#644： How to Develop Greater Self-Awareness
Episode Stats
Summary
95% of people say they're self-aware, but only 10% to 15% actually are. As my guest Tasha Urich says, 80% of us are lying to ourselves about how much we know about ourselves, and this blind spot can have big repercussions for our success and happiness.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast 95% of people
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say that they're self-aware but only 10 to 15% of people actually are as my guest today says
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that means on a good day 80% of us are lying to ourselves about how much we're lying to ourselves
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and this blind spot can have big repercussions for our success and happiness her name is Tasha
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yurk and she's an organizational psychologist and the author of insight why we're not as self-aware
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as we think and how seeing ourselves clearly helps us succeed at work and in life Tasha kicks off her
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conversation by arguing that our level of self-awareness sets the upper limit of our
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individual effectiveness and that self-awareness can be developed and is truly the meta skill of
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the 21st century she then unpacks what it is you know about yourself when you possess self-awareness
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how there are two types of this knowledge internal and external and how you can have one without the
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other Tasha then outlines the seven pillars of self-awareness the barriers to getting insights
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into them including falling into the cult of self and how these barriers can be overcome including
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asking yourself a daily check-in question we then discuss how two of the most common methods of
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gaining self-knowledge introspection and journaling can in fact backfire how to do them more effectively
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by asking yourself what instead of why and actually journaling less instead of more we also get into why
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you should be an informer rather than a me former on social media how to become more mindful
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without meditation and how to solicit and handle feedback from other people including holding something
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called a dinner of truth after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is slash self-awareness
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all right Tasha Urich welcome to the show thanks for having me so you are the author of a book
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you're a consultant psychologist and author of this book called insight it's all about developing
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self-awareness let's talk about your background how did you end up focusing your career and consulting
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on helping leaders and just everyone develop more self-awareness so i've been an organizational
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psychologist for more than 15 years and but before that i was the daughter of an entrepreneur i'm
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actually a third generation entrepreneur and so i grew up literally watching my mom run a company and
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i've i've always been very passionate about business i actually think it's the the greatest personal
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growth tool there is in some sense um but but i i fell in love with psychology at the same time and
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i was lucky enough when i was you know kind of ending college to find this field of organizational
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psychology where essentially the goal is to help create prosperity you know both sort of financially
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and then just more generally in businesses by helping leaders be better by helping companies create
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better cultures and so i i went all in i went and got my phd in the field and have really never looked
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back so for me part of what i focus on in my consulting work is i coach usually the top one or two levels
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in mid to large size organizations so ceos and their direct reports and what i kept seeing over and over
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and over for so many years was this very distinct pattern and it was that the leaders and executives i
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coached who were willing to question the assumptions they had about themselves who were willing to get
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sometimes brutal feedback about how they were showing up and what kind of leader they were
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and who were willing to do the work and and make changes and really figure out how they can show up
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in the best possible way were infinitely more successful but they weren't just more successful
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they were happier they were more confident they were they had more sustainable success and as i started
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to think about this you know the buzzword of self-awareness had emerged but what i wanted to know
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my my background is scientific is is self-awareness actually as important as i thought it was
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were sort of the common pieces of wisdom out there you know you read a forbes article that says get
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more feedback were those things actually true and so i convened a research team it's been more than
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seven years ago now where we wanted to know what is self-awareness where does it come from why do we
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need it and then probably most importantly how do we get more of it and it's been such a fascinating
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ride we've learned that a lot of the most commonly accepted truths about self-awareness what it
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means how to get more of it are wrong so there's a lot there well you open the book saying arguing
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that self-awareness you call it the meta skill of the 21st century what do you why do you think it's
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such an important skill to have these days like what is it about modern work and just life in general
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in the 21st century that requires being more self-aware sure so let me give you a couple of
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scientifically supported outcomes of self-awareness and then i'll circle back to your question because
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i think it's really the heart of the matter self-aware people empirically scientifically are
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more successful at work they get more promotions they're better communicators better influencers
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better sales people they're more effective and motivating leaders there's even a growing body of
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evidence that shows that self-awareness isn't just nice to have it's a business imperative leaders who
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are self-aware lead more profitable companies companies who are comprised of self-aware people are more
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profitable so all these things together you know it's sort of like it's it's important already but
