Your [SM] Transformation 02: Your North Star — Self-Awareness

Happy 2024! As we begin the new year I’d like to start us off sailing in the right direction. Before we begin, just wanted to reiterate for anyone new here [SM] stands for Self-Management. Now, let’s learn about cultivating your North Star.

For ancient navigators, the North Star, also known as Polaris, served as a fixed point in the sky.

As the earth rotates, the star stays in the same position because it sits nearly directly above the north pole.

This allowed navigators to use it as a reference point for direction, latitude, and guidance.

The North Star guided the way for countless adventurers over centuries.

Self-awareness acts very much in the same way for our lives. It is our Polaris, our guiding light that allows us to correct course when we stray too far from our aspirations.

What is Self-Awareness?

Self-awareness is, objectively, consciously and honestly observing and analyzing your inner garden and the impact it has on your actions and on others around you.

Areas in your inner garden that require cultivating include (but are not limited to):

• Thoughts
• Feelings
• Values
• Goals
• Strengths
• Weaknesses

I’m particularly interested in getting you to acknowledge these areas of your garden and understanding how they impact your actions and the people around you.

How it Relates to Self-Management [SM]

Self-awareness is foundational to effective Self-Management.

95% of people think they’re self-aware. That means the majority of you reading this think you’re self-aware. Research has found that the real number is closer to 10–15%.

That’s right, turns out that it’s a rare ability. Unfortunately, that means many of us lack a guiding light in our lives.

Don’t worry it’s one that we can all cultivate together.

Self-awareness provides you with the guidance you need when it comes to decision-making and essential actions you have to take to cultivate your growth and achieve your goals.

The Harvard Business Review article titled “What Self-Awareness Really Is and How to Cultivate It”, identified two primary types of self-awareness, both essential for a happier, more fulfilling life. These were internal and external self-awareness:

internal self-awareness, represents how clearly we see our own values, passions, aspirations, fit with our environment, reactions (including thoughts, feelings, behaviors, strengths, and weaknesses), and impact on others.

external self-awareness, means understanding how other people view us in terms of the same factors listed with internal self-awareness.

Benefits of Cultivating Self-Awareness

Research has found that those who are more self-aware make smarter decisions, build stronger relationships, and communicate more effectively. Being self-aware makes you more confident and more creative. You’re less likely to lie and cheat. You also become a more effective leader. As I mentioned before, it’s foundational to effective Self-Management-[SM].

Ways to Cultivate Your Self-Awareness

Cultivating self-awareness starts with thoughtfully and honestly looking inward, into yourself, and attempting to understand who you are as a person and how what you do and say affect others. This is also known as introspection. Introspection can be damaging if done incorrectly. According to Tasha Eurich, most of us are, in fact, doing it wrong.

When attempting to understand ourselves, one of the most common forms of internal questioning, when something goes wrong, is why?

• Why is this happening to me?
• Why doesn’t he/she like me?
• Why didn’t I get that promotion?
• Why isn’t anyone helping me?
• Why did I lose my temper?
• Why is everything so disorganized?

There is a high potential for negative rationalizing for asking why, especially when you’re trying to internally rationalize a situation that didn’t go your way. In Tasha Eurich’s research, they found that

…we simply do not have access to many of the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and motives we’re searching for. And because so much is trapped outside of our conscious awareness, we tend to invent answers that feel true but are often wrong.

You’re more likely to come up with answers and explanations that result from your internal fears, shortcomings, or insecurities rather than a rational assessment of your strengths and weaknesses.

Eurich’s research team read hundreds of pages of interview transcripts with highly self-aware people to see if they approached introspection differently, and as it turns out, there was. The word “what” appeared more than 1,000 times.

Ask what, not why.

Those who are highly self-aware tend to ask productive ‘what’ questions like:

• What can I do to improve the situation?
• What steps can I take to improve myself?
• What can I learn from this and carry with me moving forward?
• What situations do I put myself in that add stress to my life, and what do they have in common?

To increase productive self-insight and decrease unproductive thoughts, we should ask what, not why. “What” questions help us avoid unnecessarily judging ourselves. They help keep us future-focused and empower us to act on the growth we’re cultivating in the realm of self-awareness.

Are you Self-Aware?

Take this quiz to find out. This quiz was developed by Tash Eurich and her team. It will require you to include someone who knows you really well in order to get your final results, and that makes sense. Someone else has to think the same things about you that you think about yourself, otherwise you’d just be lying to yourself. I encourage you to share your results in the comments and let me know your overall thoughts. Let’s start building this community!

I’ll start with my quiz results! After I took the quiz, I sent over the link to my wife, who inarguably knows me best. She had to answer questions about me. There are essentially four results you can get pictured below. After learning that 95% of us think we’re self-aware, I have to admit, a little doubt creeped in. But the results showed that I am high in both internal and external self-awareness. (Geez, way to toot my own horn!). Hopefully that adds a little credibility to my writing and the research I found that can help us all cultivate a little more self-awareness.

Next Time on CYBS

We’ll explore effective goal setting, values, and how they tie into self-management. Until then, keep taking those small steps toward growth each and every day. Cultivate and nurture that internal garden of self-awareness. See you in the next one cultivators!