Think you know what your friends think about you? Here’s why you’re almost definitely wrong.

There’s an old science-backed adage that the words of a drunk person are the thoughts of a sober one. Late one Saturday night in a crowded hometown bar, I recently learned just how true this really is.

It all began, innocently enough, in a trendy restaurant in downtown Denver. My husband and I, along with six of his oldest friends, had just had a magnificent meal with a surplus of wine. Despite the fact that I (as designated driver) had been soberly sipping club soda, I was in a wonderful mood. I’d known everyone for more than 10 years, and it was just one of those nights when everything clicked. My friends were at their witty best and my stomach was sore from laughing.   

As we broke into smaller conversations, my friend Teresa pulled her chair closer to mine. “Tasha,” she said dreamily, “we are so glad Dave brought you into our lives.” How lovely! I thought, feeling equally grateful that he had brought them into mine. But before I could respond, she continued, “And boy have you come a long way since we first met you.”

I paused, instantly puzzled. “Wha-what do you mean?”

I’ll never forget what happened next. In the noisy ruckus of that crowded bar, Teresa stood up, clasped my skull with her powerful hands, and then proceeded to twist my head, agonizingly, all the way around. Well she didn’t do that, of course—but that’s what it felt like. I’ll spare you the finer details, but apparently 26-year-old me, a freshly minted PhD who thought she knew everything, had been rather arrogant and high-maintenance.

“Thank you,” I sputtered. “Thanks for your candor, Teresa. How very illuminating.”

“You’re totally welcome,” she said, beaming.

It was all I could do to stop myself from kicking her off her stool.

Once I composed myself, I recognized that this moment actually presented a valuable opportunity: hopefully to prove that Teresa didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. But either way, I had to probe further.

So in the car on the way home, with my very merry husband in the passenger seat, I recounted the conversation.

“What do you think?” I asked him. “Is she right?”

“Um, is this a trick question?”

“No—go ahead,” I assured him, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible, “I really want to know if you saw what Teresa saw.”

He paused for a moment and began, “Yeahhh . . . I can see where she’s coming from.” I bit my tongue and took a deep breath as he continued. “I mean, remember when you asked for a hard-walled office after you’d been in your job for less than six months?”

“Did I?” I said, feigning ignorance.

“No, actually, you demanded it,” he said. “That seemed pretty over the-top to me.”

At the time, I’d been of the staunch opinion that my demand was justified. But suddenly, in retrospect, I saw things from another perspective: I could see how this must have come across.

For weeks, a sea of emotions swirled in my mind. Was I surprised to hear this truth about my younger self? Absolutely. Embarrassed at my behavior? You bet I was. But most of all, I was disappointed that no one—no one!—had said anything to me about it for almost 10 years. And since gaining this valuable insight, I’ve kept it in the back of my mind. Those drunken words had revealed one of the most sobering truths about myself I have ever learned.

Most people think that self-awareness means understanding ourselves on the inside, and that by looking inward we can uncover hidden truths about who we are. Yet my research shows that true self-awareness requires an often overlooked and equally important ability: to turn our gaze outward to understand how we are seen. And no matter how hard we try, we simply cannot do this on our own. Because learning how others see us is usually thwarted by one simple fact: even the people we’re closest to are reluctant to share such information. We might pick up an observation here and there (with or without the aid of lip-loosening booze), but without concerted effort to uncover it, we’re usually not getting, as they say in the courtroom, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Now, it’s rare not to wonder, at one point or another, what people are saying about us when we leave the room. And yet we live in a world where people almost never tell us the truth about ourselves. Stir in our uneasy reluctance to ask for it and we have a recipe for a lifetime of blissful ignorance. Indeed, for many people, the mere thought of finding out how others see us can conjure up many fears and insecurities (“You really do look fat in those jeans” or “Your presentation was incoherent and underwhelming” or “You were insufferably arrogant when you were 26”).

Of course, this instinct is understandable; the cold hard truth can be hard to hear. But while finding out how others see us can be scary, intimidating, or downright painful, by avoiding it, we risk two equally unappealing outcomes. The first is that we are doomed to walk around with metaphorical toilet paper stuck to our shoe while people snicker behind our backs. The second is that we do eventually learn the truth—through an accidentally overheard conversation, a “come-to-Jesus moment,” or a beer-fueled admission at a dive bar—in a way that blindsides us, or at a time when it’s too late to do anything about what we’ve learned. 

When I’m speaking to managers in organizations, I’ll often ask, “Who is confident that your employees have the same opinion about your leadership as you do?” About half the hands go up. So I up the ante. “Keep your hand up if you’d bet your retirement savings on it.” At this point, I usually see a lot of pensive looks, and most people tentatively lower their hands. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t that simple. Just like we can’t glean total insight just from gazing at our own reflection, looking at ourselves only through the eyes of others doesn’t show us the complete picture, either.

A better metaphor for complete self-awareness than a mirror might be a prism. As you may remember from elementary school science class, when you shine a white light into a prism, it comes out the other side in the form of a rainbow. Indeed, every time we seek a new perspective on how someone sees us, we’re effectively adding another color to the picture. Instead of just looking at a flat white light, we begin to see ourselves in a richer, more complete and multidimensional way. Sometimes it might hurt our eyes to look at it, but we need that bright light to shine our path to true self-knowledge.

Dr. Tasha Eurich is author of the new book Insight. She is an organizational psychologist, researcher and New York Times best-selling author.