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the reason i think self-awareness is is the foundational skill of the 21st century even before
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covid but more more so now is that we can only be as effective at all of these 21st century skills as
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we are self-aware so think about this has anyone ever met an exceptional leader who wasn't also
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self-aware or or a very effective influencer or a relationship builder and so the way i look at this
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is essentially our self-awareness is going to set the upper limit of our effectiveness and that's why
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we'll talk about this later but a lot of people have a more room to improve than they think but the good
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news is self-awareness we've discovered is one of the most developable skills out there so it just
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presents a huge opportunity for so many people you may let's talk about what self-awareness is because
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you make the case there's two parts to it there's internal and external self-awareness and we're
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going to dig deep into each of these types but on high level like what's the difference between the
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two and why why can't you have true or complete self-awareness without both when we started this
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research program i was pretty naive and i thought oh it should be pretty easy to come up with a
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definition of what self-awareness is and almost a thousand empirical studies later we surveyed thousands of
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people all around the world we did in-depth interviews which i'm sure we'll talk about we
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finally after about a year were able to distill what what do we know when we're self-aware and
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just like you said it's made up of two types of self-knowledge so the first is something we call
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internal self-awareness which is knowing who you are at your core what do you value what are you
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passionate about what what aspirations do you have for for the kind of life you want to live and the type
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of career you want to lead but at the same time there's something equally important called external
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self-awareness and what that is is in a nutshell knowing how other people see us and fascinatingly
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kind of you you alluded to this is we found that these two types of self-knowledge are completely
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unrelated so if there are any stats nerds listening to this there is a 0.0 correlation between your level
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of internal self-awareness and external self-awareness but what i think is really important
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about that is it it provides the roadmap what does it actually take to become self-aware it's an equal
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focus on internal and external self-awareness even when those answers are different you know you sort of
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think about the way i see myself is going to be different than the way other people see me but the most
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self-aware people we've discovered are able to balance both of those types of self-knowledge not putting
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one over the other in terms of importance but being able to sort of live sometimes with that
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contradiction well because i think people can think of examples of people who are internally self-aware
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but are aren't externally self-aware so they know kind of what they want in life but they're clueless
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about how other people perceive them right what's an example of someone who like has external self-awareness
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but no internal self-awareness so the the archetype that you talked about i call introspectors
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the opposite of that somebody who has high external self-awareness and low internal self-awareness
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i've named a pleaser and and i actually fall into that category i'm i'm far more comfortable
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asking someone for feedback about myself than i am you know really pondering who i am at my core
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and what we found with pleasers is first of all there's a slightly higher proportion of women in that
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category men are just a little bit more likely to be introspectors but for pleasers their journey
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is usually figuring out what do they really want you think about you know the the classic trope of
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like i i am instead of going pre-med and in this fully a full ride scholarship i'm going to quit
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school and audition for american idol you know and it's like i really want to do that and i'm doing it
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because it's it's the thing i want at my core that's the thing that pleasers really struggle with
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is sometimes they can get it wrapped up in what other people want them to do and lose sight of or not
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even think about what they really want so internal self-awareness is knowing what you want external
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self-awareness is knowing what how other people perceive you but then what's the opposite of that
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of being self-aware oh that's a big question so everybody sees this all around us in the world
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of late particularly but just in general i think the opposite of self-awareness is closer to a self
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absorption so sometimes people say can you be too self-aware and what i think a lot of people get at
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with that question is can you be so focused on yourself that you start to lose confidence you
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know you start to overthink everything you're doing or place too much emphasis on how other people see you
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but that's actually not self-awareness that's that's almost like self-consciousness so self-awareness
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is understanding who we are our strengths and our weaknesses everything that we are but also having
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sort of a sense of self-acceptance and that's why to me self-absorption is the opposite of that it's
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it's having the sense that no matter what our objective reality is or or where we stand on you
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know all the things we want to be and do we think we're great anyway and there's a lot of research that
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shows just how dangerous that can be i get into this in insight but there's a lot of internal barriers
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to seeing ourselves clearly there's a lot of sort of external cultural barriers to that so the people
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that are self-aware are successful at fighting those things they they are able to see the barriers
