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You Aren’t Actually Self-Aware with Tasha Eurich

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In this episode, we tell the truth about self-awareness. 95% of people think they are self-aware but only 10% actually are. Where do you think you stand and what can you do to improve what our guest calls the superpower of the 21st century? All this and more with our guest Dr. Tasha Eurich.

Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist, executive coach, researcher, and New York Times Bestselling author. She is the New York Times Bestselling author of Bankable Leadership and INSIGHT. Her TED talk has been viewed over one million times and her work has been featured in Business Insider, Forbes, The New York Times, and many more! In 2019, she was named one of the top 30 emerging management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50, as well as the #1 self-awareness coach in the world by Marshall Goldsmith.

  • One of the BIGGEST conclusions of self-awareness research - 95% of people believe they are self-aware, but only 10-15% of people actually are self-aware. 

  • Self-awareness is extremely learnable and can be developed. 

  • What does it actually mean to be self-aware? What does science say about self-awareness?

  • One of the largest meta-studies ever conducted on self-awareness - reviewing and compiling over 1000 studies - here are the definitive elements of self-awareness.

  • Self-awareness is the “will and skill” to see yourself clearly. 

  • There are two types of self-awareness that are completely independent. 

    • Internal self-awareness - understanding yourself from the insight out. Behavior patterns, strengths & weaknesses, etc. 

    • External self-awareness - self-awareness from the outside in. Understanding how people see us.

  • While it may seem like these two things coexist, the research shows that there is actually no relationship. 

  • Having one type of self-awareness and not the other can have some serious risks. 

  • It doesn’t take as much time as you think to see yourself clearly.

  • Scientific data demonstrates that people with self-awareness are:

    • Better communicators

    • More confident

    • More likely to be promoted

    • Better parents

    • Less likely to lie, cheat, or steal

    • Happier in their personal and work relationships 

    • More likely to outperform at work

    • Companies that are lead by self-aware leaders are more profitable

    • Organizations with larger numbers of self-aware employees have better shareholder returns 

  • One of the biggest misconceptions of self-awareness is that it is not a “soft skill” that you should focus on in your extra time.. its something that is paramount to your success in everything else. 

  • You can only be as good at the most important skills in the 21st century as you are self-aware. Your level of self-awareness sets the upper limit for your success in almost every area of your career and your life. 

  • Most people don’t spend a lot of time and energy improving their self-awareness. 

  • Self-awareness is one of the most powerful tools to help successful people become even more successful. 

  • If you’re a leader, ask yourself: how confident are you in the way that your team sees you?

  • What are some of the counterproductive strategies for improving your self-awareness?

  • Introspection is not always the most effective path to self-awareness.

  • It’s not that introspection is a bad path, it’s that we often make mistakes when we are introspecting. 

  • Why asking WHY may not be the most important question to become more self-aware. 

  • No matter how hard we try we actually can’t access a lot of our thoughts, feelings, and motives. 

  • You get in a fight with an important person in your life and you ask yourself “why am I so upset right now?”... It's the wrong question to ask. 

  • We find an answer that feels true but is often completely wrong. We are just as confident about the answer as we are wrong. 

  • Why questions tend to set off a ruminative spiral of thinking. Single-minded fixation on our fears, shortcomings, the bad things that happen to us, etc which often turns off the rational processing portion of your brain. 

  • WHY questions can be misleading and dangerous for mental health and wellbeing. 

  • Changing WHY questions into WHAT questions gives better answers, increases self-awareness and makes us happier. 

  • Instead of asking “why didn’t I get that promotion” ask:

    • What can I do differently next time?

    • What can I learn from this experience?

    • What is the feedback I can get from this?

  • Research lessons from 50 “Self-awareness unicorns” who went from a total lack of self-awareness to becoming highly self-aware. 

  • What were those 50 people doing differently?

  • Good “WHAT” questions to ask yourself to improve your self-awareness:

    • “What are my patterns when I encounter this situation?"

    • "What can I do differently?"

    • Instead of asking “why didn’t I close this sale” ask “what haven’t I tried yet?"

    • When you have a good or bad performance “What’s different today than it was before?"

  • You don’t have to practice meditation to get all the benefits of mindfulness (through meditation has tremendous scientific benefits). 

  • 2x2 Matrix

    • "Seekers" Low Internal / Low External 

      • If you’re in this bucket, pick one type of self-awareness to start with. Focus on one development goal at a time. 

    • “Introspectors” High Internal / Low External

      • Really into journaling, meditation, personal development. 

