Self-Awareness That Leads to Self-Confidence

You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.

—Albert Einstein

Once upon a time in ancient India, a thief running away from guards noticed a beggar sleeping in a dark alley. He secretly put the small but priceless piece of jewelry he had just stolen into the pocket of the beggar. He then ran away, intending to come back and steal from the beggar after he outran the guards. Overnight, the thief was accidentally killed during a struggle with the guards. The beggar was now a rich man. In his pocket, he had enough wealth to live comfortably for life, but he never once checked his own pocket, so he never knew. He lived the rest of his life as a beggar.

You never know what you will find when you look within—there may be hidden treasures.


Clarity

This chapter is about looking within ourselves. If the whole chapter can be encapsulated in a single word, that word is clarity. Deepening self-awareness is about developing clarity within oneself. There are two specific qualities we like to develop—resolution and vividness—as illustrated by the pictures above.

The picture on the right is different from the picture on the left in two ways. First, the resolution is higher, so we can see a lot more details. Second, there is more brightness and contrast, so we can see the image more vividly. The combination of resolution and vividness makes the image more useful to us. In the same way, the practices in this chapter will help us perceive our emotions more clearly in two ways. Firstly, we can increase the resolution (or precision) at which we perceive our emotions, so we can see emotions the moments they arise and cease, and subtle changes in between. Secondly, we increase their brightness and contrast so we can see them more vividly than before. This combination will give us very useful high-fidelity information about our emotional life.

About Self-Awareness

Daniel Goleman defines self-awareness as “knowing one’s internal states, preferences, resources and intuitions.”1 I like this description because it suggests that self-awareness goes beyond insight into one’s moment-to-moment emotional experience; it expands into a broader domain of “self,” such as understanding our own strengths and weaknesses and being able to access our own inner wisdom.

Self-awareness is the key domain of emotional intelligence that enables all the others. This is because self-awareness engages the neocortex (the thinking brain) in the process of emotion. Self-awareness maps onto areas of the thinking brain that have to do with self-focused attention and language, so when we are engaged in strong self-awareness, those areas of the brain light up, and that can mean the difference between screaming at some guy or being able to stop and tell yourself, “I cannot scream at that guy; he is the CEO!” Our engagement of the neocortex in every experience of emotion is a necessary step in gaining control over our emotional lives. Mingyur Rinpoche has a poetic metaphor for describing it, he says the moment you can see a raging river, it means you are already rising above it. Similarly, the moment you can see an emotion, you are no longer fully engulfed in it.


Self-Awareness Competencies

Daniel Goleman defines the concept of emotional competence as “a learned capability based on emotional intelligence that results in outstanding performance at work.”2 He suggests that there are three emotional competencies under the domain of self-awareness:


1. Emotional awareness: Recognizing one’s emotions and their effects

2. Accurate self-assessment: Knowing one’s strengths and limits

3. Self-confidence: A strong sense of one’s self-worth and capabilities

The key difference between emotional awareness and accurate self-assessment is that the former operates mostly at the level of physiology and the latter operates mostly at the level of meaning. Emotional awareness is my accurately perceiving emotions in my body, knowing where they come from, and understanding how they affect my behavior. Accurate self-assessment, in contrast, goes beyond the emotions I feel and includes knowledge into myself as a human being. It asks questions like: What are my strengths and weaknesses? What are my resources and limitations? What matters to me? Accurate self-assessment builds on emotional awareness.

Each of these three competencies is very useful at work and in life. We discussed in Chapter 1 how a strong emotional awareness, particularly in the body, enhances our access to our intuition. Emotional awareness also has direct implications on our self-motivation. We can best motivate ourselves by aligning what we do with our innermost values, and strong emotional awareness gives us conscious access to those values. We will explore this in more detail in Chapter 6 when we look into motivation.

