Boost Your SELF-AWARENESS with Dr. Tasha Eurich (ep.174)

Talk About Talk - Communication Skills Training

How to boost your self-awareness with Dr. Tasha Eurich. Tasha and Andrea talk about how self-awareness can improve your communication, relationships, confidence, promotability, influence, empathy, leadership, and more.

Dr. TASHA EURICH

• Books:
  • Insight – https://amzn.to/42LqCIi
  • Shatterproof (2025) – https://amzn.to/3ZLzXlM
• Insight Quiz:
  • https://www.insight-book.com/quiz
• Tasha’s book recommendation:
  • “Wonder Hell” by Laura Gassner Otting – https://amzn.to/3Nc4BNt

CONNECT WITH ANDREA & TALK ABOUT TALK

• Website: TalkAboutTalk.com
• Communication Coaching Newsletter: https://talkabouttalk.com/newsletter
• LinkedIn Andrea: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/
• LinkedIn TalkAboutTalk: https://www.linkedin.com/company/talkabouttalk/
• YouTube Channel: @talkabouttalkyoutube

TRANSCRIPT

Are YOU a self-awareness unicorn? That RARE person with exceptionally high internal and external self awareness? Probably not. But according to self-awareness expert Dr.Tasha Eurich, just by learning some of the tools and approaches you’ll hear in the next 45 minutes, you’re way ahead of the pack. One step closer to unicorn status.

Let’s do this!

Welcome to Talk about Talk podcast episode #174 “Boost your Self-awareness with Dr.Tasha Eurich.”

I’m so excited for you to meet Tasha. I read her book called INSIGHT a few years ago after it was recommended by Adam Grant. The full title is Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think. It immediately became one of my favorites, a book with research that I reference all the time, and a book that I often recommend to my coaching clients.

So I was very excited to book this interview. When the time finally came and we logged into the interview, we both stopped and stared at the screen. I’m sure my jaw dropped. Tasha was sitting in front of her beautiful horizontal bookcase, all sorted by color. Like a beautiful rainbow of books, including the turquoise book jacket cover of her book INSIGHT. Some of you might know that I am also obsessed with color, particularly turquoise. So there I was, in front of my vertical bookshelf, each shelf coded by colour – black then red then turquoise, then yellow, and so on.

WOW. Even if you’re not obsessed with colour, our screens were a sight to be seen. You could say we had an instant connection.

Speaking of connection – In case we haven’t met, my name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki and I’m your executive communication coach. Please just call me Andrea. I coach executives like you to improve your communication skills so you can communicate with confidence, establish credibility, and ultimately achieve your career goals. To learn more about what I do, head over to talkabouttalk.com and you can read about the coaching and workshops I run. Plus there are lots of free resources for you at the bottom of the talkabouttalk.com homepage. You can also sign up for my email newsletter, where you’ll get free coaching from me in your inbox. Head over to talkabouttalk.com to sign up now.

Alright, let’s shift gears.

In this episode, you’re going to learn a helpful definition of self-awareness, why it’s important, and Tasha’s strategies that you can start immediately to help you become more self-aware.

Let me introduce Tasha, then we’ll get right into the interview. At the end, as always, I’m going to summarize with three learnings that I want to reinforce for you. Sound good?

Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist, researcher, and New York Times best-selling author who helps people thrive in a changing world.

With a PhD in Organizational Psychology, she’s the principal of The Eurich Group, working with clients like Google, Walmart, and the NBA. She’s been recognized as the world’s top self-awareness coach and featured by Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, NBC, and more.

Her 2017 TEDx talk has been viewed more than 8 million times! Tasha’s first book, Bankable Leadership, debuted as a New York Times bestseller. Her latest, Insight, explores the link between self-awareness and success. That’s where we’re focusing here today. She also has another book coming out in 2025 focused on resilience called SHATTERPROOF. I’ll leave links to all these books in the show notes.

Here we go!

INTERVIEW

Thank you so much, Tasha, for being here today on Talk About Talk to talk about our self -awareness.

Thank you. It’s great to be here, Andrea.

So I guess we better start with definitions. When you are writing and researching and talking about self -awareness, what exactly do you mean?