      • Because they lack external self-awareness, they are like a walking time bomb… they develop a false sense of knowledge without an external feedback loop… because they don’t understand how others perceive and interact with them. 

      • They need to take proactive control of learning how they are seen. “How do the 30 most important people in your life see you?"

      • You have 2 choices:

        • Blissful Ignorance

        • Knowing the Truth

    • “Pleasers” High External / Low Internal 

      • Putting the way other people see you ahead of your own sense of happiness and meaning. 

      • Like a chameleon. Develop an internal sense of what your values are, who you are, what you want. 

    • “Self-awareness unicorns” High external/high internal

      • Most committed and most focused on their self-awareness journey. 

      • Daily practice or habit of trying to build incremental insight into yourself and how you are seen

      • No matter what you already know, there is almost an infinite amount you can learn. 

      • You’re never done with self-awareness, there is always more to learn. 

  • How do you avoid feedback platitudes? What are the best tools for 

  • Most unicorns are surprisingly picky about who they regularly seek feedback from. The people they chose had the following characteristics in common:

    • A feedback giver, without question, has your best interest at heart. An intuitive sense that this person wants you to succeed. 

    • That person would be willing to be brutally honest about how you are showing up. 

  • You need to find “loving critics” not “uncritical lovers."

    • You need to develop a roster of 3-5 loving critics that you go to frequently. 

    • Set up a cadence that’s workable for you to check in with them. 

    • Find a regular opportunity to check-in. 

  • Feedback can often come from people who are threatened by you, have their own issues - be very wary of feedback from these kinds of people. 

  • How much visibility does the loving critic need into your life, daily activities, work, etc?

    • You want the loving critic to have domain-specific expertise for the feedback they give you as well. 

    • They need some level of subject matter expertise (usually)

  • What kind of targeted questions you should ask your loving critic?

    • Often you don’t want to ask too open-ended of a question

    • Ask specific questions around your goals or specific activities you want to improve on

    • Confine your asks for feedback to specific goals and activities

    • Is there anything else you’ve observed that I wh

  • Homework: Ask yourself “How self-aware am I?” - get some type of baseline on your self-awareness. 

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than five million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we tell the truth about self-awareness. 95% of people think they’re self-aware, but only 10% to 15% actually are. Where do you think you stand and what can you do to improve what our guest calls the superpower of the 21st century? All of this and more with our guest, Dr. Tasha Eurich.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we shared how you can feel bold, powerful, confident and alive and get the motivation you need to finally take action and make your goals and dreams a reality. Learn to believe in yourself with our previous guest, Evan Carmichael.

Now for our interview with Tasha.

[0:01:45.0] MB: Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist, executive coach, researcher and New York Times bestselling author. She's the New York Times bestselling author of Bankable Leadership and Insight. Her TED Talk has been viewed over a million times and her work has been featured on Business Insider, Forbes, New York Times and many more media outlets. In 2019, she was named one of the top 30 emerging management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 and as the number one self-awareness coach in the world by Marshall Goldsmith.

Tasha, welcome back to the Science of Success.

[0:02:19.0] TE: It's great to be back. Thanks.

[0:02:20.4] MB: Well, we're so excited to have you back on the show. The reason we wanted to have you on originally was because self-awareness has been and really continues to be one of the biggest recurrent themes on the show and how important self-awareness is to really achieving any goal, or any skill that you have in your life. You've done so much great work around self-awareness that we felt we wanted to bring you back on and go even deeper into that topic.

[0:02:45.1] TE: Happy to oblige.

[0:02:46.3] MB: Awesome. Well, I'd love to start out with one of the biggest insights that I've had from your work, also ironically, the title the book, this idea that most people think that they are self-aware, but actually a very small fraction of people actually are self-aware. Tell me about that.

[0:03:02.9] TE: This was one of the probably least surprising elements of our research program that's now been going on for six or so years, was we discovered that about 95% of people believe that they're self-aware, but only about 10% to 15% of us actually are. The joke I always make about this is that on a good day, 80% of us are lying to ourselves about whether we're lying to ourselves. Now this is really important, right? It's easy to look at that statistic, or hear it and say, we're all doomed to live in a delusional world forever and ever.

The other thing that's been just abundantly clear in all of our empirical research on the subject is just how learnable and developable self-awareness really is. There's a lot of paradoxes around it. There's a lot of surprises we found about the right and the wrong ways to become self-aware. But ultimately, I feel like this is a message of hope. Most of us have a lot more work to do than we think. If we are courageous enough and skilled enough and choose the right approach, we can make huge improvements and therefore, improve pretty much every area of our lives.

