You can't know yourself just by thinking about yourself. The parts you can't see only show up through other people, in how they react to you and what they tell you. You need lots of different mirrors.
I think probably the biggest thing that people misunderstand about knowing themselves is that there's a whole part of ourselves that we can't know on our own. So when people talk about blind spots, for example, like that's something people talk about a lot, like you don't actually know where your blind spots are. You can't find them by thinking about your blind spots. You find them through interaction, relationship, misperceived outcomes, all those kinds of things, right? So I think the inquiry and the fact that we're all mirrors for each other and that we need lots of different mirrors in order to really know ourselves through the world around us is probably what gets overlooked the most.
Reducing Regrettable Attrition in Organizations by Fixing the System, Not the People Reducing Regret
