True Self-Awareness

As often happens these days, much of the most interesting work in psychology does not come from empathy-laden therapists. It comes from people who work with businesses, who deal with real problems involving real people.

Today I am happy to bestow laurels on Tasha Eurich, an organizational psychologist who has written a book called: Insight. The therapy world has long since touted the value of introspection, leading to self-awareness. It has taught people to ignore everyday realities in favor of soul searching, a never-ending and fruitless search for one’s truest hidden motives.

To which Eurich responds, if you want to know yourself, if you want to attain a degree of self-awareness, pay close attention to how other people see you. In effect, this is another way of saying that you are your face. I have written two books on the subject. Thus, I am definitively sympathetic to Eurich’s position.

If only New York Magazine, where Eurich is interviewed, would pass the message along to its highly challenged advice columnist, Dear Polly, and teach her to stop advising people to feel their feelings.

I would mention, for those who care, that the way you look to other people, your reputation, involves your senses of pride and shame. I would also mention that introspective soul searching will supposedly get you in touch with your feelings of guilt… of all your hidden nefarious motives.

How radical is she? If you consider that psycho professionals drone on about how you should ignore how other people see you or how you look to others, she is very radical indeed. In the real world, of course, your reputation depends on how others see you. Surely, this vision is not arbitrary. Your actions contribute mightily to your reputation. Yet, it often happens that inaccurate information is passed around, to your detriment. Rather than ignore it you do best to confront it.

Be that as it may, Eurich has discovered that we all believe that we are perfectly self-aware, that we know ourselves. The truth lies somewhere in the 10% to 15% range. Most of us do not have a clue about how others see us.

Eurich is impressed by the disjunction between who I think I am and who other people see:

There’s something I call internal self-awareness, which is understanding inwardly who am I, what makes me tick, what do I want to do in my life. And there’s another kind called external self-awareness, which is knowing how people see me. And what’s fascinating about those two things is that they are completely unrelated. You can be high in both, you can be low in both, and you can be high in one and not in the other.

Somebody who’s high in internal self-awareness and low on external self-awareness is saying, I know who I am. I don’t care what anybody thinks of me, because I am really in touch with myself — and I’m the only person that matters. And then on the other side of it is someone who is so interested in how they’re seen by others that they don’t necessarily do the work and make the choices that are in their own best interest.

It’s a balancing act between these two types. Sometimes people say things like, Other people’s opinions of me be damned! It doesn’t matter what people think of me! They’re welcome to feel that way, but the second part of their statement isn’t really true — it actually does matter what people think of you. If you want to be successful in your career, if you want to have strong and lasting relationships, if you want to have a happy and fulfilling life, a lot of that is dependent on you understanding how you’re perceived.

For the record, people who are convinced that they know who they are and do not care what anyone else thinks of them have done too much therapy. They are suffering from a therapy-induced abnormality.

Eurich continues that if we want to have a more accurate sense of who we are, we should find out what other people think of us, not what we think of ourselves.

She explains:

It’s true. Our own internal opinions about ourselves do matter, but there is research showing that the way other people see us is more objective than the way we see ourselves. And other people can also predict our future behavior better than we can. The example I always give is — think of a time when you met one of your best friends’ brand new significant others, and you talk to that person for five minutes, and you say, This relationship is doomed. And then you’re right.

There are just so many things about ourselves that we truly can’t see. Also, other people are just less inclined to see us with rose-colored glasses — they see our behavior more objectively just by being in a different position to view us.

It’s not necessarily that we’re wrong, or ignorant about ourselves. It’s just that sometimes other people can see things more honestly. And that’s why I just think – my gosh, if you’re not getting feedback from people, who knows what you’re going to conclude about yourself? We owe it to ourselves to be objective.

Yes, indeed. You need to get feedback. And you need to be getting honest feedback. When schoolteachers give their pupils unearned praise, when they lie to them, they are systematically corrupting the pupils’ moral sense, their ability to accept honest feedback. Said pupils end up thinking that adults lie all the time.

What matters is the face you present to the public, how others see you:

And what the data has really clearly shown us is that it is always better to know — to see ourselves clearly, to see how other people see us. There’s a lot of research that says when you look at yourself with rose-colored glasses, your relationships are weaker, you’re more poorly thought of than your colleagues, you’re less likely to be promoted.

If this is true, major parts of the therapy profession have been selling snake oil. But, you knew that already. And you also know that most therapists refuse categorically to examine how they look to people outside of their profession.