[0:04:14.4] MB: What does it actually mean to be self-aware?

[0:04:17.8] TE: Oh, that's such a good question. I thought naively when we first started this program, I built a research team from academic institutions, a lot of graduate students, professors. I thought, well, the first thing we have to do is define self-awareness. It's a term that a lot of people throw around. We sometimes throw it around in the reverse like, “Wow, that person is not very self-aware.”

What we wanted to do was not just think about the way we're talking about it a mainstream business aspect, but what does the science say? We reviewed, by the end of our program, we reviewed almost a thousand empirical journal articles, so nobody else had to. We found just such a variety of different ways of defining it. Again, to vastly oversimplify it, what we tried to do was come up with what are the most important elements of self-awareness. If somebody wants to build their self-awareness empirically, what do they need to focus on?

What came out of that was essentially, two types of self-awareness that are completely independent, which gets really interesting and I'll come back to that. If we define self-awareness, it's basically that will and skill to see ourselves clearly. Then if you delve one more step to that in terms of detail, you come up with two different types of self-knowledge. The first is something we named internal self-awareness, which is essentially understanding yourself from the inside out. It's knowing who you are, what are your values, what are your passions and aspirations, what are the patterns of behavior, what are your strengths and weaknesses?

Equally important and again, independent is our knowledge of something called external self-awareness, which is self-awareness from the outside in. In other words, understanding how other people see us. My initial thought when we first discovered these two types of self-awareness, again, before we started collecting a lot of data on them was they would tend to co-exist. If somebody knew who they were on the inside, they would also be more likely to know how other people saw them and vice versa.

We found that they really had no relationship. What what that means practically for all of us is we have to be on the simultaneous journey of both, of doing that work internally. Again, the good news that we discovered was it doesn't take as much time as psychoanalysts would want us to think good to see ourselves clearly, but we also have to do that work to get constant feedback from the right people in the right way and sometimes live with the paradox of knowing that the way we see ourselves is not the same as the way other people see us and that's okay. There's a lot to that, but those are the two main types of self-awareness.

[0:06:57.9] MB: I really like both of those categories. I'm curious to explore each of them, what are some of the benefits of being internally self-aware and then what are some of the benefits of being externally self-aware?

[0:07:10.4] TE: When we looked at self-awareness, we were usually aggregating. In order to consider someone self-aware, they had to be high in both. That's a really important thing to mention is that having won in the absence of the other, sometimes can come along with some risks. Maybe we can come back to that, but I can talk about the benefits of self-awareness just in general. I could literally sit here for the whole podcast and rattle off outcomes, but I think for your audience, here's a couple of things that might be especially compelling.

We and others have found that people who are self-aware are better performers at work, objectively. They are more promotable. They're better communicators. They're better influencers. They're more confident. They're less likely to lie, cheat and steal. They are better parents, who raise more mature and less narcissistic children. They're even more happy in their personal relationships, as well as their work relationships. They have deeper, more trusting connections with other people.

There's even some evidence and I find this really fascinating and feels very important to me, that companies who are led by self-aware leaders are actually more profitable. There's also some evidence that organizations that are made up of large numbers of self-aware employees have actually better shareholder returns.

One of the interesting things, if I'm at a cocktail party and somebody finds out I'm a self-awareness researcher and organizational psychologist as they say, “Oh, yes. You help people with those soft skills.” I actually think that's one of the biggest misconceptions of self-awareness in particular is that this isn't something that we should work around if we have time, or this shouldn't be something that we focus on when all of our – the things on our to-do list are finished. It's really critical to our success and our happiness in all parts of our lives.

[0:09:03.4] MB: That's such a great point. I love the examples of how it increases shareholder returns and company profitability, because to me, having done this podcast for years and years at this point and really experienced the benefits of self-awareness in my own life, it's really frustrating when I interact with people sometimes and they have that exact same reaction, which is, “Oh, yeah. That's one of those soft skills. It's not that important. I really need to focus on something else first.” It's like, well really, self-awareness underpins pretty much everything else.

[0:09:36.2] TE: That is a hugely important point too, is we can only be as successful at the other critical skills of the 21st century as we are self-aware. Think about this, have you ever met someone who is an excellent influencer, who is not also self-aware? Or an excellent leader, who's not also self-aware? Or an excellent communicator, who's not self-aware? The way to think about this is that our level of self-awareness is essentially going to set the upper limit for our success in almost every other area of our careers in our lives. That's why I call it the meta skill.

