The Greek philosopher Aristotle once said: “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
Recently, I was reading the work of Dr. Tasha Eurich, author of the book Insight, and found the research findings she presented interesting:
1) Self-awareness is not just internal. There’s also an external element to it. While internal self-awareness represents the clarity with which we see our own values, passions, aspirations and reactions to our environment, external self-awareness means understanding how other people view us in terms of those same factors.
Internal self-awareness is the one you might be more familiar with. The one where you’re prompted to fill pages of your journal with answers to the following:
- What am I good at?
- What am I bad at?
- What makes me tired?
- What’s the most important thing in my life?
- Who are the most important people in my life?
- What’s my definition of success?
While it’s easier to assume that the two are correlated, they’re actually not, so on your journey to self-awareness, you must work to both see yourself clearly and get feedback from others on how you’re perceived.
2) Another interesting finding was how experience and power can lead to a false sense of self-awareness. One study showed that more experienced managers were less accurate in assessing their leadership effectiveness compared with less experienced managers. This could be because people with higher levels of experience and power tend to have fewer people who can provide candid feedback.
To counteract this phenomenon, it’s important for you to seek out feedback from loving critics – those who have your best interests in mind and are willing to tell you the truth.
3) Finally, the most important insight for me was this: introspection does not necessarily lead to higher self-awareness.
It turns out people who introspect are less self-aware and report worse job satisfaction and well-being. This happens because most of us are doing incorrectly, by asking ourselves, ‘Why do we feel and behave the way we do?’
According to Dr. Tasha, to increase productive self-insight we should ask what, not why. ‘What’ questions help us stay objective, future-focused, and empowered to act on our new insights.
I personally found this interesting because I actually wrote about it two years ago when my UAE visa application was rejected and I had to return to Kenya.
In this 2017 post titled, ‘In the face of rejection, don’t ask why’, I wrote about how every goodbye interaction went like this,
“My visa application got rejected.”
The follow-up question to has nearly always been the same….
“Why?”
But “Why?” is a useless question especially when you know you won’t be able to find the answer.
The better question is one inspired by a story that happened to me in undergrad when I called home one day to tell my dad that my handbag was stolen along with my purse and phone. He could have hammered me with at least the following questions,
“How did you lose it?”
“Where did you keep it?”
Instead, my dad’s reaction was simple, “The first thing you do is call the bank and cancel your cards…”
In that moment of turmoil, having something to do kept my mind off things.
So the question that’s better than “Why?” is this…
“What can we do about it?”
In conclusion:
Focus on building both internal and external self-awareness, who seek honest feedback from loving critics, and who ask what instead of why.