Dipping your toe in the pond of self-awareness: learning how to become more self-aware and developed into your best self.

Hello again, dear reader. In a few of our previous discussions, we have pontificated on manners on the importance of manners in the 21st century. In the physical world, as well as the technological one and the more I thought about the importance of manners and etiquette. The more I realized the only way to truly understand the importance of manners and etiquette in both the physical world and the digital one and appreciate their value is to be more self-aware. And I know we have touched on the importance of self-awareness and being in the moment. In a few previous discussions concerning leadership, and how to be a good politician or states person, but there was never really had an opportunity to pontificate on how to become more self-aware and the importance of being so. So I got for today's discussion, we would dip our toes briefly into the world of self-awareness and discussed the basic strategies and techniques for becoming more self-aware, because if more of humanity was truly self-aware than more of humanity would be the best version of itself...

They say the first step is admitting you have a problem, and that's true in every aspect of life. Self-awareness and introspection have the ring of a self-help guru's empty promises, but they are the starting point that leads to every improvement.

Self-Improvement Is Impossible Without Self-Awareness

Self-awareness (sometimes also referred to as self-knowledge or introspection) is about understanding your own needs, desires, failings, habits, and everything else that makes you tick. The more you know about yourself, the better you are at adapting life changes that suit your needs.

Of course, self-awareness is a big part of both therapy and philosophy. It's also the basis of the quantified self movement , which assumes that if you collect data about yourself you can make improvements based on that data. The New York Times breaks down the roots like so:

Socrates's ukase was "know thyself." Though it may come as a surprise to some philosophers, self-knowledge requires more than intellectual self-examination. It demands knowing something about your feelings. In my experience philosophers are, in general, not the most emotionally attuned individuals. Many are prone to treat the ebb and flow of feelings as though our passions were nothing but impediments to reason. Freud, more than the sage of Athens, grasped the moral importance of emotional self-transparency. Like the Greek tragedians but in language that did not require an ear for poetry, he reminded us of how difficult it is to own kinship with a whole range of emotions.

Essentially, the more you pay attention to your emotions and how you work, the better you'll understand why you do the things you do. The more you know about your own habits, the easier it is to improve on those habits. In most cases, this takes a little experimentation. Here's The New York Times again, talking about a self-awareness method called double-loop learning :

LESS common but vastly more effective is the cognitive approach that Professor Argyris called double-loop learning. In this mode we... question every aspect of our approach, including our methodology, biases and deeply held assumptions. This more psychologically nuanced self-examination requires that we honestly challenge our beliefs and summon the courage to act on that information, which may lead to fresh ways of thinking about our lives and our goals.

You can read every productivity tip out there , you can adapt the routines of geniuses , and you can eat up every piece of self-help that comes across the computer screen, but it's completely pointless if you don't know yourself well enough to put the correct advice into practice. For example: in college, I spent my time staying up late and working on papers until late in the night. My room was a mess, I didn't have a proper desk, and I spent more sleepless night than I can count. I felt terrible everyday and the papers I wrote were horrible. I thought I was a night person because it had that sense of "cool creative type" about it, but it obviously wasn't working for me.

Now, I can try all I want to work until 3 am with a messy desk, but it'll never make me more productive. At some point I realized I do best with a tidy workspace and early morning writing. It took me years to figure this out. I thought I was a night person because I never took the time to think about my own personality and try something different. Once I did, I never went back.

Self-Awareness Isn't a Magic Bullet, But It Is Step One

It's easy to fall for the idea that if you know yourself well enough you'll be able to fix all your problems, but that's not how it works. It's step one. Our minds are feeble and ripe with biases that color our decisions.

Self-image to the point where we don't notice our own failings.

To bring back my example, this was my problem with working at night. I saw myself as a night person and never even thought about trying to work in the mornings. I've had plenty of similar revelations over the years. It took a divorce for me to realize I wasn't as good at communication as I thought I was and countless experiments to try and figure out who I am . I still make plenty of mistakes and have no idea what I'm doing most of the time, but at least I know what time of day I work best.

Improve Your Self-Awareness with a Few Exercises

Knowing yourself completely is difficult, and it's impossible to solve for every single cognitive bias you have. But just because we suck at it doesn't mean we shouldn't try. You can't solve every problem in your life, but you can make some headway on minor changes. Here are a few ways of doing just that:

• Learn to look at yourself objectively: It's nearly impossible to actually look at yourself objectively, but it's always worth a shot. As we've talked about before , the main idea here is to study and criticize your decisions. Even better, find some trustworthy friends to talk with and listen to their criticisms.
• Write your own manifesto: The main purpose of self-awareness is self-improvement, so it makes sense that you need to have goals. If you're struggling with that part, a manifesto is a great way to push yourself into figuring out what you want.
• Keep a journal: As Kahneman noted above, our memory colors the past pretty deeply. If you want a more accurate gauge of yourself, a journal is a great way to get it . A journal makes you more aware of what you're doing and where problems might be coming from because you can document anything. If you spend time documenting the little things, like food intake, water intake, or sleep, you might notice a larger trend that you can correct for. If you're looking for a deeper understanding of your decision making skills, Harvard Business Review suggests writing down what you think will happen with a decision, then wait nine or ten months and review what you wrote.
• Perform a self-review: The self-review is one of those annoying little things we all do at work, but you can make them beneficial if you think of them more as a thought experiment. Instead of spending your time thinking about what you should improve about yourself, think about what you boss thinks you should do and what co-workers might say. This way, you can see yourself from someone else's perspective and gain a little extra insight into yourself.