Emotional awareness may even have a direct impact on the bottom line. For example, organizational psychologists Dr. Cary Cherniss and Dr. Robert Caplan reported that teaching emotional awareness skills to financial advisors at American Express Financial Advisors resulted in more revenue per advisor.3 Those financial advisors learned to identify their own emotional reactions in challenging situations and became more aware of unproductive self-talk that led to self-doubt and shame. Having that emotional awareness enabled them to employ coping strategies that eventually resulted in them becoming more effective at their work, earning more money for themselves, and presumably giving clients better financial advice. (Related: I taught my own financial advisor mindfulness meditation, and he thought I was just being nice.)

Accurate self-assessment is also referred to as “self-objectivity.” It is useful for everyone, but especially useful for managers. Quoting Daniel Goleman:


Among several hundred managers from twelve different organizations, Accurate Self-Assessment was the hallmark of superior performance.... Individuals with the Accurate Self-Assessment competence are aware of their abilities and limitations, seek out feedback and learn from their mistakes, and know where they need to improve and when to work with others who have complementary strengths. Accurate Self-Assessment was the competence found in virtually every “star performer” in a study of several hundred knowledge workerscomputer scientists, auditors and the likeat companies such as AT&T and 3M.... On 360-degree competence assessments, average performers typically overestimate their strengths, whereas star performers rarely do; if anything, the stars tended to underestimate their abilities, an indicator of high internal standards.4

Essentially, none of us is perfect, and accurate self-assessment helps us become successful despite our limitations.

Self-confidence is a powerful competency. Norman Fischer has a lovely description of true self-confidence:


Self-confidence isn’t egotism.... When you are truly self-confident, you are flexible with regard to ego: you can pick up ego when necessary, but you can also put it down when necessary in order to learn something completely new through listening. And if you find that you can’t put ego down, at least you know that this is so. You can admit it to yourself. If takes profound self-confidence to be humble enough to recognize your own limitations without self-blame.5

Now that we have walked through a couple of chapters together, we have become almost like old friends, so it is time I share a dirty little secret with you: I am actually a very shy person. In fact, when I was growing up, I was shy and socially awkward, befitting the stereotype of the geeky kid who everybody predicted would grow up to be a successful engineer. Today, as an adult, even though I am still very shy, I find myself able to project a quiet but unmistakable self-confidence, whether I am meeting world leaders like Barack Obama, speaking to a large audience, or dealing with a traffic police officer. I watched the video of myself speaking at the United Nations, and I was amazed how confident I appeared. Heck, if I didn’t already know the guy on that video, I would have thought him to be very cool.

I am able to project that confidence not because I make the effort to look confident, but because I have a sense of humor about my ego, or my own sense of self-importance. In most situations, when interacting with people, I let my ego become small, humble, and mostly irrelevant, while focusing on bringing kindness and benefit to whomever I am interacting with. At the same time, I let my ego grow to whatever size that allows me to be unintimidated by whomever I am interacting with, whether it is Bill Clinton, Natalie Portman, a traffic cop, or a large audience watching me on YouTube. In that sense, I think of self-confidence as the ability to be as big as Mount Fuji and as small as an insignificant grain of sand at the same time. I let my ego be simultaneously big and small, and I quietly laugh at its absurdity. That is a shy engineer’s secret to self-confidence.

Unsurprisingly, self-confidence also turns out to be very useful for work. There are many studies showing the importance of self-confidence in outstanding work performance. For example, one study by a well-known expert in emotional intelligence, Dr. Richard Boyatzis, shows self-confidence to be a distinguishing factor separating the best managers from the merely average ones.6 In fact, a large meta-analysis of 114 studies shows self-efficacy (a form of self-confidence) to correlate positively with work performance and suggests it may be even more effective than strategies like goal setting, which are widely known to improve work performance.7

From Emotional Awareness to Self-Confidence

An easy way to get an injection of self-confidence is to attend a motivational speech where some guy speaking perfect English without my funny accent shouts at you and tells you how great you are, “You can succeed! You are great! You can do it!” And everybody claps. And we all go home feeling great about ourselves, for three days, maybe. In my experience, however, the only highly sustainable source of self-confidence comes from deep self-knowledge and blatant self-honesty.

In my engineer’s mind, I think of it as understanding two important modes I operate in: my failure mode and my recovery mode. If I can understand a system so thoroughly I know exactly how it fails, I will also know when it will not fail. I can then have strong confidence in the system, despite knowing it is not perfect, because I know what to adjust for in each situation.