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they're able to sort of jump over them whereas most people can get wrapped up in i call it the cult of
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self right this this idea that i am special and unique and wonderful no matter what and nobody really
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understands me that's the opposite of self-awareness and we'll dig into these biases or these roadblocks here
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in a bit but through your work and your research you've uncovered so okay we know what self-awareness
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is kind of knowing what you want and in life but also understanding what how other people perceive you
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but you've uncovered sort of like what you call seven pillars of self-awareness things about your life
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that in order to be self-aware you need to kind of have an understanding about and we'll dig into a few
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of these but you know what are in your research what are these seven pillars of insight that you think
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people need to have in order to be self-aware so this is just fascinating our research showed
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this crystal clear distinction between when someone is self-aware what do they know and when someone
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isn't self-aware what don't they know so i'll go through them and this is kind of in order from
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most core to us to most external and by the way you can receive internal and external information about
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all of them and i think that'll make sense when i when i say what they are so the first is our values
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knowing the principles that we want to live our lives by number two are our passions what are the
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things that we just love to do make us leap out of bed in the morning and and how can we design our
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lives so we do them as much as possible another is our aspirations and that's not just what we want
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to accomplish in our life and our work but also what experience do we want to have when we're here on
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this earth another one is is basically the fit we have the the types of environments and people
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who give us energy versus taking our energy away another is our patterns and this is basically you
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know knowing your personality knowing in in this type of situation i tend to respond this way or in
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general i tend to be more of an extrovert or an introvert and so on the next one is our reactions and
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this gets a lot of play with self-awareness you know you think about my in the moment awareness of
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my thoughts my feelings my behaviors and what's also part of this reactions component is our underlying
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strengths and weaknesses you know if i have anger management problems a weakness i am going to in
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the moment you know lose my cool more often than not and so that's why those two things are linked
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and the last pillar of insight the seventh pillar is knowing our impact on others and the beauty of these
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seven pillars is you can do your own unique exploration from an internal standpoint and it's
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valuable to get feedback from other people and so that's where i sort of think about internal and
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external self-awareness as the two camera angles for how we can see ourselves and then those seven
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pillars are you know is the what is the work that we need to do yeah that was interesting that
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you can it's possible to have internal or not have internal self-awareness about some of these things
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but external self-awareness can help you get more insight into that i was thinking like you know
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your triggers right you might not even be aware the things that cause you to to flip for whatever
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but other people can see that and if you get their feedback you can finally figure out like okay well
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this sort of thing triggers me for whatever reason exactly yeah we are notoriously poor judges
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of particularly how we come across to other people but like you said our reactions even our values
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one thing i do with the the ceos i work with is is you know we work on clarifying their values but
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it's also really helpful to ask other people based on my behavior and what you know of me you know what
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do you think is most important to me what are the what are my key values i've done that exercise so
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many times that sometimes something unique will come from that conversation something that maybe that
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person didn't even know they were doing or or even was so core to them that they didn't think
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about it because it's just how they see the world so that's why i think those two perspectives are so
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important yeah i thought that was interesting with the values thing because a lot of people i have a
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mission statement where i value this this this this but then you look at like how they spend their time
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their money how they treat and it's like that's really going to show you what they really value
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it's keeping you honest right i've had i told a story about this in an article i wrote recently about how
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i had lunch with a client and i was really really worked up about this person who had sent a nasty
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response to my newsletter that day and it was like consuming all of my thoughts and he and i was
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telling him you know i'm gonna i'm gonna respond to this guy and i'm gonna say this and this and this
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and he just looked at me and he said tasha this is not the tasha i know right now the tasha i know
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wants to make the world better for as many people as possible and i'm hearing you talk about how you're
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going to take this poor guy down and it was it was just such an instructive moment and i think
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as much as we can have people around us who trust us and love us enough to tell us the truth that can
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keep us honest you know like you said am i really following my mission statement on a bad day having
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someone call me out is really helpful well let's talk about how do you get these insights into these
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different pillars of self-awareness i mean you just mentioned one you had a colleague say just tell you