The beauty of this is most people, as we'll talk about, don't spend a lot of time and energy improving their self-awareness. The people that are courageous and again, smart enough to do that are going to have a leg up.

[0:10:29.1] MB: The people who don't dedicate the time and energy to improving their self-awareness, do you think that it's a lack of knowledge that they even aren't self-aware, or do you think it's a lack of tools and abilities that they can use to improve their self-awareness?

[0:10:44.2] TE: I think sometimes, it can be a little bit of both. One of the things I love to do in my work is help already successful executives become even more successful. When I come in to coach a CEO for example, I'll say things like, “Okay, so how confident are you that you know how your team sees you?” They’ll say, “Oh, I feel very confident.” I say, “Okay. Well, what do you think they're going to say about you?” We go through this whole process.

Then when I actually start to do this qualitative 360, I speak to 30 people, not just they work with, but their spouse, their adult kids, if they have adult kids, their friends and I get this really complete picture of who the person is that they know. When I come back to them and say, here's what we learned, there are often a lot of positive surprises, often quite a few negative surprises.

What I hear people say is like, I really thought I knew the answers to this. Often, it's not even for a lack of trying. It's that they're busy, or they don't see how central this is to their success. That's where I think again, we have all these empirically developed tools that I've been using in my coaching practice, with CEOs who can't fail for so many number of years that we can do it. Part of it is knowing how important it is and then another piece of it is using the right tools. That's another thing I think there's a lot of commonly accepted paths to self-awareness that are sometimes doing us more harm than good.

[0:12:16.8] MB: Tell me about some of those paths that may be counterproductive.

[0:12:21.7] TE: The biggest one, and I think for me personally when I learned this, the one that turned my life upside down a little bit was this idea that introspection is not the universal path to self-awareness. Introspection is deeply analyzing our thoughts and our feelings and our motives. Very early on in our research program, one of the first mini studies I did was I surveyed about 300 people on how much time they spent introspecting. Literally, how much time every week, or every month. Then I looked at outcomes like, did they feel in control of their lives? Were they happy? Were they depressed or anxious? Did they have positive personal and professional relationships? We also looked at their level of self-awareness.

The pretty shocking and disconcerting finding was that not only did people who spent a lot of time introspecting, tend to be less self-aware, they tended to be more stressed, more anxious, more depressed, less happy with their lives, less in control of their lives. At first, I thought I had done all these analyses wrong, and so I just kept doing them over and over. I said, “No, this is what's going on.” This is why I think it's so hugely important to actually use science to understand a lot of these pop business terms.

It took us down this path of figuring out what's really going on here. As we discovered, thankfully, it's not that introspection in and of itself is wrong, or unproductive for self-awareness. It's that a lot of us make mistakes in the way we introspect, that essentially stuck out all of the insight from the experience. The best way to illustrate this and again, we could do a whole podcast on just this, but to keep it simple, is I think a very common introspective question that people ask themselves is why, especially if something bad happens, right? Like, “I didn't get this promotion at work that I thought I was going to get.” You might say, “Why didn't I get this promotion?”

When we asked ourselves why questions, there's two things that happen that are what take us off course. Number one, psychologists have found that despite what Sigmund Freud desperately wanted us to believe, no matter how hard we try, we actually can't access a lot of our thoughts, feelings and motives. Maybe if I have a fight with one of my best employees and I could say like, why am I so upset right now? There's this feeling that if I ask myself that question, I will be able to excavate into my own consciousness, find an answer and that will be the truth.

Again, what psychologists have discovered is that what happens when we ask ourselves those questions is we find an answer that feels true, but is often completely wrong. In this example, maybe I say, “Well, it's because I'm not cut out for management, or it's because my father abandoned me when I was a child and I'm just afraid of confrontation, whatever, whatever you could make up.” Again, we can't access those true feelings. What happens is we are just as confident about the answer as we are wrong. You can start to see how this leads us away from self-awareness.

Going back to the first example, here's the second problem with why questions. Again, “Why didn't I get this promotion?” Why questions tend to set off a ruminative spiral of thinking and rumination is a single-minded fixation on our fears, or shortcomings, or the bad things that happen to us. When we ruminate, it essentially turns off the rational part of our brain. We think we're answering this really important question, “Why didn't I get this promotion?” When we're just getting into this rabbit hole of despair. That's the wrong type of question to ask, why. Why as an introspective question is not only misleading, it can be dangerous for our mental health and well-being.

