How to Improve Self-Awareness: Why You Can’t Do It Alone

You are the world’s leading expert on being you – but only partially. Unfortunately, you are also standing in the worst possible place from which to see yourself entirely clearly.

Self-understanding, to know yourself, is an inward focused activity. Maybe you reflect, journal, take personality tests and do the work of inward processing. Most of this is genuinely effective, but (aside from our internal biases, positive and negative) there is a problem.

In her book Insight, organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich makes an important distinction between two kinds of self-awareness.

• Internal self-awareness is what you can discover from the inside: your values, desires, reactions, patterns, strengths and aspirations.

• External self-awareness is understanding how you are actually experienced by other people.

And, she argues, you cannot do the second one alone.

How to improve self-awareness with other people

The first obvious challenge is are you open to other people’s opinions of you? No doubt you’ve experienced the uninvited opinions of others and the negative ones (fair or not) can have a big and lasting impact. To consider opening yourself up and even inviting feedback on your character, from others, just seems counterproductive. 

But if you accept the argument that a fuller and more rounded self-understanding does require external points of view, then the question might be, how do we do that (without it being the free for all character assassination that a hurt part of you is expecting).

What might be benefits be? 

Better self-understanding gives us more freedom. If I can see a pattern I was previously blind to, I have some chance of changing it; if someone notices a strength I have underestimated, I can use it more deliberately; if I understand the effect I have on other people, I can build better relationships and make wiser choices about how I want to live.

Research reviewed in Insight associates greater insight with stronger relationships, clearer purpose, greater wellbeing, more self-acceptance and a stronger sense of being able to shape one’s life.

We're not going to hand other people the right to define us, we’re selecting people capable of telling us something true while still having our interests at heart. We lower the drawbridge a little because remaining comfortably mistaken can cost more than hearing something difficult.

A small experiment in external self-awareness

Here is a fairly unthreatening experiment. Take the free VIA Character Strengths Survey. It will give you a ranked profile of your 24 character strengths, from the strengths most characteristic of you downwards. You will, I expect, see some truth to the portrait it paints based on your answers. But that’s just part one of the experiment

For part two, ask a close friend or colleague to look at the full list of 24 VIA character strengths and put them into the order that best represents how they see you.

Then compare the two. Where are the surprises? Which strengths do they see clearly that you have underestimated? Which do you rank highly but they experience less often? The interesting bit is not whose list is correct. It is the conversation created by the difference.

If you get interested in the model, you can also read about our VIA Strengths for Spiritual Practice course.

Other people are not necessarily right

There is an obvious danger. Another person having a perspective on you does not make their perspective true, so, in some circumstances a full 360º review is recommended where a number of people’s feedback is collated and a facilitator or coach gets to interpret that back to you. Not everyone’s idea of fun.

Eurich uses the phrase loving critics for the people most likely to give us genuinely useful insight: people willing to tell us something we may not be aware of, or particularly want to hear, but who we trust to have our interests at heart. In my experience of 1:1 work, that earned trust takes time but is one of the reasons the client is there.

It happens in good spiritual direction, not because the director possesses superior knowledge about you, but because another attentive person can sometimes notice what you cannot. And even that is not quite the whole picture; spirtitual direction isn’t the same as other 1:1 models.

There may be three perspectives in the room

The Christian tradition adds another possibility. There is what I can see in myself, what you can see about me, and what might become apparent when both of us pay attention to the Divine – something in and beyond either of us.

You can see something like this happening in Christian sacred texts. Here are two examples.

Mary has already had an extraordinary experience: an angel has told her that she will become pregnant and give birth to Jesus. Soon afterwards she visits Elizabeth, an older relative who is herself unexpectedly pregnant with the child who will become John the Baptist.

When Mary arrives, she greets Elizabeth. Before Mary has explained anything, Elizabeth’s unborn child moves, and Luke says Elizabeth is “filled with the Spirit”. Elizabeth then names significance back to Mary: she calls her blessed, refers to her as the “mother of my Lord”, and says she is blessed for trusting what she had been told.

It is immediately after this encounter that Mary finds her own remarkable language for what is happening. Her response is the song traditionally called the Magnificat, with its famous reversal of the usual order of things: the powerful brought down, the lowly lifted up, the hungry filled with good things.

Mary’s experience is enlarged by Elizabeth's interpretation. Elizabeth sees something in what is happening that Mary cannot simply provide for herself, while both women are trying to notice what God might be doing.

Or take another story from Luke’s Gospel.

Shortly after Jesus has been executed, two of his followers are walking away from Jerusalem towards a village called Emmaus. They are devastated. Everything they thought Jesus represented appears to have ended in failure.

A stranger joins them on the road and asks what they are talking about. They tell him the whole story: Jesus’ teaching, his death, even the strange reports that his tomb has been found empty. Their problem is not lack of information. It is the meaning they have given the information. “We had hoped…” is the revealing phrase. They had hoped Jesus was going to change everything, and now, as far as they can see, that hope has collapsed.

The stranger listens, questions their interpretation and offers another way of understanding precisely the same events. Only later, when they stop to eat together and he breaks bread, do they realise that the stranger is the risen Jesus. Afterwards they look back on the conversation and say that their hearts had been “burning” as he spoke to them on the road. Something had been changing before they understood what it was.

The facts did not change. Another perspective allowed the same facts to form a different picture. And again the story contains that intriguing third dimension: their own understanding, the perspective of another person, and the possibility that God is already at work within the conversation before they can fully recognise it.

Perhaps we aren’t meant to work ourselves out alone

There is a strongly individualistic version of spirituality in which almost everything important happens privately: find your truth, listen to yourself, go within. There is wisdom in all of those things, but they can only take us so far.

Sometimes the thing you most need to discover is sitting directly inside your blind spot. A good spiritual direction conversation creates another angle.

Spiritual direction also makes room for the possibility that the conversation is not simply one person analysing another. Neither person needs to manufacture an insight or arrive with the right answer beforehand; instead, they pay attention together.

• What keeps returning?

• What happens when you say that?

• Where did you suddenly become more alive?

• What have you dismissed too quickly?

• What might you be unable to see from where you are standing?

• And, for those comfortable using the language: where might God be in this?

That, I think, is one of the underestimated values of spiritual direction. You still bring the indispensable inside view of your life, but someone else can notice what is hard to see from there. Spiritual direction makes room for both perspectives while staying open to the possibility that something more may emerge in the conversation. Imagine that in a group.

If this is the kind of conversation you are looking for, to improve self-awareness amongst other things, you can explore our spiritual directors here.