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hey this isn't really you you're better than this and any other ways that you can find insights about
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this stuff sure so there's a lot to this answer and i might not be able to give you anything
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satisfying but i think you know part of it are the types of questions we ask ourselves and then the
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process we use to get feedback from other people so values is another example it's it's not uncommon
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when i talk to you know organizational leaders for me to say hey have you have you actually sat down
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and thought about your top three values and how you're going to use those to be more effective
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sometimes people just look at me blankly you know and i think that's the kind of thing that it's going
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to morph and evolve as we go about our lives but even just to sit down and ask what are my values
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another is to put up processes that help other people give you feedback especially if you are trying
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to work on something or get better at something let's say that you know someone aspires to be a better
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public speaker a good way to continue that journey is to put a few people in place who are going to
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watch you speak publicly and figure out a way to regularly get feedback from them so i think it's
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really and this is where our research is is kind of nuanced because there isn't one way to get there
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but what we've discovered is to build self-awareness in all these ways if you're strategic and smart about
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it it actually doesn't become like another part-time job it can be done very efficiently
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and effectively with not a ton of time and then you also mentioned the book i mean some ways they're
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just sort of like big like you call like earthquake moments maybe you get turned down from a job or you
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get fired from a job or you know you have a big failure in your life and you have to sort of have
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this reckoning maybe this isn't for me maybe i'm doing something wrong because the the situation
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forces you to actually introspect and try to get some self-awareness of the situation right one would
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hope that's that's the difference between people who grow their self-awareness in their lives and
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people who you know just want to sort of remain blissfully ignorant i understand the urge you know
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we think like if i get fired i might think well nobody understands me they you know they wouldn't
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know a good salesperson if they smack them in the face but i think especially when when life hands us
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an outcome that is dramatically different than what we expect professionally personally anything
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that is a data point and if we're not really doing the work to make sure that there wasn't something we
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were missing or there wasn't something we did to contribute to that i i think we're we're we're
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losing that opportunity for greater self-awareness and greater empowerment and just being able to to build
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the life that we want to live right and you hear people who've had like near-death experiences or had to go to
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the hospital for you know a health situation like that was a moment where they had to be like i got
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to take care of my health i got to figure out what it's really important to me and ideally it wouldn't
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take like a heart attack for you to do that i mean ideally you would start you'd be able to be attuned
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like throughout your daily life of you to gain insights about yourself so that doesn't have to happen
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exactly and that was one thing we found pretty clearly in what highly self-aware people did
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differently you know they did come across those earthquake events for sure i think that's what
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life is about sometimes but what they did differently is they looked for kind of almost
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like this incremental daily insight and it wasn't spending hours and hours in therapy you know it
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wasn't writing journals you know every single day it was really just having that curiosity on a daily
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basis pretty much all of our subjects that were highly self-aware had some form of what i named
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the daily check-in and basically what you do is you take at the end of your day if you're getting
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ready for bed or brushing your teeth you ask yourself what went well today what didn't go so well today
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and then what can i do to be smarter tomorrow and if you think about that it's so targeted and focused it
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doesn't take a ton of time but if it increases your self-awareness by even say one percent a week
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if you do that most days that's when you're going to start to get these really astonishing
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sort of compounding improvements and your self-awareness and for me that's what i would
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recommend to someone you don't want to just wait until you know like you said you don't want to wait
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until you land yourself in the hospital because you didn't see the pattern coming if you take a little
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bit more time and be proactive you can prevent some of those things from happening we're going to
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take a quick break for your words from our sponsors
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and now back to the show so you mentioned earlier that gaining self-insight or self-awareness can be
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hard because we have all these psychological biases working against us what are some of these biases
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that are working against this and then after that like how do you overcome some of these blind spots
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let's start with the biggest one in our research we have found that if you ask people are you
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self-aware about 95 percent of people believe that they are and the reality is that only about 10 to 15
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percent of people actually fit that um profile only 10 to 15 percent of us actually are self-aware
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and so the delta on that is pretty stunning you know the joke i always make is on a good day
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80 percent of us are lying to ourselves about whether we're lying to ourselves and there's a lot of
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sort of issues about the way humans are wired that we prefer to see ourselves with rose-colored glasses
