Hello everyone. Welcome to Improve Your Thinking. I’m your host Kevin Browne and today I want to talk a little about insight. It’s something we all think we have into our own thoughts and feelings. But, as Tasha Eurich argues in her book titled Insight this is not necessarily the case.
In fact, only a few people are born with the natural disposition for self-awareness. Interestingly, these people are not able to offer many insights into how they can maintain this ability so researchers have tended to focus on discovering the elements of self-awareness by looking at people who became self-aware by overcoming their lack of self-awareness. Most people tend to think that as they grow older they gain more self-awareness. As with many of our intuitions about our own thinking, this too turns out to be false. As Dr. Eurich puts it, “In the absence of a committed effort to build self-awareness, the average person makes only meager gains as they grow older.” There are two factors involved in self-awareness: internal and external. To be truly self-aware we not only need a deep understanding of our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors but also how people see us, which can often be quite different than how we see ourselves or how we think others see us. There are several impediments to becoming self-aware. Our brains tend to work by making thinking easier and allowing us to use a variety of shortcuts to streamline our thinking. While this often works well when dealing with complex situations or situations which repeat and are predictable, it often creates impediments to becoming self-aware. Three major impediments to self-awareness include knowledge blindness, emotion blindness, and behavior blindness. Knowledge blindness is very similar to the idea of the knowledge illusion I discussed in a previous episode. As Dr. Eurich puts it, “the opinions we have about our abilities in specific situations are based less on how we perform and more on the general beliefs we have about ourselves and our underlying abilities. In short, we think we know more than we do and that belief colors our perception of how well we will do at a given task. What’s worse, the more expertise we think we have, the more harmful knowledge blindness can be. You may be familiar with this idea which is related to the Dunning-Kruger effect which states that the least component people tend to be the most confident in their abilities. At heart, this is a problem of lack of self-awareness. In this case, the self-awareness to recognize what we don’t know. It’s no better when we turn our attention to emotions. In fact, we are often just as poor about evaluating our own emotions as we are our knowledge. Dr. Eurich calls this second impediment to self awareness emotion blindness. The third impediment to self-awareness is behavior blindness which refers to our inability to see our own behavior clearly and objectively. To combat these impediments Dr. Eurich offers three suggestions. First, We need to identify our assumptions that we make about ourselves and the world around us. Second, keep learning especially in areas where we think we already know a lot. Third, we should seek feedback on our abilities and behaviors. Objective input from others can provide a correction to our biased and inaccurate self-assessment. As I read these points in her book I couldn’t help but be reminded of my own motto which I shared with you in my opening episode: To think like a philosopher you need to: Ask more questions. Demand better answers. And learn more than you think you need to know. Most people seek explanations for their problems in externals: other people, situations, environment, etc. Self-awareness requires considering the possibility that part of the problem is the person. Another common roadblock to self-awareness is what Dr. Eurich calls the “cult of self.” This relentless focus on self-esteem leads to less self-awareness as well as less satisfaction overall. To combat this she advises that you cultivate humility, a self-acceptance that entails “understanding our objective reality and choosing to like ourselves anyway,” and better monitoring of one’s inner dialogue. There are ways to increase self-awareness but they are often obscured by several myths regarding introspection and self-awareness. “The assumption that introspection begets self-awareness is a myth. The problem with introspection, it turns out, isn’t that it’s categorically ineffective, but that many people are doing it completely wrong. introspection to access our unconscious is ineffective since our unconscious “is less like a padlocked door and more like a hermetically sealed vault.” A better approach focuses less on the process of introspection and more on the outcome of insight focusing on what we can learn and how to move forward. Much of introspection involves asking why and trying to find the causes for our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This does not often lead to accurate results and can instead lead to endless rumination. A better approach is to ask “What?” instead of “Why?” She provides an example of this in the book. “Let’s say you’re in a terrible mood after work one day. We already know that asking Why do I feel this way? should come with a warning label. It’s likely to elicit such unhelpful answers as “because I hate Mondays!” or “because I’m just a negative person.” What if you instead asked What am I feeling right now? Perhaps you’d realize that you’re overwhelmed at work, exhausted, and hungry. Rather than blindly reacting to these feelings you take a step back, decide to fix yourself dinner, call a friend for some advice about how to manage your work stress, and commit to an early bedtime.” Asking "What"instead of "Why" forces us to name our emotions which research shows is effective. Other benefits to this approach include the fact that Why questions draw us to our limitations; What questions help us see our potential. Why questions stir up negative emotions; what questions keep us curious. Why questions trap us in our past; what questions help us create a better future. So, we aren’t as self-aware as we think we are but there are steps we can take to improve our own insight. Some of these tools to increase self-awareness include mindfulness, reflecting on your life as a biography, and focusing on solutions which she elaborates on in the book. An interesting philosophical example of introspection at work can be seen in the work of 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes. His Meditations on First Philosophy illustrates how we arrived at his philosophical insights through reflecting on his own mental processes. It’s interesting to read his work in light of Dr. Eurich’s findings on insight. One thing seems clear from both Descartes’ work and Dr. Eurich’s book. You can’t really gain insight into how the world works if you rely only on your own thoughts and feelings. You need something more objective to appeal to. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put it in his book Philosophical Investigations, “an inner process stands in need of outward criteria.” To understand what’s going on inside your own head, you’ve got to get outside your own head sometimes. If you’ve enjoyed this episode I hope you’ll subscribe to the podcast and visit me online at kevinjbrowne.com. Thank you for listening and I’ll see you on the next episode.
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July 2022
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