Why is Self-Awareness so Difficult?

The following is an excerpt from my book, I Know Myself and Neither Do You , an in-depth examination of the importance of self-awareness for leaders.

"Ray Williams makes a compelling case for self-awareness as the key to leader success. Using in-depth research, case studies and personal insights, Williams shows how current and aspiring leaders can better understand themselves and improve their performance by recognizing the importance of self-awareness and taking action to improve it for the benefit of their team and organization. The book is a must have book on your reference shelf."--Marshall Goldsmith, recognized as one the top ten most influential business thinkers and coaches in the world.

If self-awareness is so important, why do so many people have difficulty with it? Part of the answer to that question, other than a person’s unwillingness, is the influence of self-deception, “blind spots” and biases.

Self-awareness avoidance may take many forms, including watching TV, engaging in social media, escaping into alcohol, drugs or other addictions, or even committing suicide.

Defense Mechanisms

Researchers Cam Caldwell and Linda Hayes explain how defense mechanisms such as projection, displacement, undoing, isolation, sublimation, and denial are virtually universal phenomena and can lead to feedback-avoiding behavior. Other researchers suggest that anticipating a desired conclusion and viewing the world through a self-serving bias can directly affect the way in which people gather evidence and reach conclusions about themselves.?

Self-Deception

The problem of congruence in how we assess ourselves is essential to self-awareness, one’s individual identity, and the degree of self-deception. As a form of cognitive dissonance, self-deception has been described as a discrepancy between the way in which we know how we ought to act and how we actually behave.??Self-deception is one of many defense mechanisms that enable us to maintain self-esteem and our identity.

The tendency to believe in faulty preconceptions is consistent with several types of self-deception identified by University of Washington psychologist, Frederick A. Ziegler, as eight rationalizations that frequently occur. Those eight perceptions and their respective meanings are:?

• A pretense to others.?Claiming prior knowledge about the likelihood of an uncertain outcome may be either a rationalization or an attempt to look good in others’ eyes.
• Discount of a failure.?Claiming to have known in advance that failure was likely may be an attempt to persuade oneself that one truly knew about an uncertain probability.
• Articulation of past fears.?Unwillingness to deal with uncertainty may result in claiming foreknowledge of a likely failure – but after that disappointment actually occurs.
• Inability to understand.?Although evidence of a fact contrary to what we may want to believe may be present, our failure to acknowledge a situation may legitimately reflect something we cannot emotionally deal with or understand.
• Wanting reality to be different.?One’s biases affect how we see the world and affect the formation of our beliefs so powerfully that we get dissuaded by wishful thinking.
• ?Intentional averting of attention.?We know intuitively that something is unbearably distressing and deliberately avoid addressing a painful issue so that we do not have to deal with it.
• Resolving to change.?At times, we acknowledge that we have not dealt with issues that we ought to have addressed in the past.
• Acknowledging regret.?We may express the fact that we should have been attuned to key information in the past, but overlooked key clues.

Understanding how we deceive ourselves can enable us to avoid those tendencies that erode relationships with others and that lower our self-esteem.??In writing about self-deception as a coping mechanism, Daniel Goleman explained that self-deception was often a sub-conscious effort to avoid pain and anxiety, skewing our conscious awareness by filtering out painful information.??Psychiatrist Scott Peck, author of?The Road Less Travelled, noted that frequently those who deceive others or themselves do so unwittingly and often without a conscious awareness of their motives for their deceptions.?

In writing about the dissonance of self-deception, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee describe it as follows: “We end up seeing the world in very black-and-white terms, and we slowly lose the ability to see ourselves, or those around us, realistically.

We miss a lot. Then, when things do go wrong, it is very easy to continue to blame others, and feel sorry for ourselves as things deteriorate--especially when the downturn feels like a surprise and follows a period of denial.”

Another reason we can deceive ourselves about reality and are not aware, is because we are “not present” a good part of the time, but rather, our minds are in the past or the future. Another way is saying this is that a person is not mindful.

Psychologists Matthew Killingworth and Daniel T. Gilbert found, in their research, almost half of the time our minds wanderto somewhere or something else other than here and now, noting that our brain’s tendency--particularly as we get older--operates on an unconscious “automatic pilot.”??

Blind Spots

In the book by Ann E. Tenbrunsel and?Max H. Bazerman?Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do?About It,?they argue?good people do bad things without knowing that they are doing anything wrong.??This can also create motivational blindness, which is the tendency to not notice the unethical actions of others when it is against our own best interests to notice. Blind spots also create the “want” self--that part of us that behaves according to self-interest and, often, without regard for moral principles.

Robert Bruce Shaw, in his book,?Leadership Blindspots: How Successful Leaders Identify and Overcome the Weaknesses That Matter,?describes the 20 most common blind spots he has seen while working as an executive coach for hundreds of professionals. Shaw describes how blind spots hinder leaders from being effective by:

Overestimating their strategic capabilities. Shaw says this is often the blind spot of leaders who have strong operational experience, but then get promoted to higher more strategic, visionary positions.

Valuing being right over being effective. This blind spot, Shaw argues, occurs when a leader thinks he or she has all the answers, and is unwilling to listen to others’ viewpoints.