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we aren't as likely to question our assumptions about ourselves and so in my opinion the biggest
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barrier there is to be self-aware is believing that we already are and our research subjects that i that
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i told you about earlier who you know made these really dramatic improvements in their self-awareness
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had this it was almost like a paradox in their mindset on one hand they were building their self-knowledge you know
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incrementally and strategically but on the other hand they had this philosophy that no matter what i know about
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myself there's always more to learn there was one gentleman in our study who was a middle school science teacher
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and he said i kind of think about self-awareness like exploring space and no matter what i learn
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there's always more to discover and that's what makes it so exciting and i really love that because
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it it turns it turns the problem on its head instead of saying oh gosh you know we all need to be more
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self-aware and we're not as self-aware as we think i think it's just a matter of having the right mindset
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of curiosity so that's something that anybody who's listening to this today can do right now in this
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moment now there's obviously action that has to back us up and and that's what we have gotten into
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a little bit i think the other thing i'd say is there really is a cult of self-movement happening
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and and it's not just for us millennials it's not just for americans it's been shown kind of all over
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the world that people are getting more low-level narcissism or kind of gaining levels of narcissism
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and so part of it is i'd never want people to overcorrect and go like oh well i guess the
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answer is to say that i suck but i think we have to be really careful about you know think about your
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last social media post was it to show people how great you are subconsciously or consciously those
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are the types of things that i think really pull us away from self-awareness if we get into that cult
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of self so i think those are two big barriers there's a lot more i'm not sure if you want to go into
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them but that would be my initial response yeah i'd say that psychologically we don't want to feel bad
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about ourselves and so we we we basically engage in cognitive dissonance to make us feel better about
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ourselves even though so we all if say something bad happens well well it wasn't my fault it was
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that guy's fault maybe but if you never even consider the fact that you might have some sort of
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responsibility in the outcome then you can never become more self-aware but i want to dig into this
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cult of self you've talked about so it's sort of a culture and you're saying we're becoming more
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narcissistic and narcissism i think you made this clear it's like low level we're not people are
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becoming clinical narcissists where that's like a psychological disorder but you're just talking
00:23:52.120
about people are just so focused on the self that they can't even take it's harder and harder for
00:23:56.520
people to take a third-party perspective on things that's exactly right and you know if you look at
00:24:03.640
some of the studies there's one that i think really sums it up they looked at the percentage of
00:24:08.440
people who agreed with the statement i am a very important person it's increased you know i think
00:24:14.960
it's like 30 percent in the last couple of decades and and if you look around that's something that we
00:24:20.580
see everywhere you know millennials are often blamed for it and i think you know some of that has
00:24:26.880
to do with life stage and just growing up and maturing but at the end of the day those increases
00:24:33.280
have been documented for for pretty much all age groups and by the way they started in the 1960s so
00:24:39.820
this isn't just something that's happened in the last 10 years it's it's really been going on for a
00:24:44.120
while and doesn't seem to be losing that much steam and also you highlight in this cult of self
00:24:49.640
section in your book that there's like research that shows that focusing more on yourself doing
00:24:54.240
more introspection because that's what people think i need to become more self-aware so they think
00:24:58.440
i gotta go off to a retreat or out into the woods and just be by myself and with my thoughts and
00:25:03.880
journal they think that's the key to becoming more self-aware just doing some really heavy
00:25:09.120
introspection but you highlight all this research that shows actually if you introspect the wrong way
00:25:15.240
or too much it can actually make you less self-aware this was one of the biggest surprises in our
00:25:21.300
research it was actually so surprising that i almost abandoned this project i thought well maybe
00:25:26.380
self-awareness and introspection are bad but essentially what we did is we surveyed about 300
00:25:31.500
people this was really early on in our in our project and i i was assuming that you know if i
00:25:37.220
asked them to say how much do you think about yourself how much do you kind of reflect on your
00:25:42.000
thoughts and feelings and motives then i wanted to measure their self-awareness and i also wanted to
00:25:46.880
measure how you know how are they feeling about life did they feel in control did they have you know
00:25:52.120
depression or anxiety were they happy with their relationships at work and at home and i actually
00:25:58.680
found the exact opposite pattern that i expected so the more people introspected the less self-aware
00:26:06.400
they tended to be and the the worse off in their lives they were more stressed more depressed more
00:26:12.540
anxious they were less satisfied just with life in general they felt less in control and as i started
00:26:19.280
to explore this what i what i ended up learning was it's not that introspection in and of itself
00:26:24.720
doesn't work it's that most of us are making some pretty fundamental mistakes again common wisdom
00:26:31.720
common wisdom says you know go sit on a mountaintop or go be in the lotus position on a beach and if you
00:26:37.900
ask yourself these questions the answers will come but as it turns out there are so many things about
00:26:44.800
ourselves that are basically unknowable this is very stressful for introspectors to say wait a
00:26:50.380
minute if i if i don't ask myself the question i can't find the answer so i think that's a piece of
00:26:55.640
it is is we have to understand that a lot of our unconscious thoughts and feelings and motives are not
00:27:01.680
going to be available to us and the challenge then is if you know if we don't know that and we ask
00:27:06.720
ourselves a question we find an answer that feels true but maybe isn't true you know like let's say
00:27:13.260
i i i i running a startup and i get in a in a blowout fight with one of my partners and i ask myself why
00:27:21.740
did that happen what i might decide is you know maybe this person and i just don't know how to work
00:27:26.320
together but maybe the actual reason was i didn't eat breakfast that morning and my blood sugar was low
00:27:32.420
and i wasn't in control of my emotions in the same way i would be otherwise so i think that's just a
00:27:37.700