In addition, if I also know exactly how the system recovers after failure, I can be confident even when it fails because I know the conditions in which the system can come back quickly enough that the failure becomes inconsequential. Similarly, by understanding those things about my mind, my emotions, and my capability, I can gain confidence in myself despite my numerous failings and despite looking like I do.

I had an opportunity to put this to the test when I recently spoke at the World Peace Festival in Berlin. I was especially nervous about being on a closing plenary panel because all the other participants were ten times cooler than I was. They were a Nobel peace laureate, a government minister, a renowned philanthropist, and my friend Deepak Chopra, while I was just some guy from Google. I felt like a kid sitting at the adults’ table. Worse, I usually had to spend a lot of time preparing for public speaking because it took me conscious mental processing to properly articulate English words. It was challenging for me to be speaking and thinking at the same time. On this occasion, I had no idea what the panel moderator would ask me until literally one minute before the event began, so I could not adequately prepare.

Happily, my mindfulness training kicked in. First, I remembered to treat my ego with humor and let it be small enough that my “self” did not matter, but big enough that I felt perfectly comfortable speaking alongside a Nobel peace laureate at a peace conference as an equal. Then I remembered my strengths and limitations—for example, I knew I was an expert at wisdom practices in a corporate setting but knew nothing about creating national peace infrastructures, so I focused on adding value where I could contribute the most. I also reminded myself that my main strength was my ability to contribute to an atmosphere of peace and humor in a room, so I stayed in a meditative state of Joyful Mindfulness (see Chapter 3) as much as I could. Finally, I understood my most immediate failure mode, which was stumbling on English words while speaking, and my recovery mode strategy, which was to breathe deeply, smile, maintain mindfulness, and not let my occasional faltering bother me. Employing all these self-awareness–based strategies, I was able to maintain my confidence the entire time. I am glad I learned this stuff.

The type of deep self-knowledge and blatant self-honesty needed for sustainable self-confidence means having nothing to hide from oneself. It comes from accurate self-assessment. If we can assess ourselves accurately, we can clearly and objectively see our greatest strengths and our biggest weaknesses. We become honest to ourselves about our most sacred aspirations and darkest desires. We learn about our deepest priorities in life, what is important to us, and what is not important that we can let go. Eventually, we reach a point where we are comfortable in our own skins. There are no skeletons in our closets we do not already know about. There is nothing about ourselves we cannot deal with. This is the basis of self-confidence.

Accurate self-assessment, in turn, comes from strong emotional awareness. I think of it as receiving emotional data at a very high signal-to-noise ratio (that is, getting a clean signal). To strengthen our emotional awareness, we must carefully study our emotional experience. We are like a trainer studying a horse; the more we carefully observe the horse in different situations, the more we understand its tendencies and behaviors, and the more skillfully we can work with it. With that clarity, we create a space that allows us to view our own emotional lives as if seeing it as an objective third party. In other words, we gain objectivity, and we begin to perceive each emotional experience clearly and objectively as it is. This is the clean signal that creates the conditions for accurate self-assessment.

This suggests a simple linear relationship between the three emotional competencies of self-awareness—that strong emotional awareness leads to more accurate self-assessment, which in turn leads to higher self-confidence.


Developing Self-Awareness

Some things in life are so glaringly obvious, they are hidden in plain sight. An example is the similarity between self-awareness and mindfulness. Compare, for example, the definitions of each by two giants in their respective fields:


Self-awareness … is a neutral mode that maintains self-reflectiveness even in the midst of turbulent emotions.

Daniel Goleman8


Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.

Jon Kabat-Zinn9

They are essentially talking about the same thing! Self-awareness (as defined by Dan) is mindfulness (as defined by Jon). This was actually the key insight that led me to develop Search Inside Yourself. Being a practitioner myself, I already knew that mindfulness is trainable, and if self-awareness is essentially mindfulness, then self-awareness must also be trainable in similar ways. Eureka! It was this insight and following that line of inquiry that led my team and me to develop an entire curriculum for emotional intelligence.

