Introspection As A Superpower
Ask a room of leaders whether they are self-aware and every hand goes up. The research says most of those hands are wrong. Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich and her team found that while most people believe they are self-aware, only about 10-15% actually meet the criteria. Take the precision of that number with a grain of salt (measuring self-awareness is famously slippery) but the gap it points at matches what I see in coaching every week. That gap is not a character flaw. It is an untrained skill, and almost nobody trains it.
Some treat introspection as a luxury reserved only for people with quieter calendars. I would argue we have it backwards. The leaders I coach who make the best decisions are are almost always the ones who can tell you, in real time, what they are feeling, why it is showing up the way they are, and what it is about to make them do. More importantly, they do this because they have the drive to improve, not because they like beating themselves up. That is a practice, and I can assure you it is trainable, but itsn't a switch you can turn on.
Here is the part most people get wrong: more introspection is not automatically better introspection. Eurich's research found that people who ruminate on "why" questions - why did I react that way or why does this keep happening to me - often become less accurate about themselves, not more. The productive question is "what." What was I feeling in that meeting? What triggered it? What will I do the next time the trigger shows up?
Why questions send you into your own story. What questions send you on the search for evidence.
A practice that fits in ten minutes:
Once a week, answer three questions in writing or even out loud. (Talking to yourself is fine. It's fine.)
- What situation got the strongest reaction out of me this week? Reactions are data. The strong ones are flashing arrows pointing at triggers. Finding and naming those triggers is a critical step.
- What exactly did I do when I was in the room? In my head? Both count and since we often don't act out on our triggers, the mental arena is fair game. The room saw one version; you lived the other.
- What does that tell me to watch for next week? This is where the note becomes a plan. As with the Basement Use Case of our Strengths (CliftonStrengths), knowing what sets us off allows us to create strategies for stepping back (or up) in the moment.
Do it in writing if you can. Your memory is an unreliable narrator with a vested interest in your innocence. Paper keeps you honest.
Do this for a month and patterns surface that no amount of "in-the-moment" willpower would have shown you. Some examples of situations that get reactions:
- The reaction that always follows a certain kind of email.
- The person whose pushback you take personally for reasons that likely have nothing to do with them.
- The meetings you leave drained and the ones you leave sharp.
Sources:
https://hbr.org/2018/01/what-self-awareness-really-is-and-how-to-cultivate-it