good example of where you know if we pounce on the first answer that feels true sometimes it can lead
00:27:42.960
us away from the truth about ourselves that's just one example of of the mistakes we can make when
00:27:48.440
we're introspecting and and how do you what can you do to overcome those introspection mistakes so you
00:27:53.340
can introspect more effectively thankfully there's a small change we can make that will make
00:27:59.700
introspection actually work for us so if i go back to the example i gave what we found of you know i get
00:28:05.760
in a fight with my business partner and i ask why like why did that happen why do i feel this way
00:28:12.600
why is this other person always starting fights with me when we looked at what do highly self-aware
00:28:18.420
people do differently we found that they almost never ask themselves why questions so they didn't ask
00:28:26.180
those questions that i just rattled off they they had a very small kind of change that completely
00:28:32.460
altered the effectiveness of their introspection and what we found is they tended to ask um about 10
00:28:39.340
times as many what questions so the example in this situation would be um you know what was going on
00:28:46.160
in that conversation or what part of that issue do i own or what can i do differently in the future
00:28:54.220
to prevent this and and at first to me the difference was really subtle but as i started
00:28:59.960
getting into it what i discovered was essentially why questions make us more emotional what questions
00:29:07.240
keep us more level-headed why questions tend to focus us on the problem and just kind of reliving it
00:29:14.600
over and over what questions help us be more solution focused why questions tend to trap us in the past
00:29:21.460
you know we get stuck and just reliving it over and over and what questions help us move forward
00:29:26.860
and so the tool that that i teach all around the world is called what not why and it's been
00:29:33.500
transformational i think for so many people myself included that if we just make that small change
00:29:39.200
a lot of amazing things can happen no i agree that insight was really powerful because i've i've noticed
00:29:45.080
that in my own life whenever something bad happens you typically you tend to go to why
00:29:49.120
why did this happen and you said you get emotional and usually the emotion that's you go to a dark
00:29:54.240
place like well you know because of this happened a long time ago and i've got this problem blah blah
00:29:59.400
blah but like if you just shift the questions to what it yeah you're right it keeps you analytical
00:30:04.060
and allows you to find a solution and move forward that's it and there's almost these introspective
00:30:11.000
red herrings that we can um get into if we ask why like a very common one usually ends up with
00:30:17.680
it was because my mother didn't love me or you know what it goes back into this childhood place
00:30:23.660
almost that this might be controversial but i'm actually not sure how helpful that is if you are
00:30:30.020
in focus therapy with a trained professional who's helping you work through those issues i think that's
00:30:35.840
different but when it comes to just these everyday insights and understanding ourselves as much as we
00:30:41.780
can focus on looking at the present figuring out what we're going to do in the future and then you
00:30:47.740
know sometimes we might look at the past to look at patterns but i think that helps us stay away you
00:30:53.340
know i call it the rabbit hole of rumination that you just described yeah and this kind of leads to
00:30:58.780
my next question because you had this section about journaling because people often think of
00:31:02.140
journaling as a really great tool to self-reflect and get new insights about themselves and i read this
00:31:07.360
chapter and i felt vindicated because you know early on in my life you know when i was a teenager
00:31:12.200
and like my early adulthood i was like a religious journalist like i just journaled all the time
00:31:17.280
but then i think a couple years ago i just it like it wasn't doing anything for me and i just realized
00:31:22.340
it's like i just ruminate over the same things like i read through my journals from like years and
00:31:27.020
like the same issues come up over and over again and i was like nothing's getting better and it just
00:31:32.660
made me feel bad and so i just stopped and i felt kind of bad because according to the internet
00:31:38.300
self-improvement internet you're supposed to journal it's the best thing ever and i just stopped i didn't
00:31:42.920
really it felt bad but it made me feel better but you highlight research that journaling can actually
00:31:48.700
not be that useful in gaining new insights about yourself it's the same kind of example as with
00:31:55.920
introspection if we do it the right way it can be really effective but if we make mistakes again
00:32:02.460
you know if we trust what we read on the internet sometimes it can lead us astray so what we and
00:32:06.940
others have found is journaling can be very helpful if like you said we don't religiously write in it
00:32:14.340
i know that's kind of mind-blowing it was mind-blowing for me actually i i have spent my life in perpetual
00:32:19.900
guilt so that i didn't journal more but what our self-awareness kind of research subject taught us was
00:32:26.420
they turned to journaling when they were facing something important in their lives maybe it was
00:32:32.340
they were at a turning point or they were facing a big decision or something you know really
00:32:38.260
surprising had happened that they wanted to better understand but they they sort of had an event-based
00:32:43.400
model to journaling versus this daily habit i think there's a lot of power in that there are other
00:32:49.760
pieces to this research that have shown that if we focus too much on emotion or too much on kind of
00:32:57.120
the logic of what happened that can derail us and so as much as we can have a balanced view of
00:33:03.040
journaling where we talk about how we feel and kind of what was happening that can be another way to
00:33:09.180
make sure that we get insight from it and you know because if you focus too much on emotions it what you
00:33:14.720
said is going to happen you know you kind of get sucked in in this negative way if you focus too much on
00:33:19.540
on the rational part of what happened you know here's what i ate for lunch today you're probably not going to get
00:33:24.660
that same level of insight so it's like anything you know there's a middle ground there's a middle
00:33:30.420
ground between what you write about and how often you write that's going to give i think the most value
00:33:36.160
yeah that's what i think i found whenever i have a problem i'll go to my journal just to write start
00:33:40.920
writing things and i i try to avoid the emotion stuff and just focus on here's the issue here the
00:33:45.580
problems what are potential solutions and i find that helpful but i yeah the daily thing i just i don't care
00:33:51.240
anymore good for you no i think that's the perfect approach so going back to this idea of the the cult
00:33:56.560
of self you talk about how how we share things on the internet the internet that's so it it exacerbates
00:34:02.840
it it promotes the cult of cult of self and i like this idea we had this well you're told on you know
00:34:09.140
you gotta you gotta develop your personal brand share about yourself that's the only way you move
00:34:12.520
forward in life but you highlight research that that makes you feel terrible or it can make you feel
00:34:16.940
terrible and it also just doesn't help you gain any more insight about yourself so you offer an
00:34:21.800
alternative to social media sharing that can be more useful talk us walk us through that research
00:34:26.920
this was another big surprise in our research we found that the the most self-aware people
00:34:32.740
counter to everything i just said about the cult of self actually spent about 30 percent more time
00:34:39.580
on social media than the average person and that was another moment where i was like wait a minute
00:34:44.520
that makes no sense but then when we started looking at what they were posting it was dramatically
00:34:50.480
different from most people so whereas you know like you said social media almost teaches us to
00:34:57.040
other researchers have called it to be a me former here's what i ate for breakfast here's this amazing
00:35:03.620