Again, to vastly over simplify this, what we have found is if we change why questions to what questions, that's when the process of introspection not only gives us good answers and increased self-awareness, but helps us be happy and in control and purpose-driven. Going back to the example of why didn't I get that promotion, a better question might be something like, “Well, what can I do differently next time? Or what can I learn from what didn't go so well from this particular instance, or what's the feedback that I can ask for in order to clarify what went on?” It seems like a small difference, but what we've discovered is that this is one of the most powerful ways you can reframe your introspection to make it actually produce insight.

[0:17:09.9] MB: Such a fascinating topic. That's a really, really important distinction between why questions and what questions. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that, just because it's a topic that's very personally interesting to me. I spend a fair amount of time introspecting, but I also totally agree with your conclusion. The way I think about it is there's a healthy level of introspection and then if you go too far down the path, it's almost like two mirrors reflecting each other, where it's the infinite depth that's not really actually really leading you to any ultimate conclusions.

[0:17:42.6] TE: That's right. I think sometimes for people, what really brings us alive are more examples. This might be a good time to mention, probably my favorite part of our study and our program, was we found 50 people, 5-0, who didn't start out as self-aware, but who made really dramatic, remarkable improvements in their level of self-awareness. To be part of, we call them self-awareness unicorns initially as a joke, but the term stuck. To be part of this group of self-awareness unicorns, you had to clear a lot of hurdles.

They had to have self-ratings of their own self-awareness on our validated 70-item scale that were quite high, someone who knew them well had to also rate them high in that assessment. They had to believe that they had improved their self-awareness throughout the course of their lives and other people who knew them had to agree. There was really a lot of hurdles that had to be cleared, because what we wanted to do is say what are these 50 people doing differently?

When we first found this bizarre results on introspection, I actually turned to our interview transcripts with our self-awareness unicorns. We had hundreds and hundreds of pages of really in-depth, qualitative information about how they made different choices when it came to their self-awareness. It was so fascinating, because I thought it was clear that asking why was the wrong question. What I did was I did a search to see how many times in our transcripts they were asking why. It was less than 150 times.

Then I started thinking, what are the other types of questions we could ask? I did another search for the question for the word what. It came up with almost a thousand results. That was where I started going, “Okay, this is something. This can't just be semantics. If there's that big of a difference between these two types of phrasings of questions, what does it look like?”

Let me give you a couple of examples from our unicorn. One of them was a non-profit director. She was in this situation, she was telling us that she had a new job and she needed to turn around the organization and get back in the black, and so they could continue to exist and serve their mission. Instead of asking something like, “In the past, why have I been so hard driving during change?” She asked a different question. She asked number one, “What are my patterns when it comes to driving change?” Number two, “What can I do differently in this situation?”

Another one was a marketing manager. He overnight had this new boss he was working for. No matter what he did, he couldn't seem to make her happy. Where I think a lot of people in that situation would ask something very well-intentioned question like, “Why are we like oil and water, this new boss and I?” He asked a different question. He said, “What can I do to show her I'm the best person for this job?”

Another one was somebody who was working on closing a sale with a client and just not able to close it. Instead of asking why didn't I close the sale, they asked, “What haven't I tried yet?” In each of these situations, going back to the first one with the non-profit director, she was able to turn around the organization in less than a year and they had a surplus. The marketing manager with the new boss, he went from they couldn't even be in the same room together, to people saying that the two of them were an example of how polar opposite people could work together. Then that third unicorn who couldn't close the sale was able to use this story-based approach, that was the one thing they hadn't tried and they made this huge close sale.

I think for each and every one of us, this is the daily practice that if we can be mindful about it and we can remember to do it, it seems small, but even just personally in my own life what I've learned from our unicorns and all these tools is it makes an unbelievable difference.

[0:21:40.7] MB: Those are great examples. Some of those questions are really helpful. I love the question about what patterns am I falling into when I encounter whatever that situation might be? I think that's a great one that you could use and apply to many different contexts in your life.

[0:21:55.5] TE: Exactly. That's actually a mindfulness technique. One of the things that is often overlooked about mindfulness is that we don't have to practice meditation to get all the benefits of mindfulness. There's a huge amount of benefits to meditating. I try to do it. I fail a lot, but I try. There are other ways that we can mindfully notice things in the present. I call that tool comparing and contrasting.

For example, if you had a great week and then you wake up one day and you are not great, a question that you could ask is what's different today than it was before? Or if you're falling into a similar pattern in a new job, what similarities can I find between this situation and other situations in my life? Yeah, it's a really powerful frame.

