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

by Tasha Eurich

sufficient exposure to the behavior you want feedback on and a clear picture of what success looks like.

The third and final factor in selecting a loving critic is whether they will be willing and able to be brutally honest with you.

The most important characteristic of the right questions is specificity.

The bottom line is that it’s on you to ask the questions you want answered—and in general, the more specific you are, the more seamless and successful the process will be for both you and your loving critics.

I’m a big proponent of realism. You can’t—and shouldn’t—try to transform yourself overnight. And in fact, the people I’ve seen make the most dramatic improvements are usually the ones who were laser-focused on one thing at a time.

But work isn’t the only place where external self-awareness matters. Aren’t most of us equally curious about how we’re seen in our personal lives—by our friends, our neighbors, and our family? 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,

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 intended to help you grow, and that all you want to do is check your perceptions against theirs. This gives them permission to be honest and candid rather than cautious and polite. Then, once your dinner companion starts sharing the feedback, Misner says, your job is to keep the conversation going. It will be tempting to shut down this line of inquiry as quickly as humanly possible. But to get the most out of this exercise, Misner recommends asking questions to clarify as necessary, just as he did with his kids during his maiden voyage of the exercise.

But learning how other people see us is only the first step on the path to external self-awareness. As eye-opening as feedback can be, if we want to turn it into the kind of insight that makes our life better, we need to develop a few more equally critical and rewarding skills: to receive it with grace, to commit to reflecting on it, and to intelligently respond to it.

KEY CONCEPTS AND TAKEAWAYS: CHAPTER 7 The prism metaphor: Every time we get a new perspective on our behavior, it helps us see ourselves in a richer, more multidimensional way. The MUM effect: People prefer to withhold the truth when it comes to telling us how they see us. CEO Disease: The tendency for people in powerful positions to be less self-aware; when the overconfidence that results from past successes makes it challenging to hear feedback—and others reluctant to give The Ostrich Trinity: The excuses we make up to avoid getting feedback: I don’t need to ask for it; I shouldn’t ask for it; I don’t want to ask for it. Tools for eliciting candid feedback 360 feedback The RIGHT Feedback The right people: Loving critics The right questions: Specific, test a hypothesis about ourselves The right process: Observation period, conversations, follow-up The Dinner of Truth

RECEIVING, REFLECTING ON, AND RESPONDING TO DIFFICULT OR SURPRISING FEEDBACK

That’s when it hit me. She had never wanted my honest feedback in the first place—she wanted the Kabuki-theater version of honest feedback: the kind where I told her she was doing a great job and that all the students loved her, even though that was far from the objective reality.

To gain true insight, we also have to learn how to hear that truth—not just listen to it, but really hear it.

Even our unicorns get tripped up. But when we make excuses, explain feedback away, or blame it on bad moods or biases, we’re only hurting ourselves.

3R Model,

The process starts with receiving feedback,

Florence’s simple but powerful decision to mine the insight potential in her boss’s feedback led her to wonder, What am I doing

when it comes to reflecting on feedback (the second step in the 3R Model), unicorns wisely avoid the temptation to jump in right away. Most reported giving themselves days or even weeks to bounce back after hearing something truly surprising or upsetting.

When, Florence was ready to figure out what this strange feedback meant, she asked herself three questions. First, do I understand this feedback?

This then led Florence to ask, how will this affect my long-term success and well-being? Remember, not all feedback is accurate or important, and as I mentioned earlier, unicorns are surprisingly picky about what they let in. After all, as Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius reminds us, “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.” To figure out what is worth listening to, a good rule of thumb is to look at how pervasive a particular behavior is. Feedback from one person is a perspective; feedback from two people is a pattern; but feedback from three or more people is likely to be as close to a fact as you can get.

This realization propelled Florence to her final question, do I want to act on this feedback, and if so, how?

respond to the feedback (the final step in the 3R Model),

But while many of us are at least somewhat aware of the stereotypes we have about others, we often lack insight into a more surprising sort of stereotype: the self-limiting beliefs we hold about ourselves and how others see us. And whether we know it or not, we all have them.

This effect was dubbed stereotype threat by psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, and it’s been demonstrated for a variety of stereotyped groups and in a wide swath of areas.