So it’s a great place to start, I think, and you’re very smart to do that. It took our research team actually almost a year to scientifically and empirically.

So it’s the will and the skill to understand who we are and how you’re seen.

So I am familiar enough with your work that I know exactly what you mean by each of those very precise words.

But I want to say I applaud and appreciate how precise you’re being with that. So maybe break it down. What do you mean by will and what do you mean by skill, first of all. So both of those are equally important, right? If you’re missing one, you can’t become self -aware. The will has to do with not even necessarily a daily commitment because life, right? Life is crazy. Most days, if you are committed to seeing yourself clearly, that really kind of satisfies that piece of it. And then the skill is not just sort of using the myths and assumptions that we have about what it takes to become self -aware, but actually looking at scientifically supported actions that will improve our self -awareness. One of the things, you know, and I’m sure we’ll talk about this that we discovered in our research was that a lot of really well -intentioned people are sort of approaching self -awareness in a way that’s not giving them increased insight.

And so that’s where the skill component comes in. So it’s not just, you know, kind of throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping something sticks. It’s saying this is my self -awareness strategy. This is how I’m going to break this down for myself.

When I was listening to and then reading your book, that’s where I felt like I personally got a lot of traction as well, providing me with the skill, the frameworks, right, for how to think about or how to get input to your identity and, well, and so that you can become more self -aware based on other people’s input and other frameworks that we’ll talk about.

So let’s go back to the definition, though. The second part was about, I’m going to paraphrase here, but it’s really about knowing yourself and also knowing how others perceive you.

Is that’s another way of saying it. It is. And I think a lot of times when we think about self -awareness, we only consider that inner piece, right? Knowing who we are internally.

What do we value? What are our passions? What are our personality patterns over time? Things like that. But we often neglect an equally important piece of the puzzle, which is to understand how other people see us. And what I always say to people is, you know, everybody has these shirts of like, what other people, other people’s opinion of me is none of my business, right? And I, while that’s very empowering, and I’m sure it sells a lot of T -shirts, unless you work in a cardboard box and live in a cardboard box and never speak to another person again, it kind of matters how other people see you.

And the angle that I’ve gotten to with, you know, I’ve been coaching CEOs for more than 20 years now is they’re already having these perceptions, right? They’re already talking to other people about these perceptions.

Wouldn’t you rather know? Because when you know, you can decide what you want to do about it, it doesn’t mean necessarily you have to change. But if we’re not actively soliciting other people’s perceptions of us, we are missing literally, you know, one of the two camera angles of that skill. What’s interesting in our research is that we found that very often, you know, highly self -aware people discover that those two data points don’t always match up, right? I might see myself one way. There might be a perception of me that’s very different. And I always go back there to the F.Scott Fitzgerald quote, which I really love. He says the definition of true intelligence is being able to hold two opposing ideas in your mind and still retain the ability to function, right?

And so to become self -aware and to be on this journey, it’s a dance, really, of soliciting both, navigating both, making sense of both, and sometimes believing and understanding that they won’t square up, but you still have to have both of those data points. Oh, my goodness, Tasha, there’s so, as you’re talking, I’m thinking, oh, I need to ask her this, I need to ask her this, I need to ask her this, I need to to ask, there’s so many directions we could go. Let me start with a quick anecdote that when I was reading your book the first time,

I was also, I happened to be coaching a gentleman who I now realize was not self -aware, but I asked him whether he thought he was self -aware. And he said, I think I’m extremely self -aware.

Of course. And when I was reading your book and thinking about it after, I thought, I know based on your research and others, there’s what you call, or we call internal self -awareness and external self -aware. And I thought instantly, he’s high internally self -aware, but not externally self -aware. And in your book, you talk about how most of us think we are more self -aware than the average, right? Including me, by the way. Fun discovery. Well, everybody is everybody, right yeah um so losers and the introspectors, if you had to put the population, you know, maybe of working professionals into this two by two matrix, the introspectors would get more than its fair share of folks. I’m not,

I’m not sure.

It’s interesting because I actually have the data. I could look at that. We have our insight quiz. Maybe we can put a link in your show notes for your listeners. But we’ve been doing this insight quiz and making it available to people for free for like more than five years now.

