An Extraordinarily Rare Occurrence
Today’s subject is a big one, so consider yourself warned. To get something worthwhile out of this post, you’re going to need to devote some meaningful attention to it… and maybe even (gasp!) leave the safety of your home.
I’d like to suggest that we are here for a similar purpose… to trigger an extraordinarily rare occurrence: self-awareness that persists over the span of decades.
It takes a lot of work to trigger this. But it can also be a lot of fun, and can banish boredom, loneliness, despair, envy, selfishness and confusion. Why? Because coming face-to-face with such a trigger implies that you set out on a journey—an adventure—that is truly life-changing. So, yes, in addition to reading my words, you may have to travel, wander in forests or along the sea, stretch your comfort zone, and lose contact with any sense of security for what feels like a very long time.
In other words, you must let go of the narrative you have built around a false sense of self-awareness.
Author Tasha Eurich—my colleague in Marshall Goldsmith's 100 Coaches program—wrote in Harvard Business Review that "even though most people believe they are self-aware, self-awareness is a truly rare quality: We estimate that only 10%–15% of the people we studied actually fit the criteria."
Self-awareness is a practice, not a skill. It requires that you develop tactics to gather honest and accurate feedback from others. It requires a willingness to accept the fact that how you perceive yourself may not be how you come across to others.
Tasha makes the case that "self-awareness isn’t one truth. It’s a delicate balance of two distinct, even competing, viewpoints."
The first viewpoint is internal self-awareness: how you see your emotions, reactions, beliefs, and so on. It's what most people think of as self-awareness.
The second variation is external self-awareness. It is understanding how others perceive you, and Tasha discovered a surprising relationship between these two types: there is virtually no relationship between them. You can be highly aware of your own reactions and emotions ("that SVP always triggers me, and I need to manage my own state carefully to avoid overreacting") and still have immense blind spots when it comes to grasping the ways that others perceive you.
The more unbiased external feedback you get—and the more openly you consider it—the more likely you are to have accurate external self-awareness.
There's another simple technique you might try as suggested by Level Legal CEO, Joey Seeber. He suggests asking at the end of every interaction, "Has this been of value to you?" and then deeply listening to the response.
Of course, if you surround yourself with people who tell you only what you want to hear, no amount of questioning will produce accurate feedback. Above all else, you must demonstrate with your actions and reactions that you cherish frank feedback, even when it is critical.
Let’s be real…
I am not delusional. I do not believe that by sending you a few dozen paragraphs, you will suddenly become self-aware.
No, it takes much more than that. My journey towards self-awareness accelerated three years ago, when my marriage of 30 years started to end. Prior to that, I also jumped up a notch or two starting in 2012, when I began a practice of writing 3-5 times a week on LinkedIn, Forbes and sometimes other outlets; to write in a meaningful fashion, you can’t help but look inside you.
I view the process of rebuilding my life after divorce as “waking up.” We had a great life together, built a wonderful family and loved each other. But, I now realize, neither of us was being true to ourselves. We didn’t understand how our actions—or inactions—impacted the other, and how burrowing too deep into our own set of grievances built walls that never would come down.
For me, divorce was a trigger of self-awareness.
Here’s how Guy Raz, former host of NPR’s All Things Considered, describes his own trigger that caused him to leave that position. These quotes are from an episode of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast:
I’m a parent. I’ve got an 11-year-old and a nine-year-old. The day (the Newtown) shooting happened, I was asked to host our national live coverage. It was one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life. Now I’ve covered five wars. I’ve seen human beings dead. I saw humans die before my eyes. I never got near Newtown. I never went there. I never saw it, but it was so difficult for me. It was this intense feeling of sadness and despair…
That was sort of the end for me, but it was really building up for a while. I was getting tired of how news organizations do news. I’m still tired of it. I think most news organizations forever and ever thought that there was something called objectivity, and that they determined what that was. It was usually an older white man, nothing wrong with older white men, I’m just saying, that determined what objectivity was. Basically we needed to think of ourselves as robots, as automatons, who had no feelings or views or thoughts about the world. We were just there to deliver the news. If you asked most reporters, even to this day, if you ask a lot of reporters in Washington, they will say, “Look, all I do is call balls and strikes. That’s my job.”
But I never thought that that was my job. That’s not why I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to be a journalist because I, probably naively believed, and still believe, that the more knowledge people have about other people, the more people know about other people’s stories, it’s more likely that that will make that person more empathetic… If I could tell those stories, then I could make a contribution to better human understanding. I was not going to do that on my own, obviously. I was not personally going to change the world, but I think many people want to do something that will have an impact on the world in a small way. For me, my small way was to be a reporter and to tell stories.
This trigger led Raz to leave All Things Considered to create and produce the TED Radio Hour.
Theoretically, it is possible that you already have excellent self-awareness and that you already see both the world and yourself with rare clarity. If that is true, you already have developed a practice that cultivates and supports such self-awareness: you journal, meditate and ask yourself probing daily questions. You have a method for gathering honest feedback from others, and a means of absorbing even the most painful responses.
I know very few people for whom this is true, but it’s possible.
And thus, I will leave you with a simple thought: upheaval is good. Shaking yourself up, while disruptive, will ultimately benefit you. Open yourself up to a massive whack on the side of the head, a trigger you simply cannot ignore, one that will lead to self awareness that never, ever fades away.
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Did you miss them? My recent social media posts:
You Are Much More Powerful Than You Imagine
The Upheaval post
Yoda Mike “fear is the path” post
Repeat After Me, “I Am Incredibly Positive”
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