It's important to remember that self-awareness is introspection, but it's not navel gazing. Self-absorption and overthinking doesn't get you anywhere, but being aware of your needs and acting on them can help you improve. You might not realize how often what you're doing doesn't correlate to what you want.

The five most important steps to self-awareness

as we have mentioned in a few of the previous discussions. You can’t be a good leader without self-awareness.
It lies at the root of strong character, giving us the ability to lead with a sense of purpose, authenticity, openness, and trust. It explains our successes and our failures. And by giving us a better understanding of who we are, self-awareness lets us better understand what we need most from other people, to complement our own deficiencies in leadership.
The question, then, is how can we cultivate and develop it further. There are many ways to do so. Below are five that I have found to work best:
Meditate. Yes, meditate. As most people know by now, meditation is the practice of improving your moment-by-moment awareness. Most forms of meditation begin with focusing on, and appreciating the simplicity of, inhaling and exhaling. But these don’t need to be formal or ritualistic — greater clarity can also come from regular moments of pause and reflection. Speaking personally, I try to gain greater awareness by simply finding a few seconds to focus on my breathing, often before sleep, and sometimes with one of the many apps available to help. During these meditations, I also ask myself a set of questions, among them:

• What am I trying to achieve?
• What am I doing that is working?
• What am I doing that is slowing me down?
• What can I do to change?

But the most frequent form of “meditation” I practice derives from carrying out seemingly mundane tasks that inspire a degree of therapeutic serenity, including washing dishes, working in my garden, and spending early Saturday mornings writing in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts as I wait for my son to be dismissed from his drawing class.
Write down your key plans and priorities. One of the best ways to increase self-awareness is to write down what you want to do and track your progress. Warren Buffet, for one, is known for carefully articulating the reasons he’s making an investment at the time he makes it. His journal entries serve as a historical record that helps him assess whether or not future outcomes can be attributable to sound judgment or just plain luck.
Li Lu, a co-leader of the Tienanmen Square student demonstration and today a highly respected investor, told me once about a practice he followed for years, inspired by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin kept a “balance sheet” of both the assets and liabilities of his personal traits. By plagiarizing any new strength he believed he could learn from someone else, and marking down any self-perceived weaknesses, he could better assess whether the “net worth” of his character was growing over time.
Take psychometric tests. In Heart, Smarts, Guts and Luck, my co-authors and I developed a simple “entrepreneurial aptitude test” in order to understand which traits readers were most likely to be biased in business-building and in life. Among the best known of these tests are Myers-Briggs and Predictive Index, but all are aimed as serving as a data point towards greater self-awareness. A common design point with all of them is that there are no particular right or wrong answers. Instead, they are designed to compel respondents to consider a set of traits or characteristics that most accurately describe them relative to other people. In our own version, (which can be taken at www.hsgl.com, and is free) we ask people to consider forced choices in paired question sets – e.g. Is your success best described by analytics or instincts? Are you more driven by passion or by action? Reflecting on forced trade-off questions such as these help test-takers better understand their own true characters.
Ask trusted friends. None of us is altogether aware of how we come across to others. We have to rely on the feedback of our peers, friends, and mentors. To have your friends play the role of honest mirror, let them know when you are seeking candid, critical, objective perspectives. Make your friend or colleague feel safe to give you an informal, but direct and honest view. This can mean saying something like, “Look, I am actually asking you as a friend, please just be straight with me on this matter. Okay?“
Another strategy is to ask friends to call you out when you are doing a behavior you already know you want to change. For instance, “Look, I know I am a ‘story-topper’ who needs to one-up every conversation, but do me a favor and each time I do that, let me know – preferably discreetly – so I can learn to stop.”
Get regular feedback at work. In addition to informally and periodically asking friends and family, use the formal processes and mechanisms at your workplace. If none are in place, see if you can implement more formal feedback loops. Provided it is done well, constructive, formalized feedback allows us to better see our own strengths and weaknesses. At my own venture capital firm, Cue Ball, we have begun encouraging entrepreneurial founders to institute a formal, annual 360-feedback process that provides feedback across multiple areas of competencies and work styles.
The key to effective formal feedback is to a) have a process, and b) have an effective manager of it. The latter either requires really good internal HR people, or bringing in outside facilitators and consultants. We’ve found the approach with external folks to be more effective at both small and large companies, because they come without the baggage of per-conceived biases or reporting lines. Once the feedback process is completed, it is important all involved to reflect on it by writing down their top takeaways. Note both any surprising strengths and any weaknesses or blind spots.
In the end, we all want self-awareness. Without it, one can never fully lead effectively. It’s only with self-awareness that one can journey closer to a state of “self-congruence” — in which what we say, think, and feel are consistent. Building self-awareness is a life-long effort. You’re never “done.” But these five pragmatic practices will help you move faster and further along the way.

As always thanks for listening, and there will be more to come soon guaranteed.