So we could run those stats. I just don’t want to speak out of the wrong side of my mouth, right? It’s been a while. But the last time we did it, I want to say three or four years ago maybe, we were seeing very few people are high in both, right? That internal self -awareness, the first part of the definition, knowing who we are, and then the second part of it, understanding how other people see us, that’s hard to achieve, right? But it is possible and very learnable. It’s just that, again, most people are approaching it with good intentions, but bad tools, right? The Seeker category is people who are just starting their journey in both of those categories, right? They’re just starting to learn kind of who they are, what they want, what matters to them, and maybe they haven’t gotten a lot of feedback in their life. And they’re really trying to start that journey. What I always tell seekers, if you feel like you might be in that category for anyone, is pick one to start with.

Don’t try to boil the ocean. Say, do I want to kind of get in touch with myself more? Do I want to understand how other people see me more? And then you can always add things after that. But to your question, where it gets really interesting is when people are high on one and then low on the other. And this happens because those two types of self -knowledge are totally independent. Just because it’s like the executive you were coaching, just because he saw himself clearly doesn’t automatically translate to other people, to him understanding how other people saw him. And then the reverse is true. The category I fall in,

I call pleasers. And these are people who are so focused on knowing how other people see them, that sometimes they forget their own, they forget or they aren’t even in touch with the choices that they can make in their own best interest.

Like the example that I give about this, it’s kind of a silly one, but a couple of years ago, I couldn’t decide what color car to get. I was renewing my lease. I was traveling. I was super busy.

So I texted like my five best friends. And I said, here are the choices. Which one should I pick? Right? It’s like this, this completely other focused view, which can have its advantages, but it can also have really big disadvantages.

You know, in that case, what car did I want? You know, what would make me happy? But going back to your – You’re the one that’s going to be driving it every day, Tasha. Exactly. They’re probably not going to be in it very often. But to your point, there is a pretty wide variety across those three categories. So I think it’s interesting, you know, I would argue that even somebody who says they’re self -aware may not be internally self -aware at all, right? If they say they’re self -aware and you look at them and you’re like, well, buddy, I’m not sure you understand. That probably means they’re low in external self -awareness. But what our research has shown is that regardless of where you fall on that spectrum,

95 % of us believe that we are self -aware. And the real number, according to several different studies that we’ve done, is about 10 to 15 % of us, right? So if 10 to 15 % of us meet those criteria, 95 % of us think we’re self -aware. What that means is that on a good day, 80 % of us are lying to ourselves about whether we’re lying to ourselves.

So that’s the question I ask about your client, right? It’s like, I don’t know. I don’t know. Yeah. It’s like our default should be to believe that we probably are not self -aware or at least not as self -aware as we could be.

Bingo. I always say, I put the word gently in front of that. Gently stop assuming that you’re self -aware. I wouldn’t want any of your listeners to get the wrong idea about this.

I am not here as like a poster child of self -loathing or, you know, self -consciousness or neuroses. That isn’t what self -awareness is at all. But there is, I think you’re exactly right, there’s this paradox that as soon as we stop assuming that we are self -aware, we can actually become that. And, you know, another way to look at it is as long as you’re making forward progress, that’s all that matters at the end of the day. That’s very inspiring. So I want to get into some of the tactics that you recommend. I know there’s the what versus why recommendation. But before we get into that, I just want to touch on something that you said that also is related to something in your book about folks that are like the senior leaders and the most powerful people. So when you’re talking about the pleasers,

It reminds me of some of the conversations that I have in workshops and coaching with my clients when we’re talking about their personal brand. And one of the most important strategic principles,

I believe, of establishing a strong personal brand is to focus on what makes you unique. Because if you’re thinking and focused on your unique strengths and passions, you’re going to end up being as happy or satisfied as you can be and as successful as you can be.

