If you think self-awareness is important for happiness then you’ll want to read about these 5 great tips…

If you think self-awareness is important for happiness then you’ll want to read about these 5 great tips…

via Eric Barker

You probably know more than a few people who are just clueless about themselves.

They make the same errors over and over but never seem to notice. They think they’re great at stuff that, frankly, they’re terrible at. But that’s not the real problem…

The real problem is you’re one of them too. Hey, so am I. Humans just aren’t terribly self-aware creatures.

From Insight:

In one study of more than 13,000 professionals in financial services, technology, nursing, and more, researchers found almost no relationship between self-assessed performance and objective performance ratings.

Some people are probably shaking their head at me right now. They think they’re the exception. They think they know themselves pretty well…

If you don’t think you need to learn to be more self-aware, then you definitely need to learn to be more self-aware.

From Insight:

…the big catch-22 of self-awareness is that the people who need it most are usually the least likely to know they need it… When given the opportunity to purchase a discounted book on improving EQ, the students with the lowest scores— that is, those who most needed the book— were the least likely to buy it.

And self-awareness is a really good quality to have, almost across the board. What’s the research show?

From Insight:

There is strong scientific evidence that people who know themselves and how others see them are happier. They make smarter decisions. They have better personal and professional relationships. They raise more mature children. They’re smarter, superior students who choose better careers. They’re more creative, more confident, and better communicators. They’re less aggressive and less likely to lie, cheat, and steal. They’re better performers at work who get more promotions. They’re more effective leaders with more enthusiastic employees. They even lead more profitable companies… some research has even shown that self-awareness is the single greatest predictor of leadership success.

In my book, I point out that “know thyself” is the first step toward success in life. (I’m by no means the first person to say that, just the most recent.)

So what does Dr. Tasha Eurich, an organizational psychologist who has spent oodles of time studying the problem, have to say about how to really get to know yourself — and reap all those delicious benefits?

Let’s get to it…

1) Reflect Less, Notice More

Maybe you spend a lot of time thinking about what you’re really like and you think that’s given you some self-awareness. Wrong.

From Insight:

The act of thinking about ourselves wasn’t correlated with knowing ourselves. In fact, in a few cases, he found the opposite: the more time the participants spent in introspection, the less self-knowledge they had (yes, you read that right). In other words, we can spend endless amounts of time in self-reflection but emerge with no more self-insight than when we started.

If you really want to get to know yourself better, do it like a good researcher would: spend less time theorizing and more time collecting data points to see patterns and trends.

  • “After I exercise, I feel better about myself.”
  • “When I wake up early I get more done during the day.”
  • “When I put blogging off to the last minute, it’s hard for me to generate three examples of anything.”

Stop weaving elaborate theories and look to your behavior and the results.

(To learn more about the science of a successful life, check out my new book here.)

So you’re starting to see clear trends in what you do and how it makes you feel. Awesome. The next thing you usually do is ask yourself why that happens.

Umm, that’s a huge mistake, by the way…

…to read the full & original article, just click HERE