award that i won it's my child's you know two and a half year birthday all these things that are just
00:35:10.040
about me me me but our highly self-aware people that we studied they use social media not as a me
00:35:17.520
megaphone but as an opportunity to enrich other people's lives so they gave us examples of you know
00:35:23.880
i i love to do nature photography and i if i find something really beautiful i post it because i i want
00:35:29.860
other people to feel calm and grounded or i read this hilarious article and i wanted to share it with
00:35:35.600
others because it would make them laugh so it's this idea that instead of thinking about what we're
00:35:41.240
trying to accomplish for ourselves if we can flip the question and say you know first of all why
00:35:46.680
what's the reason i'm posting this what am i hoping to gain and is it making other people's lives better
00:35:53.140
and i think you know if you're trying to build a brand it's not about getting a hundred percent there
00:35:58.740
like for me i try to do about 10 posts talking about myself and 90 posts trying to make other
00:36:05.720
people you know feel better do better be better because we can't just completely neglect the
00:36:11.220
self-focus piece but i think most of our we just have to change the percentages a little bit
00:36:16.120
actually be an informer and not yeah be an informer sorry yes exactly thank you no it's be an
00:36:21.440
informer not a me not a me former um so any other tools i mean so introspection if you ask
00:36:27.700
what instead of why that can help you gain some internal self-awareness any other tools you found
00:36:32.900
effective that you know really self-aware people use to gain internal self-awareness so we talked
00:36:39.260
about um what not why the daily question another thing to think about there's this obviously big
00:36:46.160
social force on meditation and meditation is primarily about kind of understanding and noticing
00:36:55.360
what we're thinking feeling what's happening around us without judgment but the beauty of this for any
00:37:02.160
fellow type a people who are listening to this is that we don't have to meditate to be mindful to get
00:37:09.580
those same effects and you know there's sort of a lot to this but i'm just going to give one example
00:37:14.720
one way to practice mindfulness that isn't about mantras and meditation is something that i call
00:37:21.780
comparing and contrasting so comparing and contrasting is basically if you find yourself
00:37:26.860
in a situation that feels familiar so the example i give in the book is actually i spent about five
00:37:33.320
years working in the corporate world before i went out on my own about 10 years ago and i found that
00:37:38.520
almost every time i had a new job i would enjoy it for two years and then after two years i would
00:37:44.440
start to get bored and restless and one day my husband actually pointed it out he said have you
00:37:49.620
noticed this pattern so what i started to do was compare and contrast you know what is similar
00:37:56.760
about each of those moments where i started to not you know not like my job as much anymore
00:38:02.220
and what i did is i looked back in my life and i thought and i realized that every every time i had
00:38:07.240
worked for someone else there was a two-year ticking time bomb but whenever i was working for myself
00:38:13.280
like when i was doing my own research or when i was teaching at a university when i was in grad school
00:38:17.980
i didn't feel that way so by comparing and contrasting i was able to notice you know again
00:38:23.780
without judgment it just was what it was that i might have been that i know that i'm better off
00:38:29.340
working for myself and people don't think about mindfulness in that more general form and i think
00:38:36.280
it's just really helpful for people that you know if you're meditating more power to you
00:38:41.940
and there are more options if there's anybody who wants to increase their insight and be mindful but
00:38:47.920
they don't want to meditate all right so we talked about gaining internal self-awareness let's move to
00:38:52.980
external self-awareness this is how people an understanding of how people perceive us and this
00:38:57.880
is where insight or self-awareness can get scary because it's always scary to think about what other
00:39:02.980
people think of us and also people don't like to give that people don't people don't like to tell
00:39:09.180
you what they really think about you it's the idea of the white lie right so what can we do what are
00:39:14.700
some tools that you found to help people get constructive useful external self-awareness
00:39:22.080
without being destroyed emotionally in the process that's right you have to keep your mojo in the
00:39:28.820
process um what we found was again some surprising findings people who are highly self-aware did not
00:39:36.760
in fact go to everybody they knew and ask for feedback they kept their circle very very small
00:39:44.440
most of most people told us it was between three and five people that they regularly asked for feedback
00:39:50.880
from and these weren't just randomly selected people either there seemed to be two main criteria
00:39:57.500
that they used to select this handful of people so the first criteria was do i believe this person
00:40:05.360
is on my side in other words are they rooting for me are they supporting me or are they like a secret
00:40:11.960
frenemy that is gunning against me and i think most of us know that intuitively if we feel in our gut that
00:40:17.980
that person supports us even if we're not incredibly close that usually checks that box the second thing is
00:40:25.780
do i feel like that person is going to tell me the truth i think if if everybody thinks about
00:40:30.420
your life and your work there's a lot of people that fit one of those criteria you know for me like
00:40:35.940
my mom is the most supportive wonderful person who's always on my side but is she going to be critical
00:40:41.560
about an article i'm writing maybe not or there are people who just love to be critical who who don't
00:40:47.780
actually want you to be successful so so the the magic of picking the right people to give us feedback
00:40:53.020
is to choose these i call them loving critics and i think the beauty of this is again you don't have
00:40:58.880
to spend all of your time finding 20 people that you rotate through it's a matter of saying okay who
00:41:04.680
are even to start with two or three people that i can go to and say and sort of formalize this
00:41:09.940
relationship and say you know here's why i'm doing this here's what i'm working on would you be willing
00:41:15.000
to let me talk to you for five minutes once a month to just get your feedback so let's say you know
00:41:20.680
going back to the example i gave earlier somebody who wants to be a better public speaker if i had
00:41:25.280
my two or three loving critics i would want them to be people who saw me speak publicly and i would
00:41:31.040
ask them once a month very quickly hey as you know i'm trying to be a better public speaker first
00:41:36.040
question what feedback do you have for me from the last 30 days second question is what ideas do you
00:41:42.400
have for me in the next 30 days and the reason the conversation is five minutes is what i would say
00:41:48.900
is very simply thank you i don't justify i don't tell them why they're wrong i don't give excuses i
00:41:56.660
just say thank you so i think that's really powerful is again being focused and strategic about how we're
00:42:02.640
getting that feedback the second tool i would offer is um this one's a little scarier i'd actually
00:42:08.540
be curious what you think about it this is from a communications professor named josh meisner and
00:42:13.360
i've named it the dinner of truth so basically what it entails is you find someone in your life
00:42:19.840
or your work who you have a good relationship with who you want to have an even better relationship with
00:42:25.040
you take them out to dinner virtually or in person depending on your comfort level you ask them the
00:42:32.400
very simple question what do i do that is most annoying to you and then once again just like the
00:42:40.640
loving critics you listen to the answer and you say thank you and what i've discovered you know i would
00:42:46.500
never share a tool like this with with any listeners readers clients if i haven't done it multiple times
00:42:53.140
myself and i have been shocked at actually what a positive experience every dinner of truth i've had
00:43:00.020