And so when I’m thinking about this two by two matrix, I feel like it might be okay to be a pleaser early in your career, but then at some point, you have to focus on what you want to be and what you are so that you can evolve. And this is what I say. Like it’s early, it’s fine early in your career to look around and copy people because you’re trying different identities, right? But as soon as your mid -career, and definitely when you’re a senior executive, you need to double down on what makes you unique, right? So maybe that’s when being a pleaser can really backfire on you, right? But it happens because we’re social learners. We look around at other people that are successful and we copy them. I guess the question is, do you think there might be kind of a similar insight here about self -awareness as there is about personal branding, where to, let me tell you a little bit about the sample of people that we really studied most exhaustively. And you know this. We called them our self -awareness unicorns. And these are people, yeah, that didn’t start out as self -aware, but through some, like, mysterious process that we wanted to uncover, were able to become dramatically more self -aware and, in fact, highly self -aware. And what was so interesting to me is that there weren’t any patterns in that sample based on any demographic, including age. So I’m thinking about, you know, one person, Kelsey, who is a middle school science teacher, who was very, very early in his career. But even earlier in his career, he had been an engineer and was absolutely miserable. And so he went on this journey of self awareness and said, you know what I really want to do is I really want to be a public school teacher and I want to teach science to kids.

And so from my perspective, I think we miss something really for every year we’re not on this journey. We could be, you know, depending on whether it’s internal or external self -awareness, if we’re missing internal self -awareness, you know, we’ll be like somebody who, you know, is maybe not choosing a career that makes them happy. And for every year that goes by without having external self -awareness, we could be alienating everyone, right? Who knows what impact we’re having if we don’t know and can’t control it? So I see what you’re saying, and I think you’re right. I think in some sense, self -awareness becomes more important the higher up you rise because it’s more rare. But I would also just encourage anybody, like, wherever you are on this journey, wherever you are in your career, it will put you above the pack. If you use some of these tools and really use what’s scientifically supported, it’s a superpower. There’s no better way I can say it.

I absolutely agree. I’ve been telling people lately, I used to say a growth mindset was the superpower that would build your success in your communication skills and then in your career. But I actually think it’s a combination, a growth mindset and self -awareness. In your definition of self -awareness, though, there is the growth mindset because it’s the will, right? We just put everything in there just to make sure.

So my next question is related to what you were just saying about as you get more senior in your career, it becomes more important. So in many things that I’ve read that you’ve written and interviews that I’ve listened to, you list the many, many benefits of self -awareness. Why don’t you just list some of them right now? I love this question. So we could be here forever, but I’ll kind of focus it to your audience specifically.

So people who are self -aware are more successful at work. They get more promotions. They’re better communicators. They’re better influencers. I know, right? Pick your favorite. They’re more confident. They’re more empathetic. They’re more effective and respected leaders. And there’s even some evidence that’s been starting to emerge over the past 10 or so years that in companies with high numbers of self -aware, you know, employees and leaders, those companies are actually more profitable. So a lot of executives might think like, oh, I’m a very busy person and, you know,

I don’t have time to work on my self -awareness. But what I would say is, you know, you are modeling this behavior for the entire organization. And an organization can only be as self -aware as the person at the top or the team at the top or the senior team, right? But wait, there’s more. This is where I’m like the knife salesman person or the infomercial, but wait, there’s more. So self -awareness also benefits us in our personal lives. There are a ton of examples, but I think kind of most universal is that people who are self -aware have better romantic relationships. They have stronger and deeper friendships. And this might be especially interesting for some of your listeners.

They tend to raise more mature and less narcissistic children. Oh, wow. Right? So like pick your poison. The beauty of this, and this is why I call self -awareness the meta -skill of the 21st century is that it is literally the foundation of everything else that you’re accomplishing in your life.

You can only be as influential as you are self -aware. You can only be as good of a communicator as you are self -aware, right? You can only be as authentic as you are self -aware. And so that’s where, you know, I think if, again, if you choose to work on the skill, the ripple effects are are astonishing. Okay. Well, you’ve got me convinced, Tasha, easily. Easily, when you say communication skills, I light up, as you could see. So before we move on to the tactics for how people can work on developing their self -awareness, I just want to ask you this question that occurred to me a couple of days ago.

So on the one hand, there’s this research that one of the things you said was more effective, and it was effective and something leadership, more effective and respected.

Respected leadership, leaders. But there, I think you said there’s also an inverse correlation between power and self -awareness. So how do you reconcile that?