[0:22:48.6] AF: This episode of the Science of Success is brought to you once again by our incredible sponsors at Brilliant. Go to www.brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess to learn more. For a limited time, the first 200 of our listeners to sign up get 20% off an annual premium subscription. Brilliant is a math and science learning platform and their mission is to inspire and develop people to achieve their goals in STEM learning. I love it.

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[0:24:15.7] MB: So many great tools. I want to continue to explore some of the other empirically developed tools that you found in the research to improve self-awareness. Before we dig into that, one of the things that you touched on earlier that I think is worth exploring now is this idea that there are some risks, or dangers to having an over-cultivation of one type of self-awareness and not enough of the other. Tell me a little bit about some of those pitfalls.

[0:24:41.9] TE: Yeah, that's great. One of the things that is so cool about having internal and external self-awareness be independent skills is that we, psychologists, can do our favorite thing ever, which is to put them on a two-by-two matrix. This is oversimplifying a little bit, but I think it's really instructive for each and every one of us on our journey to really reap the rewards of being more self-aware.

On the bottom left-hand corner is someone who is low, or less developed on both types of self-awareness, both internal and external. I call these people seekers. Seekers are at the beginning of their journey. It's not again, because they are bad people, or they'll never develop it, sometimes it's a lack of time, it's a lack of understanding of how important self-awareness is. If you're in that category where you say, “I've never really focused on this,” what I recommend to people is to pick one. I know that sounds crazy, because we know we need both, but I'm a big believer in pragmatic personal improvement.

When I work with my CEOs, for example, they're never working on more than one development goal at a time. If you're a seeker, you're at the beginning of your choose-your-own-adventure. You could go either way. What I would recommend is pick whichever one seems most interesting. Would you rather spend some time delving inward, or would you rather spend some time figuring out how people see you and hopefully, improving your relationships in the process? That's one.

Then you get into these really interesting archetypes, where people can be high on one and low on the other. Let's imagine someone who is high on internal self-awareness, but low on external self-awareness. In other words, they really feel like, maybe journaling is a hobby, or they’re really into personal development, or they love to meditate and really explore who they are. They've made some great progress in their internal self-awareness. The challenge with what I call these introspecters is because they're lacking an understanding of how other people see them, or that external self-awareness is in some sense, they're like a walking time bomb.

What happens very often with introspecters is they develop this false sense of confidence of your own self-knowledge, without having that external feedback loop. If somebody's an introspecter, they might again apply for a promotion that they thought they were a shoo-in for and not get it, or they might think they're in a great relationship and their spouse or partner abruptly leaves them.

It's not always that dramatic, right? It can be, but it's not. The challenge is if introspecters don't take proactive control of learning how they're seen, they lose that autonomy and that choice. What I tell my clients, if I'm sitting down to give them their 360 report, it's like, how did the 30 most important people in your life see you? What I always say is you have two choices. One is blissful ignorance and two is knowing the truth.

As comfortable as blissful ignorance feels, you're basically just giving up control. It doesn't mean if you learn how other people see you that you have to become a slave to other people's opinions, or other people's feedback, but you do have to open that channel. That's the challenge for introspecters is really focusing on that feedback. Then if you flip it, this is where it gets just as interesting.

Imagine someone who has a really highly developed sense of how other people see them of external self-awareness, but a less developed sense of who they are on the inside, internal self-awareness. I call these people pleasers. Pleasers, you start to think about an example of a person who is in their freshman year of college and for their entire lives, their parents have been pressuring them to become a doctor. They become a doctor and they hate it. That's a good example of someone who was putting the other people saw them ahead of their own sense of happiness and meaning.

A lot of times, people who are pleasers – I talked to somebody recently who was a pleaser who said, “It's like I'm a chameleon. I change my color for every situation I'm in, but I actually don't even know what color I am.” The journey for pleasers is to build that sense of internal self-awareness of who am I? What are my values? What do I want? What's going to make me happy?

Sometimes, people ask me at this point in the conversation if there are gender differences. We have found a slightly bigger representation of women in the pleaser category, but it's actually not as big as I was thinking we would find. A good first step for anybody is to say, where am I on this spectrum internally and externally? Then what does that mean for how to move forward in a practical, pragmatic way?