The traditional analogy of this mind is a fluttering flag on a flagpole. The flag represents the mind. In the presence of strong emotions, the mind may be turbulent like a flag fluttering violently in the wind. The flagpole represents mindfulness—it keeps the mind steady and grounded despite all that emotional movement. This stability is what allows us to view ourselves with third-person objectivity.

Talking about the flag and the mind reminds me of a Zen joke. A large group of people gathered to listen to a talk by a Zen teacher. One guy in the audience got distracted by a fluttering flag and said, “Flag is moving.” Another guy said, “No, wind is moving.” The third guy, the wisest person in the audience said, “No, my friends, mind is moving.” A fourth guy, getting really annoyed, said, “Mouths are moving.”

Generic, plain vanilla mindfulness meditation alone can help you develop self-awareness. We feel, however, that formal practices can work even better, so we introduced two formal practices in our class, both based on mindfulness. The first one, Body Scan, functions at the level of physiology and works best for developing emotional awareness. The second, Journaling, functions at the level of meaning and works best for developing accurate self-assessment.

These two practices, by facilitating self-knowledge and self-honesty, also create the conditions for self-confidence.

Body Scan

In Chapter 1, we mentioned that emotion is a physiological experience, therefore the best way to create a high-resolution awareness of emotion is by applying mindfulness to the body. The simplest way to do it is to bring mindfulness to your body all the time. Every time you bring mindful attention to your body, you create conditions for neurological changes that allow you to become even more perceptive of your body, and consequently, of the process of emotion.

For those of you who like to do things systemically, there is a formal practice called body scan. It is one of the core practices in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s highly successful Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course. The practice itself is very simple: we just systematically bring moment-to-moment non-judging attention to different parts of our bodies, starting from the top of our head and moving down to the tips of our toes (or vice versa), noticing all sensation or lack of sensation. Remember that the important thing is attention, not sensation. Hence, it does not matter if you experience sensation or not, it only matters that you pay attention.

In MBSR, depending on the teacher, this practice can last for twenty to forty-five minutes. In Search Inside Yourself, the practice is shorter, concentrating only on parts of the body most involved in the experience of emotion. In addition, because Search Inside Yourself is primarily an emotional intelligence course, we also invite participants to experience their physiological correlates of emotion during the second half of the sitting.


BODY SCAN


Settling Attention

Let us begin by sitting comfortably for 2 minutes. Sit in a position that enables you to be both relaxed and alert at the same time, whatever that means to you.

Now, let us breathe naturally and bring very gentle attention to the breath. You can either bring attention to the nostrils, the abdomen, or the entire body of breath, whatever that means to you. Become aware of in breath, out breath, and space in between. Scan Body

Head

Now bring your attention to the top of your head, ears, and back of your head. Notice sensations, or lack of sensations, for 1 minute. Face

Now move your attention to your face. Your forehead, eyes, cheeks, nose, lips, mouth, and inside of your mouth (gums, tongue) for 1 minute. Neck and Shoulders

Move your attention to your neck, the inside of your throat, and your shoulders for 1 minute. Back

Move your attention to your lower back, mid back, and upper back for 1 minute. The back carries a lot of our load and stores a lot of our tension. So let us give our backs the kind and loving attention they deserve. Front

Now move your attention to the chest and stomach for 1 minute. If it is possible for you, try to bring attention to your internal organs, whatever that means to you. Entire Body at Once

And now, bring your attention to your entire body all at once for 1 minute. Scan for Emotion

Did you find any emotion in your body? If there is any, just notice its presence in the body. If not, just notice the absence of emotions, and catch one if it arises in the next 2 minutes. Positive Emotion

Let us now try to experience a positive emotion in the body.

Bring to mind a memory of a happy, joyous event or a time when you were optimal and productive or a time when you felt confident.

Experience the feeling of positive emotion. Now, bring your attention to your body. What does that positive emotion feel like in the body? In the face? Neck, chest, back? How are you breathing? Any difference in level of tension? Let us just experience it for 3 minutes. Returning to Grounding

Let us now return to the present. If you find an emotionally charged thought, just let it go.