Because presumably these leaders have power. Right. So the way I would reconcile that is that some leaders figure it out and benefit, right? So just because it’s rare at the top ranks of a company doesn’t mean it’s not immensely powerful. And in fact, I would argue that makes it more powerful.

If, you know, we all, I would argue that, like, we all probably start at a similar level of self -awareness, but what happens is when you’re the boss, suddenly you walk in and like nobody’s giving you bad news, everybody’s laughing at all of your jokes, right? Nobody’s bringing you problems before the problem becomes a big problem. And that’s just the nature of, you know, hierarchy and power.

There’s a lot of other examples too of, you know, many leaders, especially senior leaders that I’m sure we both worked with make assumptions. And the assumption is something like, well, I must be doing something right.

I’m the CFO. Right. I must be doing something right. I’m an SVP. And, you know, that is often true. But the success criteria change, we change, the environment changes.

So we can’t ever say, I’m good, right? I’ve arrived. And I think, you know, again, with each successive level of leadership, fewer and fewer people are comfortable telling us the truth. So that’s how I would square that is it is actually, it’s empirically important at high levels, but it’s even more important because it’s so rare. Right. B, not necessarily because of something that you did differently. It’s because of other people treating you differently.

And then you just, but if you have similar beliefs about what feedback is, yeah, I get it. Okay, that makes sense. Please share with us a couple of your favorite frameworks, if you want to call them that, or tactics for helping us improve our self -awareness? Sure. So let me give you two. And I think these are, in some ways, these are the, like, simplest and most practical.

And I use these a lot with my coaching clients. So one is for internal self -awareness and the other is for external self -awareness. So internal self -awareness, we found that those self -awareness unicorns, almost to a person. Each had some kind of daily practice. It was very quick. And again, if they didn’t do it every day, they didn’t beat themselves up, they just tried to do it most days, where they were reflecting on their day, but not in a way that kicked them down something I call the rabbit hole of rumination, right? And the danger of sort of over -analyzing ourselves and our experiences is that we actually lose insight, and it makes us worse off. It makes us more stressed, more anxious, more depressed. And that’s probably a whole other podcast that we can do. But for the purposes of this, the daily check -in process,

I would offer three questions. So think about this, like, the next time you’re brushing your teeth at night, or the next time you’re driving home from work, ask yourself some variation of, number one, what went well today, number two, what didn’t go so well, and then three, how can I be smarter tomorrow? And by the way, if you’re working on something different, if you’re working on something specific, you could even say, how can I be more empathetic tomorrow? How can I be more influential tomorrow. How can I be a better coach tomorrow, right? But I think smarter is a nice catch -all of how can I use what I learn today to be 0 .1 % more self -aware tomorrow.

And what’s really interesting about the journey of self -awareness that we’ve discovered is most of the time improvement doesn’t happen in really dramatic leaps and bounds.

It happens slowly, incrementally, every day. which is maybe what I’ll give you for the second tool.

This is actually not something that I identified. It was something that I named. I call it the Dinner of Truth, but it was developed by a communications professor named Josh Meisner. And Dr. Meisner has been doing this exercise with all of his students for many, many years. I would guess he’s probably in, I mean, at least the thousands, if not the 10 ,000s. And here’s what it entails.

So First, you identify someone. It could be a work colleague. It could be someone in your personal life with whom you want to improve your relationship, right? Then you take them out to coffee, lunch. I like dinner because you can have cocktails and one cocktail can make this a little bit easier if that’s something that you’re into. And then you sit them down and you kind of explain, trying to improve myself awareness. you’re someone that’s very important to me. I have a question I’d like to ask you to answer as honestly as you can. And the question is, what do I do that is most annoying to you?

Everybody’s stomachs collectively dropped upon hearing that question. That is a hardwired human response. We’re very scared of possibly discovering that people don’t think, actionable that I can focus on. So instead of an indictment of who I am, you know, I always worry that my friends would be like, you know, Tasha, I’m really glad you asked because everything you do annoys me.

And I don’t really like that much. And I don’t want to be, but that’s the fear, right? And I know it was, you know, at the time, I even knew it was irrational, but you’re afraid of it. But like, one of my friends, you know, said, I love you in person, but you really annoy me on social media. And I was like, thank you. That’s so actionable, right? And I actually complete, this was like 10 years ago, I completely changed how I was showing up in, in that sort of virtual space. And so I would encourage people as scared as, as scary as it sounds or as scared as you might be.

