if we don’t understand the behavior we’re getting feedback about, we don’t yet have the power to make better choices. Luckily,

To do so, Kim and I used an approach that I call the RIGHT Feedback Process. The idea is that all feedback (and all sources of feedback) are not created equal: we have to choose the RIGHT people, ask them the RIGHT questions, and use the RIGHT process to get the kind of valuable information that leads to actionable insight.

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: a jealous co-worker, an ex with a grudge, or an irrationally uptight boss.

On the other end of the spectrum, the second source to avoid are uncritical lovers. While unloving critics hate everything we do, uncritical lovers wouldn’t criticize us if their lives depended on it.

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.

The first is a level of mutual trust.