Bring your attention to either your body or your breath, whichever your mind finds more stability in. And let’s just settle the mind there for 2 minutes.

(Long pause)

Thank you for your attention.


Notice that we only invite you to bring up a positive emotion in this exercise, not a negative one. We wait until the next chapter to do an exercise involving negative emotions because that is when we introduce tools for dealing with them. In class, we also do not want to ask our participants to bring up negative emotions without first introducing tools to manage them because doing so would upset our lawyers, and we like our lawyers.

I want to encourage everyone to try out the formal body scanning practice because it has many important benefits. First, it works better than just merely bringing mindfulness to day-to-day activities. The main reason is focus. When you are doing normal activities, you can likely only dedicate a small percentage of your attention to your body, unless you have a highly trained mind, like Thich Nhat Hanh does, or your activity involves devoting full attention to your body, as in competitive dancing, or you are Thich Nhat Hanh engaged in competitive dancing. In contrast, if you are doing nothing else but formal body scanning, you can focus far more of your attention to your body, and attention is what drives neurological change.

One of the participants in our Search Inside Yourself class is a manager called Jim. After a few weeks of practicing body scan, he told me, “I realized that I suppressed emotions into my body. That made me experience physical disablement that would frequently cause me to miss work. This practice has helped me come to work more frequently.” Jim has nine direct reports, so his practice benefited at least ten people at work. (“Jim” is not his real name, but I assure you he has a real body.)

“Scan your own body!”

A second benefit of body scan is it helps you sleep. I know that because in MBSR, participants practice body scan lying down, and in every class, at least one person ends up snoring (with everyone else thinking, “Stop snoring. I’m trying to meditate, damn it!”). I am not entirely sure why body scan is so conducive to sleep, but from my own experience, I can think of a few reasons. By bringing attention to the body, we are helping it relax. Very often, bodily tension builds up because we are not paying attention to the body, so the mere presence of attention corrects that problem. Also, body scan and other gentle, mindfulness-based exercises bring the mind to rest. So body scan relaxes both the body and the mind, and if you do it lying down, it is easy to fall asleep. If you have problems sleeping, this might help you.


Journaling

Journaling is the practice of self-discovery by writing to yourself. It is an important exercise to help you discover what is in your mind that is not in a clear, conscious view. Usually, when we write, we are trying to communicate a thought with another person. This exercise is different. You’re not trying to communicate with somebody else. Instead, you are trying to let your thoughts flow onto paper so you can see what comes up.

The exercise itself is very simple. You give yourself a certain amount of time, say, three minutes, and you are given (or you give yourself) a prompt, which for our purposes is an open-ended sentence such as “What I am feeling now is…” For those three minutes, write down whatever comes to mind. You may write about the prompt, or you may write about anything else that comes to mind. Try not to think about what you’re going to write—just write. It does not matter how closely you follow the prompt; just let all your thoughts flow onto the paper. There is only one rule: do not stop writing until your time is up. If you run out of things to write, just write, I ran out of things to write. I have nothing to write. I still have nothing to write.... until you have something to write about again. Remember, you are writing to yourself, for yourself, and you will never have to show this to another person unless you want to. Hence, you can do this with full honesty.

You can think of journaling as mindfulness of thoughts and emotions; paying moment-to-moment, non-judging attention to thoughts and emotions as they arise; and facilitating their flow by putting them on paper. There are a couple other ways of looking at it. My engineer’s way of looking at it is an unfiltered brain dump—dumping your mind-stream onto paper. A more poetic way of looking at it is seeing your thoughts as a gently flowing stream and trying to capture that flow on paper.

This practice is so simple, you may wonder if it does anything useful at all. I wondered the same thing the first time Norman Fischer explained it to me, but the research blew my mind. A study by Stefanie Spera, Eric Buhrfeind, and James Pennebaker had a group of laid-off professionals write to themselves about their feelings for five consecutive days for twenty minutes each day.10 These people found new jobs at a much higher rate than the people in the non-writing control group. After eight months, 68.4 percent of them found jobs, versus 27.3 percent from the control group. Those numbers just blew my mind. Usually, if an intervention can make a difference of a few percentage points, you can publish a paper. But here, we are not talking about 3 percentage points. We are talking about more than 40 percentage points! And all it took was one hundred minutes of intervention. Oh, wow.