[0:29:36.4] MB: That's awesome. Then I'm assuming the fourth quadrant is the self-awareness unicorns for –

[0:29:41.0] TE: That’s it. Yup. The unicorns are the top of the top-right. If you think about this, you want to be in the top-right box. Yeah, exactly. It’s people who are aware and people who experience all of the benefits that we have already mentioned. What I think is really interesting about our unicorns in particular is obviously, they are arguably the most self-aware among us and they were the ones who were the most committed and most focused on their self-awareness journey.

It didn't mean they were spending hours and hours a week on it, but it meant it was this daily practice, or habit where they were trying to build incremental insight, because one of our unicorns was a middle school science teacher. He gave a great analogy of the process of self-awareness as being exploring space. No matter what we already know, there's almost an infinite amount that we still can learn. Just because you cross over into that top box of aware, doesn't mean – 

Sometimes people ask me like, “When am I done?” My answer is never. There's always more to learn. There's always more that can help inform how you can live your best, most meaningful, most successful life.

[0:30:50.7] MB: Such a great point. I definitely feel the self-aware his journey, even if you spend a very long time on it, you're very, very early on in the journey still. There's a couple specific pieces from that that I'd love some quick, almost tactical follow-ups on. One is is there a tool or resource that you recommend to collect external feedback from the people in your lives?

[0:31:15.8] TE: Yes. This is really important, because I think without the empirical backing, it's easy to fall prey to feedback platitudes, right? You read an article and it says, “Get more feedback.” You say, “Okay.” Then you just indiscriminately ask for feedback. What we learned from our unicorns was I think again, very instructive for all of us on our journey, which is that most of our unicorns were surprisingly picky about who they regularly sought feedback from.

When we looked at what these people they chose had in common, there were really two characteristics that I think as you hear these, if you're like me, the first time I discovered this, I said, “Yeah, I know a lot of people who fit one of these criteria, but very few who fit both.” The first criteria is that the unicorn had to believe that a feedback giver without question, had their best interest at heart. This didn't need to mean that that person was their best friend at work, or somebody they were incredibly close to. They just had to have an intuitive sense that this person wants me to succeed.

Number two, at the same time, they had to believe that that person would be willing to be brutally honest about the good, the bad and the ugly of how they were showing up. For that reason, what we named these people were loving critics. I always give the example of it's really easy to get feedback from uncritical lovers. I could send my newsletter that I'm working on to my mom. God bless her. She'll tell me it's the best newsletter I've ever written, but is that going to be helpful for me to get better? Maybe it's good for my confidence, but it's probably not great for my self-awareness.

On the other end are the critical people who don't want us to be successful. A lot of us, I don't know if you've had this experience. Most of us have in a workplace setting, where somebody comes by and says, “Hey, I have some feedback I'd like to give you.” It's like a feedback drive-by, where you're pretty sure they don't actually want you to be successful. This might be more about their issues, their hang-ups, they might see you as a threat. I think we just have to be really careful and disciplined.

Then once you have your loving critics, and by the way, this can be three to five people. That was what most of our unicorns shared is I've got a roster of three to five loving critics that I go to frequently, is to set up some type of cadence that's workable for you to check in with them. I talked about this pretty extensively and insight, but I think that the biggest piece of this is to find a regular opportunity to check in.

For some people, if you say the best I can do is quarterly, fine, but just do it. The worst thing to do in the situation is to say, “Oh, I'm going to overcommit. I'm going to check in with my loving critics for five minutes every month.” Then you don't do it and then all was lost. What I would encourage you to do is experiment with that, but have a conversation with them. Say, “Hey, listen. You or somebody that I've identified as a great supporter of me, for which I'm very grateful. You're someone who maybe even if you haven't given me direct feedback yet, you're somebody that I always see in meetings who's willing to put the truth on the table that no one else is willing to say and I respect that about you. I'm wondering if you might be willing to give me 10 minutes of your time every two months and let me just take you to a quick cup of coffee and I can ask you a few targeted questions that can help me be the best leader I can be,” for example.

I find that that is one of the most powerful ways we can improve our external self-awareness, that again, if you add up the amount of time you're spending is really pretty minimal compared to what you get out of it.

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[0:36:38.6] MB: How much visibility does the loving critic need into your life, your daily activities, your work, etc.?

[0:36:45.3] TE: Great question. That's really important. I give the example an insight of my best friend, who is absolutely a loving critic. There are only certain things that make sense for me to get her feedback on. She's a lawyer by trade. Let's say I have my brand-new speaking reel that I just put together and I want to get feedback on it. I could send it to her and she could give me some feedback of just things that occurred to her, but because she's not in that world, it might not be as helpful as another loving critic who is in the speaking business and in the speaking world.

