Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

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.” 2He 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. 3Those 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 workers — computer scientists, auditors and the like — at 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. 6In 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.