Give it a try. Just try it once and see what happens. So I guess the criteria, who would you ask? It would be someone who probably Thank you. ask and then you just say, that’s okay. Thank you very much. Let’s have a nice dinner now. But yes, but I think if you’re a little more strategic about it than that, if you say, you know, has this person, you know, maybe been the brave soul who says the thing that nobody wants to say, like in at least one context that I can remember, that’s a pretty good sign. Yeah.

I’ve gotten in the habit. I’m thinking now as I’m speaking with you, Sasha, probably based on my reading of your book and listening to you, I’ve gotten in the habit after I’m done with coaching sessions and with workshops of immediately asking for feedback and make me really clear to people that I truly believe feedback is a gift, right? Because I’m in this environment where I’m coaching people. And if I don’t ask for feedback, unless I did a really bad job, which doesn’t happen, but if I did a really bad job, I’m sure they would let me know, but they’re always like, oh, it was great.

You got nine out of 10, la, la, la, whatever. I’m like, tell me something I can do to improve next time. And most of the time, they don’t share anything. They’re like, no, everything was great.

Is there something you can say to people that encourages them to share feedback with you that you’ve come across? Yeah. I mean, let’s take that situation specifically, because I think it’s something very generalizable, right? We all can ask for immediate feedback. And so how can we get that feedback and have the best chance it’ll be helpful? I might even, so two ideas there.

One would be to share with them past feedback you’ve gotten. You could say, you know, gosh, I remember you know, five years ago I was giving this workshop And a gentleman, you know, came up to me during lunch and said, you know, we don’t have enough breaks and we just don’t have the mental space to think about everything we’re learning. And it was so incredibly helpful. And here’s how I changed the class.

Like, maybe you can give a couple of examples of that. If it’s the first time you’ve asked for feedback on something and you don’t have, you know, a past track record, I would just make some stuff up, like, or even say the things that you’re worried aren’t working, right? Like, you know, I felt like my energy was down a little bit this afternoon. And, you know, maybe that’s in my head, but maybe you can verify that for me. That’s a hypothesis I have that I can’t test without you telling me what you think.

So to kind of give them, like, I’m not just saying this, I’m actually going to give you examples and show you how excited I am about hearing feedback on those examples.

I think that might do a lot. It’s obviously just one thing you can do, but I think that’s worth trying. Definitely worth trying. I’m going to try it and I’ll let you know how it works. I can’t imagine it wouldn’t work, right? It’s like you’re setting the table for the feedback. Yeah. I love it. Okay. So I can imagine some people are hesitant, is a nice way of it to ask for feedback, to gain insight into particularly their external self -awareness, right, and what their identity is in the eyes of other people.

So this leads me to your upcoming book called Shatterproof. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re going to be talking about in that book? So I have to preface this by saying that the book just went to copy editing,

And I am not yet as smart and talking about it as I know that I need to be. But I’m just going to give you like some headlines. I started writing this book.

I worked on Shatterproof for five years. And it started out as an exploration of, you know, when bad things happen to us, what are the best ways that we can respond?

So that we’re not just sort of getting back to where we were before, but we’re getting, you know, smarter, more confident, stronger, more ready for, you know, whatever challenges lie ahead.

But during this research, COVID happened, as we all remember, and I experienced something that I had never experienced in my life. So I’m a person, you know, I just recently learned I’m not a fourth generation entrepreneur. I’m a fifth generation entrepreneur. and I have been raised, you know, I was raised by a single mother, taught that when you fall down, you get back up again, right? You’re resilient, you’re tough, you persevere. And I’ve, you know, I’ve had lots of challenges in my life like we all have, you know, for me, the biggest one has been a lot of, like, pretty significant health challenges. But I, you know, up until COVID happened, I had always found a way to kind of push through them to endure quiet endurance, right, where I wasn’t complaining.

I was getting up every day. And, you know, for the longest time, I assumed that everyone else was in 10 out of 10 pain every day and they just didn’t complain about it as much as I did. So then I was like,

I have to complain less. But what happened during COVID was literally, and I can trace the day that this happened. I woke up one day And my resilience ran out.

