Self Awareness Podcast

Self awareness:

• Internal self awareness: knowing what you want
• External self awareness: how you're perceived
• There is almost no correlation between having interval vs having external.

Roadblocks:

• Self absorption

Columns of self awareness:

• Values: principles we want to live our lives by
• Passions: what makes us leap out of bed in the morning
• Aspirations: what we want to accomplish & experience
• Fit: types of environments & people that give us energy
• Patterns: knowing personality; responses under circumstances
• Reactions: in the moment awareness; underlying strengths & weaknesses
• Impact on others

Can do both an internal exploration and get feedback from other people: 2 camera angles to see myself.

Figuring these out

• sit down and ask yourself what your values are
• set up processes to acquire feedback from others
  • eg. regularly get feedback on public speaking
• being strategic and smart about self awareness means it can be done effectively.

• when life gives an outcome that is dramatically different from expectations, that becomes a datapoint and it becomes an opportunity for greater self awareness. eg. hospital visit
• highly self aware people looked for incremental daily insight
• have a daily checkin:
  • what went well today
  • what didn't go well
  • what can I do to be smarter tomorrow
• biases
  • 95% people believe they are self aware. Only ~10-15% people are actually self-aware. The biggest barrier is believing that you're already self-aware.
    • paradox: no matter what I learn about myself, there's always more to discover.
  • cult of self movement: people are getting more low level narcissism; be careful about what's posted.
    • need to take a third-party perspective of yourself
• Be careful of too much introspection: it's not that introspection doesn't work, but we're making some fairly fundamental mistakes.
  • There are several things about us that are unknowable: a lot of our unconscious thoughts and motives aren't going to be available to us. The answers we find will feel true, but aren't not necessarily true.
• To make the introspection work:
  • never ask yourself why
  • tended to ask 10x what questions
    • what was going on in that conversation
    • what part of the issue do I own
    • what can I do differently to prevent this

Why make us more emotional, and focus on the problem. What help us be more rational and solution focused. Why traps us in the past; What helps us move forward. What not Why.

Why keeps going back to a childhood place, or some other past excuses. Look at the present, and figure out what can happen in the future. Stay away from the rabbit hole of rumination.

Journaling can be very effective if you don't write in it religiously: effective self reflective people find it valuable if they turn to it. Event based model of journaling. Have a balanced view of journaling to capture both feeling and what – don't focus too much on emotions, don't focus too much on rational part either. Middle ground between what is written and how often it's written.

Self aware people spend ~30% more time on social media: their posts are dramatically different. Enrich other people's lives: eg. nature photography, or sharing a hilarious article.

Dealing with feedback: keep circle of feedback very very small; between 3 and 5 people that you regularly ask for feedback. There are 2 main criteria:

• do I believe this person is on my side
• will this person tell me the truth

Getting feedback

• request 5 minutes of feedback, say thank you
• dinner of truth: what do I do that annoys you the most?

Dealing with unsolicited feedback

• let feedback sit for a little bit of time
• be skeptical of unsolicited feedback

We're in-charge of how we do the feedback.

Build habits to improve self-awareness.