The Self-Awareness Spectrum Turning Vulnerability into Strength
“‘Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” CG Jung Self awareness has been described as the meta skill of the 21st century. Tasha Eurich wrote about this in her book ‘Insight,’ and offers a fascinating perspective into the power of self-awareness. It prompted me to write about the spectrum of self-awareness and how we can take a vulnerability in our business and turn it into a game changing strength. Self-Awareness and why it matters Last week I had the chance to listen to a panel of Private Equity fund managers discuss their approach to running and investing their funds. If you’re unfamiliar with Private Equity, think of it like this: I have a pool of money (hundreds of millions of dollars) that I need to invest into small or medium-sized businesses. My goal is to use this equity infusion to help these businesses grow in value so that when I exit as a partner, we do so for a business worth much more than it was when I invested. My ‘fund’ represents the 8-15 businesses I will invest equity into from the pool of money I have to work with. One of the best takeaways I had from the panel discussion came from what a manager said about good ownership vs a good business. Specifically, he said, ‘I’ll take good ownership over a good business.’ When pressed further he elaborated and said, there’s plenty of good businesses with bad ownership and for us, I’d rather have a bad business with good ownership than a good business with bad ownership. The takeaway being that the quality of ownership is of much higher importance to a business’s valuation today and in the future than the quality of the business itself! It drives home just how important it is for an owner to invest consistently into themselves and not just into their business. One of the best investments into ourselves is into a greater understanding of our own self-awareness making one of the most meaningful skills an owner can have into a strength. What is self-awareness? Self-awareness needs to be broken down into two dimensions: internal and external. Internal self-awareness is an understanding of my own behaviors, reactions, and responses. It’s what most of us think about when we think about self-awareness. External self-awareness is an understanding of how others perceive me. External self-awareness is less well known but an equally critical element of self-awareness for a business owner today. It’s considered a meta skill because it deeply influences a MASSIVE array of business abilities from decision-making to leadership to relationships with employees, customers, constituents, and stakeholders. While we could work on any of these individual skills directly, by investing our time and working on our self-awareness we can work on a skill that underlies all of these other skills, thus leveling up our development exponentially and gaining some real productivity by doing so. As a business owner, self-awareness plays an even greater role when we consider that self-awareness is crucial to understanding our own strengths and weaknesses allowing us to navigate challenging situations adeptly. It plays an integral role in our strategic decision making and it strengthens and empowers the entire organization starting from the leadership team all the way down to the least seasoned employee. When taken together, I’m not sure there are many skills as important as self-awareness for a business owner to develop. Poor self-awareness is a vulnerability One of the great ironies in the world today is that for most of us, we often consider our greatest weaknesses our greatest strengths. In short, we all think we rock at self-awareness. Unfortunately, study after study proves this to be the exact opposite! 85% of us believe that we are self-aware, yet conversely, only 10-15% of us are. Why is it that so many of us think we’re self aware when we aren’t? It’s because it’s very difficult to know ourselves! Funny enough if you thought the answer were simply to be introspective, guess what? Those that spend more time on introspection tend to be even less self-aware than others. This is largely in part due to the fact that we have never been taught how to properly be introspective and we end up using confirmation bias to end up with the wrong conclusions steering us even further off track than if we had never put the time and energy into trying to become more self-aware. Poor self-awareness shows up as a vulnerability in businesses in many obvious ways and some less obvious ways as well. One of the more obvious ways it may influence us is through overconfidence or via self doubt. We have all met someone that is confident when they should not be. To be clear, I’m not discussing self-efficacy (the belief that I have capacity to do something), I’m discussing confidence (the belief that I can do something). Imagine being confident at playing tennis at a high level having never picked up a racket, yet some people really do believe they can compete with professionals or even amateurs with thousands of hours of practice racked up. An owner with overconfidence will jump into action without properly weighing their true ability to accomplish what they have set out to do. Likewise we have all met someone who expresses self doubt and deals with imposter syndrome even when they have proven to be more than capable and effective at the work that they do. People struggling with this may have symptoms they struggle with like overthinking and paralysis by analysis. In both instances, whether it’s overconfidence or self doubt, we can point the finger at poor internal self-awareness as a common culprit. Self-awareness can also be a vulnerability less obviously. Blindspots are common and often derive from poor self-awareness. One blindspot many people and owners have is misunderstanding how they come off to other people. An owner stretched for time, for example,