I hit my resilience ceiling where I was, my coping tools that I had relied on for my whole life were not only not working, but they were feeling like extra stress. You know, things like exercising or meditating or my gratitude journal, right? All the things were taught will help us be resilient.

My tank was completely empty. And so that actually kind of kicked me down into this hole of looking at what does the research on resilience actually tell us?

And what’s the alternative? Right. And so the best way to think about becoming shatterproof is a second skill set in addition to resilience.

It’s not that resilience isn’t helpful. It’s that it has its limits, right? So becoming shatterproof is about instead of bouncing back, which is what resilience is, when we become shatterproof, we are proactively growing forward through our toughest challenges. So instead of, you know, waiting for something to be over and just trying to keep persevering, we’re actually saying this is an opportunity for a profound personal transformation. In order to do that, I need to understand what my pain is telling me.

I need to kind of understand the self -limiting patterns and behaviors and beliefs that I’m bringing to the table. I need to pick new ones. And so the book is really about this four -step framework to become shatterproof that we can use, you know, all the time, first of all, but specifically when our resilience is starting to run out so that we’re not, I never want anyone to experience what I experienced and it was about, you know, March or April of 2021. And so the book is really to help people, my publisher didn’t like this title, but the goal is to help people build a more beautiful life in a world of constant chaos.

Instead of just bouncing back, like, and people, you know, they’re falling off equipment or whatever. And some of them, it was like not the first time that day where they had just like something’s happening, right? And I was watching with my mom and I said, well, they’ve got a TED talk. They now hit rock bottom in front of billions of people. Billions, I think, right? Isn’t that? Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, I’m going to move on to the three rapid fire questions are you ready i’m ready okay first question are you an introvert or an extrovert big time introvert really okay i’m what’s called yeah i’m a gregarious introvert that’s the qualifier okay what are your communication pet peeves there’s only one at the top of the list and it’s lying dishonesty Dishonesty.

Okay. Question number three, is there a book or a podcast that you find yourself recommending a lot lately? By the way, I recommend your book all the time. Well,

I and Penguin Random House, thank you, Andrea, for that. That’s very nice of you. So to your question, yeah, the book that I have been, I find I’m recommending most often lately is by my really dear friend Laura Gassner Otting.

She has written two books, but her most recent one is called Wonder Hell. And it’s about what happens when we start to achieve our greatest potential and how it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

It gets into things like imposter syndrome and all the things that come along with success when we thought success would be easy and we actually discover that it’s hard and it’s it’s a it’s very clever she is um she’s like the best friend that’s going to kick your ass and tell you exactly what you need to do um but in a way that is so kind and warm and she’s also very very funny it’s it’s a delightful book oh I can’t wait to read it i can’t i can’t wait you know based on the fact that we’re both interested in in i guess self -identity and self -awareness And based on the fact that we arrange our bookshelves similarly,

I’m going to maybe make the hypothesis that we might also enjoy reading the same books. So I can’t want to read that book. Is there anything else you want to say, do you want to share with the talk about top listeners about self -awareness?

I mean, I would just say, sort of let me give them two things. Number one, I would encourage everybody listening to this to go take the five minute insight quiz. You can get it at https://www.insight-book.com/quiz.It again takes five minutes. It’s free. You fill out 14 questions. You send it to someone else who knows you well. They fill out 14 questions. Very important. And then when both results are in, you get a nice report that shows you high level, which of those four boxes are you in right now? And then it gives you, you know, usually two or three very practical things you can do if you decide you want to improve.

So I think that’s the first thing. But the second thing, I’ll go back to, you know, kind of a theme that I think we’ve touched on multiple times, which is

Amazing. Thank you so much, Tasha.

I really appreciate your time and your expertise, and it’s really nice to get to know you. You too. I really enjoyed this. Yeah, two self -identity, self -development, bookshelf nerds. We had to come together at some point, so it was a pleasure. I love it. Thank you.

Thanks again to Tasha for sharing her insights about self-awareness.

Yah I got that.

Her book is called Insight and she’s insightful.
Of course!