What might be great for me to ask her about is how am I showing up in social situations? How can I be a better friend and a better human? You want to make sure that that person has sufficient exposure to you in that sphere of your life. Then hopefully, some level of subject matter expertise. I'm going to say that's not always the case. I call it the grandmother test. Sometimes, somebody who is totally new to whatever you're doing can spot things that are very valuable that people who are mired in the weeds wouldn't see. I think in general, the more the person we're asking knows about that particular skill, or part of our lives, the better.

[0:38:01.5] MB: Are there any commonalities, or best practices you've found around the kinds of questions to ask your loving critics?

[0:38:09.6] TE: This is an interesting one, because I think it really depends on a lot of factors. Here's the one universal truth. I'll illustrate this with a comical story that happened to a friend of mine in graduate school. It was her first semester working with her advisor. When you're in a PhD program, you work with your advisor and see your advisor more than almost anyone in your life. They're the center of your world.

At the end of the semester, she wanted to ask her advisor what feedback her advisor had for her and how she could be the best grad student possible. At the end of one of their meetings, she asked her advisor, “Do you have any feedback for me as your advisee?” She paused for a minute and she thought. The answer she gave my friend was essentially, she felt like my friend was wearing the wrong color foundation, the wrong color makeup. She didn't talk anything about what kind of a teaching assistant she was, how she was doing in her courses, anything that was relevant. My friend just wandered out and thought like, “Oh, my God. What just happened?”

That's the danger if we ask someone a really open-ended question. This is really common. People say, “Oh, ask what you can start doing, stop doing and continue doing.” I think in some situations, that can be helpful. What I suggest to people is that to remind you that we are all the captain of our feedback ship. As cheesy as that analogy is, I think it's true. What that means is you should be deciding about the things you want to get feedback on.

What I recommend to people is to come up with a working hypothesis. For example, I want to be the CEO of a big company someday. What are the skills that I'm going to need to develop to be the best CEO I can be? Okay, one of them that I think I have the most work to do on is public speaking. I'm going to work on getting loving critics who can give me feedback on my public speaking. When I ask them for feedback, I'm going to confine it to that.

Sometimes people ask me at that point, well, if I'm being that specific, how do I make sure I'm not missing anything? I think that's a really good question also. Maybe at the end say, “Hey, is there anything else you've observed that you think might be helpful for me to know?” Then you've got the best of both worlds; you're being specific, but you're allowing things that you're not focused on to bubble up if they're important.

[0:40:27.9] MB: Great questions and highly practical and usable. For someone who's been listening to our conversation and wants to take some first step to concretely implement and execute on some of the stuff that we've talked about today, what would be one piece of homework, or one action item that you would give them to begin that journey?

[0:40:46.1] TE: If this is answering your question, I think this is the most tangible, actionable step people could take just as a starting point. It's a fair question to ask at this point, how self-aware am I? By the way, I learned that I was definitely not as self-aware as I thought I was. That's okay. We're all in this together.

I think is a first step, getting some type of baseline on your level of self-awareness can be very helpful. When Insight launched all the way back in 2017, we created this free quiz that I thought we'd leave it up for a couple months and take it down. We've had so many hundreds of thousands of people take it and they just loved it so much that we've continued to support this free tool to help make the world a more self-aware place.

What it is is a subset of 14 questions from our bigger, validated self-awareness assessment. You fill it out, it takes about five minutes, you send it to someone who knows you well, they fill out the questions about you and then you get this nice little report back on your high-level self-awareness and then a couple of tangible actionable steps based on your results, which again, is really important. It'll tell you where you are in those four archetype; seeker, introspecter, pleaser, aware. If anybody wants to take that, you can find it insight-quiz.com. Again, it's just a free resource we have up there that people seem to love, so I'm happy to continue to offer it.

[0:42:07.0] MB: We'll make sure to include that in the show notes as well. Tasha, for people who want to find more about you, your work, everything you're doing online, what is the best place for them to do that?

[0:42:18.5] TE: I always say, it's much less about me and more about supporting everybody's journey who's listening to this. If you take the Insight quiz, it's very easy to find me in general. I would start there.

[0:42:30.5] MB: Awesome. Well Tasha, thank you so much for coming back on the show, for sharing a tremendous amount of knowledge and insights; another great conversation about the importance of self-awareness.

[0:42:40.8] TE: My pleasure. Just always a pleasure to talk to you and very grateful for the opportunity.

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