Self-awareness is two different abilities wearing one word, and most people are better at the one they can practise alone. Eurich’s research separates internal self-awareness, a clear view of your own values and reactions, from external self-awareness, an accurate view of how you come across, and found the two barely correlate. [eurich-2018-selfawareness] This guide covers why the popular route to it does not work, and what does.
The two kinds, and why that matters
Internal self-awareness is what most people mean by the term: knowing what you value, what you react to, and what you actually want rather than what you are supposed to want. It is built alone, through attention and writing and time.
External self-awareness is knowing how you land. It cannot be built alone, because it is information about other people’s experience of you and you have no access to that from inside. This is the half that gets neglected, and neglecting it produces a recognisable person: thoughtful, reflective, considerable insight into their own history, and no idea that they interrupt.
Being strong in one predicts very little about the other. That is the finding that makes the distinction worth keeping, because a great deal of self-development work addresses only the first and is then surprised by feedback.
The gap between how much people think they have and how much they have
The headline result in this area is a gap. A large majority of people rate themselves as self-aware; a small minority meet reasonable criteria on both dimensions. That is uncomfortable in a specific way, because reading it does not exempt you from it.
The reason the gap can persist is structural rather than a failure of effort. Internal self-awareness generates a feeling of insight, and that feeling is what people use to judge whether they have it. External self-awareness generates no feeling at all, because the information sits with other people and only arrives if somebody tells you. So the sense of being self-aware tracks the half you can do alone.
Why asking yourself “why” backfires
Nisbett and Wilson established something in 1977 that most self-help has not absorbed: people confidently report reasons for their own behaviour that demonstrably were not the causes. [nisbett-1977-telling] The reports are not lies. They are the mind’s best available account, produced without access to the process that actually did the work, and they feel exactly like knowing.
Applied to a feeling, “why am I so anxious about this meeting” is a request for a story, and one will be supplied. It will be coherent, it will fit what you already believe about yourself, and it will feel like insight. Whether it is true is a separate question the exercise cannot answer.
Worse, why questions tend to point backwards and downwards, toward what is wrong with you and where it started. That is the shape of rumination rather than reflection, and rumination is associated with worse mood rather than better. [nolen-hoeksema-2008-rethinking] Our guides to rumination and overthinking cover why that loop is so convincing from inside, and our pillar on self-worth covers what it tends to do to how you see yourself.
What questions work instead
Swap the question word. What am I feeling right now, what happened in the ten minutes before it started, what do I want to do about it, and what would I tell someone else in this position are all answerable from evidence you actually have.
The difference is not cosmetic. What questions point at observable things and terminate; why questions point at causes you cannot observe and generate narrative. One produces a fact you did not have, the other produces a story you already believed.
| Instead of | Ask |
|---|---|
| Why do I always do this? | What happened just before, the last three times? |
| Why am I like this? | What am I actually feeling, in plain words? |
| Why did they react that way? | What did I do, and what did they do next? |
| Why can I never stick at anything? | What did I stop doing first, and what was going on that week? |
Writing helps here for a specific reason rather than a general one: it slows the story down enough that you can see it is a story. Pennebaker’s work on expressive writing found benefits for writing about difficult experiences, and the versions that work describe what happened rather than circling what it means. [pennebaker-1997-writing] Our guide to journaling covers the practical forms.
Getting the half you cannot get alone
External self-awareness requires asking, and most attempts fail on how the question is put. “Do you think I come across badly?” invites reassurance, because that is the socially correct answer and the person can see you would rather hear it.
Three things make an honest answer easier to give. Ask about a specific situation rather than in general, because “how was I in that meeting” is answerable and “what am I like” is not. Ask what you could do differently rather than how you are doing, which turns a judgement into a suggestion. And ask a small number of people who have something to lose by lying to you, which usually means people who have already been honest about something uncomfortable.
Then the difficult part, which is receiving it without defending. Nothing suppresses future feedback faster than explaining why the feedback is wrong, and the explanation always feels reasonable at the time.
Five minutes of what, not why
Pick something that is bothering you. Write only what: what you are feeling in plain words, what happened immediately before it, what you did next, what you want to do now. If a sentence starts explaining why you are the way you are, stop it and go back to describing.
5:00
No conclusions and no diagnoses. You are collecting observations, not building a theory about yourself.
Notice whether you know something you did not know five minutes ago. If not, the question was probably a why in disguise.
When to speak to someone
Speak to a doctor if reflection has turned into something you cannot stop, if you spend long stretches going over the same events without getting anywhere, or if low mood or anxiety has persisted for more than a couple of weeks. Rumination that will not switch off is a symptom rather than a character trait, and it is treatable.
A therapist is also the most reliable source of external self-awareness most people ever get, which is an underrated reason to see one. It is somebody whose job is to notice what you do and say so, without the social cost that stops your friends from mentioning it.
How MyFreud can help
The gap between what you think sets you off and what actually does is exactly what a daily record closes. Tracking mood alongside what happened turns a theory about yourself into something you can check, which is the difference between the two kinds of self-awareness in miniature.