OK – let me now highlight three of the INSIGHTS from our conversation that I want to reinforce:
1. Why self-awareness is important
2. The definition of self-awareness and a model for how to think about it; and last
3. Two suggestions for how to boost your self-awareness

First – The significance of self-awareness.
The impact that it has. According to Tasha’s research and the research of others, those with higher self-awareness benefit in many ways. This is a long list. Are you ready? So people who are self-aware are more successful at work.

They get more promotions.
They’re better communicators.

They’re better influencers.
They’re more confident.

They’re more empathetic.
They’re more effective and respected leaders.
And the companies they lead might be more profitable.

They have better romantic relationships.
They have stronger and deeper friendships.

And.
They tend to raise more mature and less narcissistic children.

As Tasha says, self -awareness the meta -skill of the 21st century.

That’s the first point.
Don’t underestimate the significance of self-awareness.

The second point I was going to reinforce is the definition of self-awareness. This is about thinking but self-awareness in a more disciplined way, beyond self-awareness as “thinking about thinking”. Tasha’s definition is the will and the skill to understand who we are and how you’re seen.

There are 4 components of this definition:
1. The will – the desire to improve.
If that list I gave you of the many benefits of self-awareness doesn’t improve your WILL to improve it, I don’t know what to say.
Then there’s:
2. The skill – knowledge about how to become more self aware, beyond the myths and “common knowledge.”
3. Who you are – your strengths, weaknesses, passions, values, opinions, idiosyncrasies, all of it. This is internal self-awareness.
4. How you’re seen by others – how others perceive you This is external self-awareness.

As Tasha mentioned, it might be helpful to think about these last two dimensions – internal and external self-awareness, in terms of a twox2. There’s low and high interval self awareness on one axis and low and high external self-awareness on the other axis. The rare folks who are high on both are what she calls the unicorns.
If you’re low on both you’re a seeker. You don’t yet know who you are, what you stand for, or how others see you, and you probably feel stuck or frustrated with your performance and relationships.

Many of us are on the diagonal – There are the Introspectors (those with high internal and low external self-awareness) – I’ve worked with some clients who are Introspectors. They’re clear on who they are but don’t challenge their own views or search for blind spots by getting feedback from others. They end up in big trouble. Then there’s the Pleasers (those with low internal and high external self-awareness) – Tasha admitted she might be a pleaser, and I think I might be too. We’re so focused on appearing a certain way to others that we could be overlooking what matters to us.

The last point I want to reinforce is Tasha’s suggestion for how to become a unicorn. She has two suggestions:
1. the daily check -in process, Where you answer three questions. some variation of, number one, what went well today, number two, what didn’t go so well, and then three, how can I be smarter tomorrow?

The idea here is that is that improvement in your self-awareness doesn’t happen quickly, Rather, it happens slowly, incrementally, a little bit every day.

The second suggestion from Tasha is
2. the Dinner of Truth. The dinner of truth was developed by communications professor Josh Meisner. What you do is identify someone with whom you want to improve your relationship. Then you take them out to coffee, lunch, or dinner. Or maybe cocktails. Then you ask them to answer this very awkward Q, as honestly as they can: What do I do that is most annoying to you?

You know what? I’m going to start doing this. I‘m not going to wait for some fancy dinner reservation. I’m just going to ask my co-workers, friends and family what I do that annoys them. Actually, I already know what annoys my family. They tell me all the time. But I’m not sure about my friends and co-workers. Hmm.

Well that’s it!

The three things I wanted to reinforce for you are the significance of self-awareness, which includes the long list of different ways it can benefit you; the definition of self-awareness, along with the helpful 2×2 framework that distinguishes between low and high internal and external self-awareness; and two ways to boost your self-awareness. To boost your self-awareness, ask yourself the three questions: What went well today? What didn’t go so well? How can I be better tomorrow? And, of course, there’s the Dinner of Truth.

Thanks again to Tasha. Tasha, I can’t wait to read your next book, SHATTERPROOF, and interview you again. You can connect with Tasha through her coordinates in the show notes. My coordinates are there too, so please connect with me anytime. Check out the TalkAboutTalk.com website or send me a DM on LinkedIn. I love hearing from you.

Talk soon!

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