Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist, researcher, and New York Times bestselling author. As Principal of The Eurich Group, she uses science to help successful executives achieve dramatic personal and organizational change. Globally recognized as the top self-awareness coach and organizational culture expert, her clients include Google, the NBA, IBM, and the White House Leadership Development Program.
Eurich has written two books: Bankable Leadership, which debuted at #8 on The New York Times bestseller list, and Insight, which famed Wharton professor Adam Grant calls one of the three books he recommends most often. Her work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and her TEDx talks have been viewed more than seven million times.
1) In your TEDx video, Increase Your Self-awareness with One Simple Fix, you discuss how “what” questions are better suited than “why” questions when it comes to evolving our self-awareness. Why is this the case? And, are there any tips on ensuring you bias your “internal interviewer” toward “what” questions?
In our multi-year self-awareness research program, there were a couple of surprises that were so big, they actually caused me to rethink how I see self-awareness. The first one was probably the biggest. I did a pretty simple study where I assumed that people who spent more time self-reflecting or introspecting would not only be more self-aware, but they would be better off. They would be happier, more in control, less anxious, and less depressed. I collected data from about 300 people, and research showed that the more people self-reflected, the less self-aware they tended to be. So specifically, they were more anxious, more stressed, and felt less in control of their lives. They were less satisfied with their jobs and their relationships. As I dug into this, I was wondering, gosh, is self-reflection even helpful?
That then became the question: is self-awareness even helpful? What I discovered was, other researchers had kind of stumbled upon this truth in the past (although it wasn’t really that well-publicized). What we found is it is not that introspection is necessarily wrong or ineffective, but that people tend to do it incorrectly. Many people do it fundamentally because of an incorrect assumption that, “If I try hard enough, or if I ask myself the right question, I can unearth my subconscious or unconscious thoughts, feelings, motives. Somehow, I can find out why I am the way that I am.” What we discovered when we looked at people who really made the dramatic improvements in their self-awareness was that they were actually not asking themselves these types of questions. They weren’t asking questions to understand and unearth their unconscious.
So, what we found out—as much as Sigmund Freud wrongly told us this was the case—we cannot access many of those things that we think are just beneath the surface. Our unconscious is not a door, it’s more like a padlocked vault. So, what happens when we ask ourselves these really deep, probing questions about why we are the way we are, is that we usually settle on an answer that feels right, but is wrong. In turn, this can lead to self-criticism or make us more self-conscious. So, the very short story here is that we can make a different choice when we introspect, one that can get us to insight.
So instead of asking yourself questions like, “Why am I the way that I am?” Or “Why did I get in a fight with my significant other about how to load the dishwasher?” Or “Why didn’t I get that promotion?” We slightly change the question to start with ‘what.’ This shift leads to more insight. We might say, “What about my behavior contributed to that argument with my significant other?” Or “What can I learn from this experience of not getting that promotion that will help me in the future?” It is a very small shift, but it is powerful and has a very big impact. And changing the questions we asked ourselves not only produces insights but can make us happier and more fulfilled.
2) In your book Insight, one of the seven insights you discuss is ‘fit,’ which I’ve come to understand as the awareness one has about the way their environment and surroundings support them. What are some initial steps someone can take to heighten this awareness and use the ensuing insights to improve their energy and well-being?
Great question. Understanding where we fit is understanding the surroundings that we require to be happy, engaged, and fulfilled. If we have that insight, it can guide us in making better minor and major decisions. So, everything from, “What should I focus on in my to-do list today?” Or “What city should I live in?” Or “What career is going to make me happy?”
The first thing that someone who wanted to better understand that element of self-awareness might ask is, “what are the situations where I feel like I’ve performed at my best? And, what were the characteristics of those settings?” For me, for example, if I look at my time working for Fortune 500 companies (before going off on my own), it was something as simple as realizing that I can’t think straight in an open concept environment. Knowing that bit of insight, that I am not able to focus and perform at my best when there’s distraction all around me, was helpful. So, even something as simple as that insight can help us alter our environment in a positive way.
There’s another element of this where, especially if somebody is newer in their career, and they don’t have a ton of work experience per se, is thinking about how they thrived in school. For example, what types of learning approaches or classroom settings helped them perform at their best? Did they get the most out of group activity? Or did they do the best job when they were practicing a new skill?
That’s another way to say, “How can I make better decisions about how I am interacting with my world and the environment I’m choosing to put myself in?” The opposite of all of this can also be helpful. Think about, “Have you ever left a job because the environment wasn’t right for you? Or, if you had to describe your nightmare environment, what would that look like?” One last essential part of our environment is the people that surround it.
There is a term, energy vampires, meaning people that take away our energy rather than give it to us. So that’s another question somebody could ask themself, “What are the types of people that give me energy, versus take it away? How do I create an environment where my surroundings, including the people I choose to spend time with, are generative and not depleting?”