Thankfully, there’s a simple intervention we can use to inoculate ourselves against these self-limiting effects: a process Claude Steele dubbed self-affirmation. When faced with feedback in an area that plays into our self-limiting beliefs, merely taking a few minutes to remind ourselves of another important aspect of our identity than the one being threatened shores up our “psychological immune system.”

Effect? Might self-affirmation simply result in our trivializing tough feedback or explaining it away? This couldn’t be further from the truth. The rigorous scientific research on the practice clearly shows that, rather than causing us to trivialize what we hear, it actually helps us hear tough truths. According to researcher David Sherman, self-affirmation makes us “more open to ideas that would otherwise be too painful to accept.” After all, when we remember the greater picture of who we are, we can put seemingly threatening information in its proper perspective.

My own anecdotal experience aside, researchers have recently discovered that reminiscing can indeed be a powerful mechanism for self-affirmation. For instance, researcher Matthew Vess and his colleagues asked undergraduate psychology students to recall a positive memory from their past before receiving negative feedback about their performance on an analytical reasoning test. Those who reminisced weren’t just less defensive; counterintuitively, they were also less likely to hold delusional beliefs about their abilities.

Here’s the truth: in the process of moving from mirror to prism, we will sometimes uncover things that will be difficult to change—flaws that are woven throughout the fabric of who we are. The best way to manage our weaknesses isn’t always clear-cut, but the first step is to openly admit them to ourselves, and then to others. Sometimes we can make small changes that have a big payoff. Occasionally, we can completely transform. But in a few cases, the right response is, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, to accept the things we cannot change. That’s exactly what Levi did.

sometimes an outside perspective can reaffirm a positive quality that we hope we have in a way that helps us make more confident decisions.

When we learn something critical and surprising, we can work to change, like Steve; to reframe the feedback, like Florence; or to embrace it and be open about it, like Levi. When we learn something critical and confirming—that is, something that reinforces our prior insecurities or vulnerabilities—we can use self-affirmation to channel it productively and work to minimize the impact of that weakness on our careers and our lives. With positive and surprising feedback, we can acknowledge and further invest in our newfound strengths, like Tom. And finally, as we saw with Kelsey, positive and confirming feedback gives us the confidence we need to continue on our chosen paths.

KEY CONCEPTS AND TAKEAWAYS: CHAPTER 8 Self-limiting beliefs/Stereotype threat: The stereotypes we hold about ourselves that hold us back. Four types of feedback: Positive and confirming, positive and surprising, negative and confirming, negative and surprising. Tools to deal with surprising or difficult feedback The 3R Model: Receive, Reflect, Respond Self-affirmation: Not deluding ourselves to think we are better than we are, but rather, reminding ourselves of our objective strengths and seeing the bigger picture of who we are Tool: Affirming our values Tool: Reminiscing Accept what we can’t change (and put our energy toward what we can)

In a 2012 commencement speech at his alma mater, the University of Kansas, Mulally coined a term for those moments of unexpected insight. “A gem,” he explains, “is a learning that enables us to reevaluate what we’re doing.”

the purpose of the BPR was awareness—to ensure that everyone knew the plan, the status of that plan, and the reality of the challenges the company was facing.

According to Mulally, if there was a single defining moment in Ford’s turnaround, this was it. Up until that point, Ford’s executives had been afraid to surface problems; to tell each other the truth; to give and receive honest feedback. The same mentality that had kept them MUM about the realities of the business also kept them MUM about their individual failures, team dysfunctions, and cultural challenges. But now, for the first time, the team was confronting reality.

If being individually self-aware means understanding who you are and how others see you, a self-aware team commits to that same understanding at a collective level. More specifically, there are five things that self-aware teams regularly assess and address: I call them the Five Cornerstones of Collective Insight. First, their objectives: what are they trying to achieve? Second, their progress toward those objectives: how are they doing? Third, the processes they’re employing to achieve their objectives: how are they getting there? Fourth, their assumptions about the business and their environment: do they hold true? And finally, their individual contributions: what impact is each person having on the team’s performance?

As a result of their collective insight, self-aware teams are more efficient, more effective, more innovative, and more rewarding to be a part of. Unfortunately, as many can attest and studies often show, few teams are naturally self-aware.

