Insight

Tasha Eurich’s book titled Insight: Why We're Not as Self Aware as we Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life is…well the only word for it is “insightful!”

But, achieving insight takes deliberate effort and does not come naturally.  As she points out, “In the absence of a committed effort to build self-awareness, the average person makes only meager gains as they grow older.”   

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Only a few people are born with the natural disposition for self-awareness.  Interestingly, these people are not able to offer many insights into how they can maintain this ability so researchers have tended to focus on discovering the elements of self-awareness by looking at people who became self-aware by overcoming their lack of self-awareness.

There are two factors involved in self-awareness: internal and external.  To be truly self-aware we not only need a deep understanding of our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors but also how people us, which can often be quite different than how we see ourselves or how we think others see us.

There are several impediments to becoming self-aware.  Our brains tend to work by making thinking easier and allowing us to use a variety of shortcuts to streamline our thinking.  While this often works well when dealing with complex situations or situations which repeat and are predictable, it often creates impediments to becoming self-aware.  

Three major impediments to self-awareness include knowledge blindness, emotion blindness, and behavior blindness.  In short, we are very poor at assessing our knowledge with the least knowledgable thinking they are more competent than average (Dunning-Kruger Effect), we don’t do a good job of assessing our own emotions or recognizing when our decisions are driven mainly by our emotions, and we find it difficult to see our behaviors clearly and objectively.

Most people seek explanations for their problems in externals: other people, situations, environment, etc.  Self-awareness requires considering the possibility that part of the problem is one's own self.  

To combat the impediments to self-awareness, we need to identify our assumptions, keep learning, and seek feedback on our abilities and behaviors.
Another common roadblock to self-awareness is the “cult of self.”  The relentless focus on self-esteem leads to less self-awareness as well as less satisfaction overall.  To combat this we need to cultivate humility, a self-acceptance that entails “understanding our objective reality and choosing to like ourselves anyway,” and better monitoring of one’s inner dialogue.  

There are ways to increase self-awareness but they are often obscured by several myths regarding introspection and self-awareness.  “The assumption that introspection begets self-awareness is a myth.  The problem with introspection, it turns out, isn’t that it’s categorically ineffective, but that many people are doing it completely wrong.  

introspection to access our unconscious is ineffective since our unconscious “is less like a padlocked door and more like a hermetically sealed vault.”  A better approach focuses less on the process of introspection and more on the outcome of insight focusing on what we can learn and how to move forward.  

Much of introspection involves asking "Why?" and trying to find the causes for our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.  This does not often lead to accurate results and can instead lead to endless rumination.  

A better approach is to ask "What?" instead of "Why?" 
"Why?" questions draw us to our limitations;
"What?" questions help us see our potential.  

"Why?" questions stir up negative emotions;
"What?" questions keep us curious. 

"Why?" questions trap us in our past;
"What?" questions help us create a better future.
Asking "What?" instead of "Why?" forces us to name our emotions and these help us better understand ourselves.  "Why?" questions are generally better to help us understand our environment and "What?" questions are generally better to help us understand ourselves.

Other very effective tools to increase self-awareness include mindfulness, reflecting on your life as a biography, and solutions-mining.  Each of these corresponds to one of the following aspects of our lives: past (life as a biography), present (mindfulness), and future (solutions-mining).

As you can see, the book is full of useful tools to help us all gain better self-awareness.