How much journaling do you have to do before you experience a measurable change? Quoting an article that appeared on March 2, 2009, on the Very Short List (VSL): Science website:11


Twenty years ago, University of Texas psychologist James Pennebaker concluded that students who wrote about their most meaningful personal experiences for 15 minutes a day several days in a row felt better, had healthier blood work, and got higher grades in school. But a new study from the University of Missouri shows that a few minutes of writing will also suffice.

Researchers asked 49 college students to take two minutes on two consecutive days and write about something they found to be emotionally significant. The participants registered immediate improvements in mood and performed better on standardized measures of physiological well-being. An extended inward look isn’t necessary, the study concludes; merely “broaching the topic on one day and briefly exploring it the next” is enough to put things in perspective.

Four minutes can make a measurable difference. That exploding sound is the sound of my mind being blown.

One fun way of having a daily journaling practice is to write a different prompt on each piece of paper, put them all in a fishbowl (a dry one, I recommend), then pick out one or two at random each day. Here are some suggested prompts:


• What I am feeling now is…

• I am aware that…

• What motivates me is…

• I am inspired by…

• Today, I aspire to…

• What hurts me is…

• I wish…

• Others are…

• I made a happy mistake…

• Love is…

Here are instructions for the accurate self-assessment exercise. Notice that in addition to the usual journaling, we also added a primer to open your mind into a frame conducive to this exercise.


JOURNALING FOR SELF-ASSESSMENT


Prime

Before we begin journaling, let’s prime the mind.

Let’s spend 2 minutes thinking about one or more instances in which you responded positively to a challenging situation and the outcome was very satisfying to you. You felt you did great. If you are considering more than one instance, think about whether any connections or patterns are emerging.

Now, let’s take a moment to relax mentally.

(30-second pause) Journal

Prompts (2 minutes per prompt):

• Things that give me pleasure are…

• My strengths are…

Prime

Now let’s spend 2 minutes thinking about one or more instances in which you responded negatively to a challenging situation and the outcome was very unsatisfying to you. You felt that you performed badly, and you wish there were something you could change. If you are considering more than one instance, think about whether any connections or patterns are emerging.

Now, let’s take a moment to relax mentally.

(30-second pause) Journal

Prompts (2 minutes per prompt):

• Things that annoy me are…

• My weaknesses are…

Take a few minutes to read what you wrote to yourself.



My Emotions Are Not Me

As we deepen our self-awareness, we eventually arrive at a very important key insight: we are not our emotions.

We usually think of our emotions as being us. This is reflected in the language we use to describe them. For example, we say, “I am angry” or “I am happy” or “I am sad,” as if anger, happiness, or sadness are us, or become who we are. To the mind, our emotions become our very existence.

With enough mindfulness practice, you may eventually notice a subtle but important shift—you may begin to feel that emotions are simply what you feel, not who you are. Emotions go from being existential (“I am”) to experiential (“I feel”). With even more mindfulness practice, there may be another subtle but important shift—you may begin to see emotions simply as physiological phenomena. Emotions become what we experience in the body, so we go from “I am angry” to “I experience anger in my body.”

This subtle shift is extremely important because it suggests the possibility of mastery over our emotions. If my emotions are who I am, then there is very little I can do about it. However, if emotions are simply what I experience in my body, then feeling angry becomes a lot like feeling pain in my shoulders after an extreme workout; both are just physiological experiences over which I have influence. I can soothe them. I can ignore them and go get some ice cream, knowing I will feel better in a few hours. I can experience them mindfully. Fundamentally, I can act on them because they are not my core being.

In meditative traditions, we have a beautiful metaphor for this insight. Thoughts and emotions are like clouds—some beautiful, some dark—while our core being is like the sky. Clouds are not the sky; they are phenomena in the sky that come and go. Similarly, thoughts and emotions are not who we are; they are simply phenomena in mind and body that come and go.

Possessing this insight, one creates the possibility of change within oneself.

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