In addition to experience, executives’ positional power can hinder their self-awareness. Studies have shown that people don’t always learn the right lessons from experience. Expertise doesn’t always guarantee seeing the right information or making the right decisions. Overconfidence can often be the result. Business professor James O’Toole has observed that, as one’s positional power grows, one’s willingness to listen to others shrinks.

Biases

A?cognitive bias?is a systematic pattern of deviation from the norm?or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective?social reality" from their perceptions, which then may dictate their?behavior?in the social world.?As a result, cognitive biases may lead to perceptual distortions, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what we know as a lack of rational thinking.

Not all biases are conscious. Unconscious bias is a survival mechanism that helps our brains sift through large amounts of sensory information and influences our perceptions of people and situations, and how we behave in response.??

A study by James S. Jones and his colleagues found that biases often develop outside of our control.??As we learn more about bias, psychologists have come to believe biases are a hard-wired aspect of our brain and our behavior. They contend our ancient minds know that survival can be dependent on snap decisions, so biases help us make these decisions quickly--often without us being conscious. We have so much information coming at us, it’s much easier for our minds to continue to follow what’s familiar and expected versus what’s not--hence, why “change” can be such a stressful event in our lives.

Unconscious cognitive biases can have a significant negative effect on our self-awareness, particularly our social self-awareness. As we become unaware, blind or reject how other people see us, we make decisions based upon those biases, which may distort reality.

Self-Assessment Inaccuracies

A common approach to raising self-awareness is self-reporting assessments, which are more prevalent than 360 degree assessments which involve the assessment by others. Recent research shows that there is questionable accuracy for self-assessments.?

In one?study of more than 13,000 professionals, researchers found almost no relationships between self-assessment and objective performance ratings. A second study by these researchers found more than 33% of engineers rated their performance in the top 5% relative to peers.

Another?study showed that 94% of college professors thought they were above average in their jobs. In 2001, 91% of Harvard University students graduated with honors, and in 2013, 50% of all grades awarded were A’s. By 2015, 72% of students didn’t think grade inflation was a problem.

Yet, the reliability of self-assessments and lack of self-awareness is significant. One study showed that employees who lacked self-awareness reduced decision quality by 36% and increased conflict by 30%. Another study with hundreds of publicly traded companies found that those with poor financial returns were 79% more likely to employ large numbers of employees who were not self-aware.

Accurately Assessing Self-Awareness

There are numerous ways in which leaders can become more self-aware. Here’s a partial list. Many on this list can be described as self-assessments, which are extremely valuable. However, to develop social or external self-awareness (i.e., how others see you), obtaining feedback either through a formal assessment or informal conversation is even more valuable.

1. Emotional Intelligence assessments.?A good example is the EQi Assessment (with?a 360 component) which has been used as a powerful coaching tool.
2. Strengths assessment.?The Values in Action Strength Test from the University of Pennsylvania will highlight your most natural strengths and your weaknesses.
3. The Self-Awareness Outcomes Questionnaire.?The SAOQ is an attempt to capture the range of effects that self-awareness has on an individual’s everyday life.
4. The Reflection/Rumination Questionnaire?measures the extent to which a person tends to think about or reflect on self.
5. The Mindful Attention Awareness Scale?which measures mindfulness traits.
6. The Self-Reflection and Insight Scale?which measures the tendency to reflect on the self and the extent to which individuals have insight into their own behavior.
7. Taking self-reflection?time.?Take time each evening to reflect on your behavior for the day.?How do you perceive yourself? How do others perceive you? What can you learn from observing your behavior today?
8. Personal values?assessment. Identifying core values which answer the question:?what’s most important?to me??When you become aware?of your personal values, you can evaluate if you’re living in accord with them.
9. Developing your personal vision, purpose?and mission statements.?You have an ideal future self. This future self is your realized innate potential. Being able to also identify and clarify your life purpose and mission which go far beyond describing?them as your job, helps raise self-awareness.
10. Journaling.?Capturing your inner thoughts and feelings in a journal helps you objectify them.
11. Writing your life story.?Your life story is a fundamental component of your personality. Psychologist Dan McAdams?says, “The stories we tell ourselves about our lives don’t just shape our personalities—they are our personalities.”
12. Shadow work.?We are complex creatures with opposing tensions within us. For every aspect of our character we identify with, an opposing quality lives within our unconscious.?Shadow work?seeks to bring these opposing qualities to light so they won’t influence our behavior.
13. Reflecting on your “Inner Dialogue.”?Within our minds is a family of inner voices (or sub personalities) with their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Dialoguing with these characters out loud or in a journal helps us develop self-awareness of our emotional terrain.?
14. Mindfulness meditation.?During mindfulness meditation, you can develop the practice and skill of reflecting both on your inner state (thoughts and emotions), as well as your external state through observation and noticing without judgment.
15. A?360-degree feedback assessment. This is a process through which feedback from an employee's subordinates, colleagues, and supervisors is gathered and compared to your own self-assessment. Such feedback can also include, when relevant, feedback from external sources who interact with the employee, such as customers and suppliers or other interested stakeholders.?