Self-awareness: An Ingredient for Success
We would agree that almost everyone hope to achieve success in their lives. Success can have different meaning for everyone, but in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — most of us wish to have our needs fulfilled to some extent. For those above 20, the fulfillment of our needs might be influenced by our career as we invest most of our times in career. Therefore, a successful career could be what we’re looking for a successful life.
The road to success in career itself is a long process. For some, it starts from our early education, choosing a major and a university or an area of expertise outside of formal education, developing our skills, finding a suitable job, gaining experiences to maintaining excellence at what we’re doing. This process might seem like an easy linear process in a glance, but after we undergo it ourselves — we know that it is not as simple.
This leads to the question — what can we do to be more successful in those processes?
I believe that the answer lies in one necessary but often overlooked skill: self-awareness. A lot of research has shown how increased self-awareness can be useful, not only for our career but also for our everyday lives. It can even serve as a foundation for any other hard or soft skills required for greater success. However, it is unfortunate that many thinks that this skill not as crucial as education, experiences, credentials, hard skills, or other soft skills.
“I am already self-aware.”
At first I thought that I am too. I mean — how can one not know about themselves? Interestingly, findings by Tasha Eurich made me reconsider if I truly have this skill. With background in organizational psychology and as an executive coach, she conducted large scale scientific study of self-awareness with nearly 5,000 participants. The research finds that:
Most people believe that they are self-aware but estimation shows that only 10%–15% of the people actually fit self-awareness criteria.
This reminds me of my experience as a part of HR team in during which I see assessment results using self-report or by other-report method (managers, peers, subordinates, stakeholders, etc). Some results show that an individual think that their performance is exceptional while others see that it is very bad — or on the contrary, some people think that they are not good but others have positive feedback towards them. It’s true that we can’t always assess ourselves perfectly, but the discrepancies between how we see ourselves and how other people see us is able to show how aware we are of ourselves. So turns out, self-awareness might be a rarer quality than we previously expected — maybe it’s time to reassess our own self-awareness more objectively.
So, what is self-awareness?
According to Duval and Wicklund (in Morin, 2011), self-awareness can be defined as the capacity of becoming the object of one’s own attention where one actively identifies, processes, and stores information about the self. Eurich (2018) in her research found two categories of self-awareness. The first is internal self-awareness, knowing how we see ourselves — our values, passions, aspirations, fit with our environment, reactions (thoughts, feelings, behaviors, strengths, and weaknesses), and impact on others. The second one is external self-awareness, understanding how other people see us in terms of the aspects listed before.
There is no correlation between those two categories of self-awareness — which reflects that one can be high on one category but low on the other. Eurich (2018) further identifies four self-awareness archetypes. It is originally intended for leaders, but I believe that this archetype can show how both categories are equally important in our career.
If we dive deeper into each point of our lives, I think we can see how self-awareness can greatly benefit us. I’ll give some examples in the context of work.
- In job-seeking, companies in general would seek a candidate that fits to their company vision, culture, people, and needs. Therefore, knowing yourself and how others might see you might help you filter existing job vacancies so you can be more focused in applying at suitable companies. By predicting your compatibility, you can increase your chance of getting accepted. For the long term, this can possibly help you to avoid “suffering” due to intolerable differences (extremely different values, culture, passion, etc) with the company. Self-awareness can guide us in figuring out the best possible career path.
- Another important aspect in career is personal branding, activities where we share and promote about ourselves. Our values can be shown even more when we do branding clearly and consistently, showcasing your uniqueness. However, how can we delivery our branding effectively if we aren’t aware about ourselves? The same goes for other activities, such as when we create our resume or undergo an interview. We would be required to share about ourselves as relevant as possible — strengths, skills, achievements, motivation, personal cause, and so much more. So, quoting PwC’s Personal Brand Workbook, “People with strong brand are clear about who they are” — self-awareness is needed to help us know and showcase our value to the market.
- Next, we know that facing work challenges itself is also a part of our career. Stress, interpersonal conflicts, or unfortunately — toxic work culture can greatly affect our physical and mental health, affecting other life aspects as well over time. Without awareness of our own condition and how we are affected by our environment, we fail to realize that we need to manage stress, resolve conflicts, set boundaries, take some rest or do self-care activities. Contrarily, self-awareness is a recipe for self-regulation or self-management, both being aspects of emotional intelligence. Thus, self-awareness can help us in knowing how we can face work challenges effectively.
- As we go on in our career, maintaining and improving excellence at work is a must for every worker from all levels — even up to high-level company leaders. I believe that this can be done by knowing your strengths (that is effective and useful for your work) and utilizing it, while also knowing your weaknesses and biases (that is ineffective for your work) and learning how to overcome it. Self-awareness can be a great personal development tool that can enhance your work quality in parallel — which will also benefit everyone you work with.
In overall, Eurich (2018) found that internal self-awareness is correlated with higher job and relationship satisfaction, personal and social control, and happiness; negatively associated to anxiety, stress, and depression. On the other side, external self-awareness — knowing how others see us enable us to be more skillful at showing empathy and taking others’ perspectives. Leaders with the ability to see themselves as their employees do also tend to be seen as more effective — better relationship with their employees and greater employee satisfaction towards them.
By being genuinely self-aware, we are able to create achievable goals that are aligned with what we can do, make positive behavioral changes and eventually move us to higher personal success (Gallardo, 2019). That is why I trust that self-awareness is an ingredient to success. It starts at the core of who you are as a person and spreads to every aspect of your life. Quoting Carl Jung, “There is no cure and no improving of the world that does not begin with the individual himself.”
In the end, it is up to each one of us what skills we want to improve and who we’d like to be in life, but I’d like to suggest developing a true self-awareness continuously. See how it can benefit your life and watch how it supports other skills development.
If you are interested to learn how to cultivate your self-awareness, stay tuned — I will share about it in my next article. Until then, thank you for reading! If this article is insightful for you, please give it a clap and share it to your friends! Or if you have any feedback or opinions or maybe ideas for the next article, feel free to connect with me here or e-mail me at janicealberta@gmail.com and share your thoughts!
References
Eurich, T. (2018, January 4). What self-awareness really is (And how to cultivate it). Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2018/01/what-self-awareness-really-is-and-how-to-cultivate-it
Gallardo, L. (2019, September 3). The importance of self-awareness for improving well-being. Thrive Global. https://thriveglobal.com/stories/the-importance-of-self-awareness-for-improving-well-being/
Guber, P. (2015, May 7). Self-awareness is the most important skill for career success. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-were-22-self-awareness-most-important-skill-career-success-guber/
Morin, A. (2011). Self-awareness part 1: Definition, measures, effects, functions, and antecedents. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 5(10), 807–823. doi: 10.1111/j.1751–9004.2011.00387.x
PwC (n.d.). Personal Brand Workbook. https://www.pwc.com/c1/en/assets/downloads/personal_brand_workbook.pdf
Zenger, J. (2014, April 17). The singular secret for a leader’s success: Self-awareness. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackzenger/2014/04/17/the-singular-secret-for-a-leaders-success-self-awareness/#2591bea4cb71