3) A construct also discussed in Insight is the Cult of Self—our current state of conditioning that somehow superiority should play a motivating role in defining our self-worth. In an era where much of our lives are on display, how do we safeguard ourselves from succumbing to the cult?
One of the most powerful antidotes to the cult itself is to cultivate a sense of humility. There are two ways that the cult itself can tempt us. One is in the real-life interactions we have with other people, and the other is things we’re doing online—on social media, more specifically.
Starting with social media, research has shown that there are two general types of people on social media. About 70% of the population are what researchers who discovered this call meformers. Meformers exist on social media with the sole purpose of telling everyone how awesome they are, or what they did today, or if it’s their child’s fifth and a half birthday, really just kind of using social media with a ‘pieces of me’ megaphone.
That’s the essence of the cult itself online. It’s this idea that “I am so special, that everyone should know what I ate for breakfast.” The alternative to that—and something that we found in our research of highly self-aware people—are informers. Informers have a different philosophy. Interestingly, they actually spend more time on social media than the average person, but instead of the meformers, informers focus on showing up virtually to inspire, connect, or entertain other people. So some of our research subjects say things like, “I love being on social media, catching up with all my friends and seeing what they’re doing, and posting beautiful nature photos I took because someone might look at them and they feel calm.”
The insight offered there is the next time you’re going to post something on social media, ask yourself, “What am I trying to accomplish here?” “Am I using social media as a me-megaphone, or am I genuinely trying to make a connection?” To be clear, it’s not necessarily ‘wrong’ to be an informer, but I think the process for fighting the cult is to develop an awareness of when you may be unwittingly showing up as a meformer versus consciously making a different decision.
In the in-real-life piece, something interesting has happened to all of us in the last year. Most people have had more time alone with themselves than they ever wanted. They’ve stared at themselves on video conferencing software nonstop, so there’s this new level of self-focus that I think a lot of us have developed. It’s not necessarily good or bad; I think it just sort of is.
But especially as we start to reintegrate into a world with other people, I think we can all be reminded that we are truly not the center of the universe. Humility is operationalized by, for example, not making every conversation about you. It’s operationalized by trying to understand someone else’s viewpoint before you put forward your own. Becoming aware of this will actually help us become more connected and fulfilled. One thing I feel really confident stating is that the more we belong to the cult itself, the less truly connected with other people we are. So, even if you’re not looking at humility as an antidote to the cult itself, I think you can look at it as an express route back to the connection that you miss so much.
4) In your work, you’ve concluded that successful introspection comes from having a flexible mindset. What are some strategies to develop this skill to improve the value of being introspective?
This is a fascinating area of research by researcher Omer Faruk Simsek. What he discovered is, the need for absolute truth about ourselves is an enemy of insight. The reason is, when we seek absolute truth, it blinds us to the complexity and the contradiction and the nuances that are inherent. So, the more we try to figure out the answer for anything, it is closing us off to kind of a more complex, multifaceted understanding of ourselves. So the first step is to really let it go … let the expectation that you need to figure yourself once and for all out … just roll that out the window, take that pressure off yourself.
Think about the journey of self-awareness as being insanely incremental. What I mean by that is, when we looked at the people who were arguably the most self-aware people we could find, all over the world, they had this paradox in the way they thought about self-awareness. They weren’t expecting, for example, to wake up one day and just have this complete, game-changing insight, and all be well. They were just slowly chipping away. They were saying things like, “Oh, huh, that’s interesting; my colleague told me that my presentation to the client was the best one I’ve ever done. I wonder what I can learn from that.” Or, “Oh, I’m feeling so tired at the end of the day today. What did I do that’s making me so tired?”
What’s really beautiful about that is sufficient, it is incremental, and ultimately it’s more sustainable. I think if we just let the idea go that self-awareness has to be a huge project and really think about it as a lifelong series of baby steps. Empirically and scientifically, that’s how the most self-aware people get there. Also, they are comfortable with the discomfort; when contradictions arise, they acknowledge them as part of the process.
5) In your article for The Muse, “Here’s Why You Should Journal (Just Not Every Day),” you assert that insight happens from the practice of journaling when we are able to effectively process our feelings and thoughts through the act of writing. So, what are things to keep in mind to make the most out of journaling? And, what pitfalls should we avoid (including why we should avoid the practice every day)?
By writing in a journal every day, you risk a kind of navel-gazing or cycle of self-pity. A better approach may be, instead, to stand back at a pivotal moment—for instance, you are making a decision, or you’ve got something big that you want to figure out—and use journaling as more of an event-based methodology rather than a habitual one.
The second thing I’d offer is to make sure that you are evaluating things as part of the journaling process—especially if it’s a socially related item that you’re exploring. Make sure that you’re not only introspective but using the time to explore different potential perspectives other than your own.
So, if you want to deepen your relationship with someone, a great journaling exercise would be writing about a situation you had with them from their perspective. We have found that those with a high level of self-awareness commonly use this journaling technique given its effectiveness for deeper insight.