Specifically, there are Three Building Blocks that must be in place for a leader to drive a self-aware team. First, if the team doesn’t have a leader who models the way, the process will be seen as insincere or even dangerous. Second, if there isn’t the psychological safety to tell the truth, the chance of candid feedback is almost zero. But even with all this in place, you need an ongoing process—not unlike Mulally’s BPR—to ensure that the exchange of feedback is built into the team’s culture.

if a team doesn’t know where it’s headed, they are missing the “because” of self-awareness, and trying to get there would therefore be both frivolous and pointless!

The lesson is that no matter what challenges you’re facing, self-aware teams must begin with a self-aware leader who models the way. “It’s easy to get isolated at the top,” Suttles told me, “But if your team isn’t performing as you’d like, the first place to look is at yourself. If I glance over my shoulder and there’s nobody back there, that’s called feedback. If I glance over my shoulder and people are following me, that’s probably a good sign.”

However, when a leader commits to confronting his flaws while also striving to improve, his team is motivated to do the same. In fact, this is a great example of preeminent psychologist Albert Bandura’s theory of social learning, which suggests that followers tend to imitate the attitudes and behaviors of their leader. When a leader is authentic, team members learn that it’s not just okay but expected to honestly reflect

The process was famously pioneered in the early 1970s at General Electric and has been described as “a super-intensive getting-to-know-you meeting [where] team members raise candid observations and questions” about their leader. Though it was originally developed to help new managers and their teams get to know one another, the so-called “New Leader Assimilation Exercise” has been shown to be valuable regardless of a leader’s tenure—that’s why I call it the Leader Feedback Process. It helps managers earn nearly instantaneous insight into their team’s perceptions and expectations of them while improving their leadership, communication, and well-being. What’s more, empirically, their teams experience better, more trusting relationships and a greater sense of commitment to their mission.

Even once leaders have opened up these channels, they must also work to ensure that they stay open, and not just between employees and the leader but among members of the team.

Edmondson coined the term psychological safety to describe the shared belief that it’s safe to ask one another for help, admit mistakes, and raise tough issues. “The term,” Edmondson explains, “is meant to suggest neither a careless sense of permissiveness, nor an unrelenting positive affect but rather a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.”

It should come as no surprise that the first step for leaders wanting to cultivate psychological safety in their team is to work on building trust. But though it’s important, trust alone isn’t sufficient for psychological safety.

To define these behaviors, we used the Start/Stop/Continue Model that we learned about in chapter 7 (while I don’t think this model is particularly effective at the individual level, it can give teams a common framework to discuss what’s working and what isn’t).

Building Block #3: An Ongoing Commitment and Process to Stay Self-Aware

However, he told me, there were two problems. The first was that not every manager had the skills to solicit ongoing feedback. “People take their cues from what they see and observe,” he said, “not from what we say.” No matter how often the executives assured everyone that this was a safe organization for criticism, if their team didn’t feel safe, they would be cautious about what they said.

The second problem, as Catmull described it, was that notes are well-intended criticisms, but they are not solutions. “Solutions,” he said, “require a great deal of effort, both in understanding them, and then working out how to act on them.” At the end of Notes Day, they had thousands of “notes” but still needed to sort through the information, find patterns, set priorities, and then develop solutions.

Clearly, if the Pixar executives wanted to keep the floodgates of feedback open, an ongoing process was needed—though it would take some adjustment to reap real rewards. Two employees, one technical and one artistic, proposed a system: if people didn’t feel comfortable talking to their manager about something that wasn’t working, they could approach a designated Peer Pirate for help. Catmull explained that “in the days of real pirates, the crew would elect one of their peers to take issues and complaints to the captain with the agreement that he wouldn’t be killed for what he said.”

So is Dalio a brilliant visionary or an Orwellian autocrat? It depends on whom you ask. Though I certainly don’t disagree with his unflinching commitment to the truth, my view is that Bridgewater’s methods may be unnecessarily costly, and that most teams can achieve a feedback-rich environment without such extreme measures. Let’s look at one way to do that: the Candor Challenge, a process I have refined over many years to instill ongoing self-awareness in teams.*4

It seems to me that all strong cultures in business show a similar pattern. Many people don't fit the culture and they tend to leave early.