has been no so that i read that it reminded me i have some we have some my wife and i have some uh friends
00:43:05.240
and in their family they have this tradition similar to this it's on your birthday some of the people in
00:43:10.940
your family have to tell something they they admire about you in that that year of your life and then
00:43:15.860
also something you got to work on and i love that and uh some of the stories out of it are really
00:43:23.640
hilarious because people learn things that they finally sort of the truth is uncovered but it's i think
00:43:30.900
it's similar to that that dinner idea that's i love that idea actually because then it becomes a ritual
00:43:36.220
yeah it is your birthday it's time to do that it doesn't let you off the hook so okay this is great
00:43:41.020
stuff so this is way you can get controlled very fine-tuned feedback about a specific thing in your
00:43:46.460
life but a lot of the feedback we get in life external or they can give us external self-awareness
00:43:51.400
it's like it's unsolicited right it's just some random guy on the internet or it could be
00:43:55.940
a family member or a friend just saying hey you you need to do this and oftentimes it's very jarring
00:44:01.940
it can be really uncomfortable how do you any tips on how to handle that unsolicited often hard
00:44:07.920
feedback that we get throughout our daily lives i think we have to be very careful to be honest with
00:44:13.560
unsolicited feedback you never know someone's motives when they're doing that unless you're 100%
00:44:20.620
sure you know it's your best friend and you know they love you but but usually it's not it's it's like
00:44:25.640
you said that random person on the internet or that random co-worker so that would be my first
00:44:30.460
piece of advice is is just be really careful that you don't accept what they're saying as face value
00:44:35.760
immediately the second piece of advice i'd give is actually probably counterintuitive which is don't
00:44:42.040
do anything about it for a while just put it in the back of your mind and let it be the urge we have
00:44:48.460
to you know oh my gosh i'm gonna figure this out a lot of times we're still we're reeling from
00:44:55.300
this feedback especially if it was difficult to hear and even if we try to do that it's it's not
00:45:01.460
often going to result in what we think it will we might just get more upset or we might feel you know
00:45:08.020
depressed so take a week or two just put it in the back of your mind and say okay that person gave me
00:45:14.280
that data point i'm gonna look into it but only when i'm ready and there's no magical timeline for
00:45:19.560
this i think it's whenever you feel like okay it stings a little bit less and now i'm gonna
00:45:24.340
learn more about it the third piece of advice i'd give is again to go back to your loving critics
00:45:30.380
you want to vet this feedback if if this is a one-off person obviously you've got to decide how
00:45:36.660
important that person is like if it's your boss maybe you might want to take it you know a little
00:45:41.580
more seriously but if you ask your loving critics hey i got this feedback you know somebody says that
00:45:47.300
i'm constantly interrupting people have you experienced that or is that something that
00:45:52.900
you've seen as well and if you ask a couple of your loving critics the beauty of this is you're
00:45:58.140
getting a wider sample of people so it may be that that they see it too and then you can talk to them
00:46:04.880
in a supportive safe way about like okay let's figure this out what's this about what can i do
00:46:09.780
differently can you help me and then you're more empowered so at the end of the day it's kind of a
00:46:16.020
stupid analogy but we are the captain of our feedback ship and we can't let other people
00:46:21.260
climb on board and start steering it so i think as much as we can do that and remember that we're
00:46:27.220
in charge we get to decide what we do with us we might you know say thank you very much for that
00:46:31.340
feedback and never think about it again or that might lead to a transformational growth experience
00:46:37.140
but the but the point is we're in charge well here's the question we've talked about internal
00:46:41.480
and external self-awareness separately are there practices that you found that are useful to sort
00:46:47.600
of synthesize the two so you can actually sort of develop a holistic picture of self-awareness or is
00:46:52.540
it something that just happens naturally as you're doing these using these different tools for internal
00:46:56.560
and external self-awareness that's a great question i think it's more the second statement that if if we
00:47:03.540
build in daily practices that keep us curious that give us more information some days we're gonna have
00:47:11.180
a conflict between the way we see ourselves the way other people see us some days they're gonna be
00:47:16.080
additive right you know i think one classic example is when other people see a strength that we didn't
00:47:22.740
know we had you know and that's like oh my god and then all of a sudden i'm more in charge and i can be
00:47:27.880
more intentional about it and i know that they're seeing me in that way and that gives me confidence
00:47:33.060
so so i do think it is a little bit more of a of a give and take but the important thing is what are
00:47:39.080
those habits you're going to put in place and my suggestion would be don't try to go big right out
00:47:44.600
the door when i'm working with ceos as an example we work on one behavioral goal at a time no more no
00:47:50.720
less and the reason for that is if we if we sort of over promise to ourselves we're not going to be
00:47:57.520
able to sustain it so so if somebody's listening to this and you say i want to improve my my external
00:48:03.940
self-awareness maybe the the number one thing you do for the next month or two is put those two to
00:48:09.680
three loving critics in place and once you've done that maybe it's time to think about okay do i want
00:48:14.780
an internal self-awareness habit that i'm going to build but if you don't build them as habits
00:48:19.080
that's when we start to sort of get these fits and starts of oh this is helpful but you know i
00:48:24.900
haven't done it like my journal i haven't written in my journal for a year that's probably not going
00:48:29.040
to be as helpful well tasha this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about
00:48:32.640
the book and the work that you're doing now so the first thing is i found that it's not about me
00:48:36.980
it's about everyone else and so we put together a it's a great resource if anybody's wondering how
00:48:42.880
self-aware they are and they want more than just their gut reaction we put together something
00:48:47.640
called the insight quiz which is a 14 item subset of our longer validated assessment and what you do
00:48:53.760
is it takes about five minutes you fill it out and then you put in the email address of someone else
00:48:58.240
who knows you well they fill it out and once the system has both of those types of information you
00:49:03.540
get a report with your high level self-awareness internally and externally and then a couple of
00:49:08.160
things you can do starting now to improve if you choose to so if anybody wants to take that you can
00:49:14.100
find it at insight-quiz.com i'm also at tashayurik.com we actually just launched a really
00:49:20.560
exciting new virtual course called the future ready leader so there's a lot of information there but i am
00:49:25.980
fortunately or unfortunately very findable on the internet fantastic well tasha yurik thanks for your
00:49:30.780
time it's been a pleasure thank you so much me too my guest today was tasha yurik she's the author of
00:49:35.100
the book insight it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can find out more
00:49:38.640
information about our work at our website tashayurik.com also check out our show notes at
00:49:42.780
aom.is slash self-awareness where you can find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic
00:49:47.460
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at
00:49:58.060
artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles we've
00:50:01.680
written over the years and if you'd like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the aom podcast you can do so
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00:50:27.320
until next time this is brett mckay reminding you not only to listen to aom podcast but put what you've heard