How to Become More Self-Aware

AI is transforming the world. And it starts with the right compute. ARM is the AI compute platform trusted by global leaders. Proudly NASDAQ listed, Built for the future. Visit arm.com discover. Welcome to the hbr ideacast from harvard business review. I'm sarah greene carmichael. Self awareness is one of those important and difficult to achieve goals because it's hard to know who we really are and how we're coming across to other people. Our guest today is an organizational psychologist and an expert on developing self awareness. There's an exercise she recommends that seems so helpful and yet so, so unpleasant. She takes people out to what she calls the dinner of truth and she asks them to tell her what about her annoys them the most.

I learned from a very close friend of mine. He said, I love you in real life, but I hate you on social media.

Yeah. Imagine hearing that. It's a lot to take in.

And what happens in that moment after they give you that feedback? Do you freak out? Do you start getting defensive? Do you start explaining it away? Or do you simply say thank you for that feedback?

Tasha Urich is the author of the book Insight why We're not as self Aware as We Think and How seeing ourselves Clearly Helps us succeed at work and in life. She's here to talk about what self awareness is and how to develop it in yourself and the people you manage. Well, Tasha, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

So why is building self awareness important to be successful at work?

In my mind, based on the research I've done for the last four or so years, self awareness is the most important skill to be successful in the 21st century. At work. There's been research that shows that people who see themselves clearly are better performers. They're more promotable, they're better communicators, better influencers, they have stronger relationships. They're certainly better leaders. And interestingly, there's some data coming out that shows that self aware leaders actually lead more profitable companies. So I call it the meta skill of the 21st century, that it essentially sets the upper limit for our success.

How many of us are actually self?

Aware? This is where it gets a little challenging. So according to our research, with thousands of people from all around the world, 95% of people believe that they're self aware, but only about 10 to 15% really are. And so the joke I always make is that on a good day, that means that 80% of us are lying to ourselves about whether we're lying to ourselves.

Yeah. So why is there such a Big gap. What have you learned about how self aware people believe they are versus how self aware they actually are?

There are so many barriers that stand in our way. Most of them, frankly, we don't even see. Go back all the way to Sigmund Freud who told us that we could, if we tried hard enough, just find those things. But there are so many things going on within us that we frankly can't ever be aware of. And there's obviously a lot of ways around that, like getting feedback and paying a little bit closer attention, but it sets the decks against us. And then, you know, externally we're living in a society that's becoming increasingly self absorbed and increasingly less self aware. So this idea that we're focusing on ourselves more and more, but we are seeing ourselves less and less objectively and clearly.

Yeah, well, it's. Dig into that distinction a little bit more because on the one hand I see what you're saying, but on the other hand, it's kind of surprising. You would think if we were all thinking more about ourselves, we would be coming face to face with our flaws more often too, but it sounds like that's not happening.

You would think. And one of the most shocking findings from our entire research program over the course of about four years emerged really early on. And I was running a study that looked at basically how much time people spent self reflecting or introspecting. And then I was looking at the relationship between that and things like happiness and stress and job satisfaction and self confidence. And what I expected to find being a self awareness researcher was that people who spent a lot of time thinking about themselves would be better off. But over and over and over, what we kept discovering is that people who spend immense amounts of time in self reflection, not only are they not self aware, they tend to be less self aware than people who don't spend that time reflecting. And what we ended up learning through, you know, several more investigations was it's not that self reflection or introspection is ineffective. Most of us are making big mistakes that are sucking the insight right out of the experience.

Yeah, well, before we dig into some of that, maybe it would be helpful at this point to just define what we mean by self awareness.

That's a great question. So according to our work, there are essentially two types of self awareness, both of which we need to see ourselves clearly. The first is something we named internal self awareness. And that's what most people think about when they hear the term. It's an inward understanding of who we are, what makes us tick, what Are our personalities. But equally important is something called external self awareness, which is having an appreciation and an understanding for how other people see us. And we found again, pretty shockingly that those two types of self knowledge are not related. So just because I see myself clearly doesn't mean that I know how other people see me and vice versa.

So I am curious now how self aware I am. Statistically speaking, there's a very good chance that I am not self aware. So what might be some of the signs that would indicate that even if you think you understand those things, you maybe are not as self aware as you might think?

