Self-awareness is the ability to see oneself truthfully and honestly – your personality traits, the motivations for your actions, habits, interests, and acknowledging how you are perceived by those around you.
Most importantly, self-awareness helps clarify your limitations and obligations to those you share your life with. Here is Part 2 on this subject.
The idiosyncratic rater effect
The idiosyncratic rater effect states that people are not good raters of others. Instead, how you rate others rests largely on your own personal, unconscious biases.
Author and business consultant Marcus Buckingham argues that this bias is why so many performance evaluations fail to motivate desired or intended improvements.
Evaluators are essentially rating performance as how they perceive it, not how performers actually are. Buckingham also claims that “most HR data is bad data” because of this bias.
When performance appraisers are called to assess others, their judgements of “quality”, “productivity”, “effectiveness”, and “promotability” are based on subjective evaluations of these performance metrics.
If you are in a role that requires you to evaluate and rate others’ performance, are you aware of how much of your personal subjectivities and past experiences are being projected onto your ratings?
The curse of knowledge
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker calls the curse of knowledge “the inability to imagine what it’s like to not know something you already know”.
The curse of knowledge bias states that those of us with an expert-level understanding of our subject matters often overlook the difficulties first-time learners face when approaching a new topic of study.
Experts, consultants and university lecturers with deep, technical and expert knowledge must ask themselves if they are aware of how they are seen, perceived by outsiders and non-experts.
Understanding one’s knowledge forms just one side of the self-awareness coin. Recognising how you are perceived by others and how best to convey your knowledge to your audience forms the other.
The bias blind spot
This is essentially the bias blind spot – others’ cognitive biases are more apparent to you than your own biases. It is essentially the flip side of the question you were asked at the start of this article.
Ask yourself now: How biased do you think you are relative to the average Malaysian?
Chances are, you will rate yourself as being less biased than your fellow Malaysians. Others are more biased, more likely to stereotype others, and harshly judge others. But not you.
Remedies for better introspection
These are four biases that are barriers in your efforts towards being more self-aware. Wikipedia lists 191 cognitive biases that affect your memory, social relationships and decision-making.
You can, fortunately, counter the effects of these biases and help yourself be more self-aware in two ways.
Ask ‘what’, not ‘why’
Analysing transcripts from her study, Eurich found that those who asked “why” questions were more likely to experience negative consequences.
Recall the last time you were asked to reflect on why something at work didn’t quite go to plan. “Why am I am experiencing so much conflict with this colleague? Why didn’t my sales team perform as expected during the last quarter? Why is my boss such a…?”
Eurich encourages people to instead to ask “what”. What are the personal factors causing this conflict between me and my colleagues? What didn’t my sales team do that could have led them to meeting targets? What might be causing my boss to act against me?
“Why” questions lure you into a myriad of possible explanations – none of which may necessarily be true or based on fact. “Why” questions increase your tendencies to second-guess, assume, and accuse.
“What” questions, conversely, challenge you to confront the facts and actual details of the situation. You obtain a clearer realisation of what is contributing to your experiences and benefit from a kind of introspection that fosters growth and improvement.
What did you realise from this article that can encourage more reflective, accurate introspection?
Cultivate intellectual humility and honesty
Recent psychological studies show that intellectually humble individuals are more likely to be better judges of their knowledge and limitations.
Intellectual humility is “the awareness of the limits of one’s knowledge and confidence in the knowledge that one possesses…[and] the mid-point between intellectual ignorance and intellectual arrogance”.
Researchers also found that individuals who were aware of their knowledge limitations were better learners, engaged in more reflective and open-minded thinking, and were generally more curious.
Being comfortable with the limits of one’s knowledge is essential towards better self-awareness and crucial in limiting how biases affect you.
Be honest with yourself when asking “what” questions. What don’t I know well about myself? What am I not learning well enough? What aspects of my job knowledge could really use an improvement?
It takes courage to admit your biases, ignorance, flaws, and lack of experience in your work and lives. And the doubt it generates on your abilities can be uncomfortable.
If you are to be truly self-aware, however, then honestly, courageously confronting your limitations is that non-negotiable first step.
This article first appeared in jobstore.com
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