If somebody has some work to do on their self awareness, they might see one or both of two main symptoms. So the first is that internal self awareness. If you lack clarity about who you are, how you fit into the world, it's very possible that you're not going to feel completely happy in maybe the life that you've created for yourself. And then on the external side, this can be a little trickier. I think sometimes the environment gives us signals. Whether or not we're paying attention is a different story. But anytime things don't go quite the way you think they should, that's a good indication to just ask yourself that question, maybe get a little more feedback from the people who know you best.

That's interesting. I think one of the things that can be difficult for someone is getting feedback that doesn't feel accurate to them. And, and I'm wondering, do you have advice for someone who's sort of wrestling with a piece of tough feedback and sort of trying to decide whether it makes sense? Like whether is this a sign that they are not self aware and could become more self aware? Or how do you sort of decide how to take that kind of critical feedback?

In our research, one of the most enlightening parts of that work was to find people who didn't start out as self aware, but who were able to develop that skill in really powerful ways in their lives. What they told us was pretty shocking. They said, you know, I don't listen to feedback from everyone around me. And I said, really? But as we peeled that onion back, what we discovered was it's not that they don't listen to the kind of feedback that you're talking about, it's that they check it with a core group of people, A core and small group of people who serve that function for them in their lives. And over time, if you do that enough, you can hear some of the behaviors maybe that, you know, sometimes we get feedback that's more about the person giving it than it is about us. But if it is something that we haven't noticed, our loving critics can help play a role in seeing that for what it is. And you know, a lot of times the most transformational feedback we receive completely blindsides us. And the worst thing I think we can do is discount that without checking it out with other people.

Yeah, well, and you've also talked about, is it a case where perception really is reality? You know, if people think that you are arrogant, for example, it's like as a leader you have to know that's how you're coming across. Like that is reality to them.

And you hit the nail on the head. Senior executives as a whole are less self aware than frontline leaders and mid level leaders. So you know, you get farther and farther away from the truth. But the truth is still important in that it's their perception. And in order to manage that perception, the first thing you have to do is own it. Whether or not you agree it has to be something that you acknowledge is a real perception and hopefully you make the commitment to deal with.

Yeah, I could see that as a leader it might be challenging to refrain from becoming totally obsessed with your image in a way that was unhealthy. What do you tell the executives you work with about kind of managing that?

You know, it's funny, I don't meet too many executives that are overly obsessed with their own image. I think it's usually the opposite. It's. They're so, they have so much on their plates and they have so, so many expectations, you know, from their board, from their CEO that they're not paying attention. But I do think, you know, there are, there's another side of this battle which is maybe people who are overly self conscious, they analyze themselves way too much. Both of those things have room for improvement. If I'm overestimating or not paying attention, I need to get a reality check. But by the same token, if I am underestimating myself or if I am too focused on how other people see me and I'm not focused on what matters to me, I have a little bit of a different task, which is to learn what I care about, what my values are, what are the things that are going to make me happy, what do I do really well that perhaps I haven't been able to acknowledge.

One of the other things you've studied is how experience and power affect self awareness. And since we're talking about leaders here, I'm wondering what you found about that.

Again, Very disturbing. I think for anyone who's listening to this, who's in a position of power, there's basically an inverse relationship between power and self awareness. I mentioned earlier that senior level executives tend to be less self aware as a whole than other levels of leadership. And that's rating everything from their empathy to their communication skills to their emotional intelligence, their coaching ability. And my belief and some others is that we don't necessarily start out as less self aware when we're senior executive leaders, but the environment that we're in makes it so difficult to see the truth that we lose touch with it. There's a great quote that's basically that leaders are surrounded by walls, mirrors and liars. And it's not uncommon for unselfaware leaders to surround themselves with yes people, people who agree with them and who are not willing to put those tough truths on the table. And so I think all of those things and sum total, it doesn't make us bad people. And on the other end, it means that if you're a leader and you actively work on your self awareness, you can be unstoppable.

Let's talk a little bit about how to actively work on one's self awareness. I know a couple of things have come up. Are there other things we can do to become more self aware?

Yeah, let me put a name to one of the concepts, which is unexpected outcomes. There's another way that you can anticipate those and be a little bit more self aware before the outcome occurs. It's something called a pre mortem. Basically what it entails is writing down, okay, so this major thing that's about to happen, let's say I'm a CEO, I'm acquiring a new company. Imagine that. That is a disaster. Write the history of that disaster, and in doing so, that helps us get out of some of the fundamentally wrong assumptions that we could be making. We've seen that, for example, business leaders tend to be overly optimistic about the outcomes of their decisions. So something like that will be a preventative way to make sure that you're considering all of the fact. So that's certainly one, I think for leaders that can be helpful. Another is assembling those loving critics, making sure that there are three to five people, ideally at different levels of the organization, a superior, peers, employees, board members, who you have a formalized relationship with to get feedback. And so I think for any leader, you don't need to go overboard with all of this. But if you can formalize a couple of regular feedback relationships, it can Mean the difference between your undoing eventually, if you're doing something that really isn't working and continuing to improve and be successful.

Why doesn't introspection work? Why can't you just think your way to more self awareness?

This is an amazing can of worms. So this is going back to what I said earlier, that introspection often is related to less self awareness. And we really had to dig into that and say, what does this mean? But what we eventually discovered was people ask themselves the wrong questions when they introspect. One of the most common questions that is out there just in the conventional wisdom to see ourselves clearly is to ask why. So we might be trying to understand a negative mood. We might say, well, why am I so upset after that meeting with my boss? Or we might be trying to better understand our feelings about something like why do I believe that we should acquire this company? Or we might be trying to explain some kind of a negative outcome. Why did my employee just quit out of the blue? And as helpful as that question sounds, there are really two main issues that prevent it from helping us and actually hurt us without us knowing. Number one is no matter how hard we try, we can't excavate those real reasons. So to say, why did I do something we literally can't know. There are so many things that are just outside of our conscious awareness but related to that. The challenge is we usually find answers that feel true even though they are incorrect. So why doesn't get us anywhere productive. The second overall reason we shouldn't ask why is that it depresses us. It's been shown that the more we ask why, the more we ruminate. And rumination. I call it the evil twin of introspection. It's where we question things to the point where we're sucking away our own self confidence, we're second guessing everything, we're beating ourselves up, and in general, why questions tend to foster that. Why did that meeting with my boss go so poorly? Well, it's because I'm doing a terrible job and maybe I should quit. And it's amazing how quickly we get to those places. So the next question folks might be wondering is if why is the wrong question, what is the right one? So the good news again is introspection is good. It's just that most people are doing it in a way that isn't effective.

Yeah, well. So we've mostly been talking so far about improving our own self awareness. But of course, as managers, part of our task is to help other people become more self Aware the people who report to us. So what can we do, if anything, to help people around us become a little bit more aware, especially if they're reporting to us.

This is such a tricky area. So there's two sides of this coin. The first thing I'll say is no matter what happens at the end of the day, the only self awareness journey we can positively impact without a doubt is our own. That said, we still have to live and work with these people and often we still have to supervise them. So there's a couple of tools maybe we can talk about that help us deal with our own internal reactions to these people. But to answer your question as leaders, what do we do if somebody who is working for us is not self aware? My strong belief is well delivered feedback that is timely, that is specific, that is future oriented, can be powerful for the right person. So I think just overall for leaders, if you can make it self directed at first, if you can make sure you have that foundation of trust, if you can give them really specific objective examples, and then if you can give them time, it can be amazing how many people are able to turn that around. But again, if they don't, that's more of a reflection on them usually rather than you.

So how time consuming is all of this? If you are trying to become more self aware or help someone else who you manage, is this like a major project? Is this a part time thing? What should our expectations be?

I think I'd say two things. Number one is a lot of this work is simply a mindset. So the mindset being I'm going to try to mine the experiences I have on a daily basis to see myself more clearly. Maybe I'm not going to assume that I know myself as well as I think I do. So I think that doesn't take any time. It takes a commitment and a perspective to see things a little bit differently. And so my belief is yes, it takes energy, it certainly takes courage, it takes a willingness to invest, all of that. But if you're smart about it, and if you use the right scientifically supported approaches, we can make huge gains over time. And another thing to think about is if you could increase your self awareness 5 to 10% per year, that's a pretty easy goal. But if you look at the sum total of that over time, it can be astonishing.

Well, I think that's a good place to wrap up. Tasha, thank you again for talking with us today.

Thank you. It was a pleasure.

That's Tasha Urich, she's an organizational psychologist and principal of the Urich Group. She's also the author of why We're Not As Self Aware As We Think and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life. Our show is produced by Amanda Kersey and Kurt Nickish. Adam Bucholtz is our audio product manager and we get technical and production help from Rob Eckhart. We got extra production help this week from Ramsey Kabaz. Thanks for listening to the hbr ideacast. I'm sarah green. Carmichael. Sam.