Sage Solutions
Advice and insight about personal growth, personal development, and becoming your best self.
Sage Solutions
Self Awareness
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You probably think you’re self-aware. Most of us do. But once you look at what self-awareness really means and what research says about how rare it actually is, it gets a lot harder to stay casual about your blind spots. David Sage and recurring co-host Hannah Sage dig into why self-awareness is not a static trait, but a living skill that updates moment by moment, especially when your emotions spike and your ego wants to take the wheel.
We break self-awareness into clear, usable parts: internal self-awareness (values, motives, emotions, self-talk) and external self-awareness (how people experience your tone, energy, and impact). We talk through why those two can be totally disconnected, drawing on Dr. Tasha Eurich’s work, and what that means for leaders, partners, and chronic people pleasers. We also explore in-the-moment awareness versus retrospective awareness, plus how personality tendencies like the Big Five shape what comes naturally and what takes deliberate practice.
Then we get practical. You’ll learn three proven tools for building emotional intelligence and closing the intention behavior gap: mindfulness and meditation, therapy, and journaling. We also share three simple daily habits you can start today: the two-word check-in to name feelings without a story, a no-defensiveness feedback loop to uncover blind spots, and a 60-second evening review to spot triggers before they repeat. We close with the nuance people skip: the difference between self-awareness and self-consciousness, and how over-monitoring can turn into analysis paralysis.
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The Sage Solutions Podcast and content posted by David Sage is presented solely for general informational, educational, and entertainment purposes. No coaching client relationship is formed by listening to this podcast. No Legal, Medical or Financial advice is being given. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast or website is at the user's own risk. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice, diagnosis, or treatment of a psychotherapist, physician, professional coach, Lawyer or other qualified professional. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical or mental health condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. The opinions of guests are their own and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of the podcast.
Why Self-Awareness Is The Foundation
SPEAKER_00Welcome to the Sage Solutions podcast, where we talk about all things personal growth, personal development, and becoming your best self. My name is David Sage, and I am a self-worth and confidence coach with Sage Coaching Solutions. I'm really glad that you're here today with me, because we're going down a path that looks incredibly familiar on the surface, but the moment that we actually step onto it, we realize how much of the map we've actually been misreading. Today we're joined by one of our recurring co-hosts, my wife, Hannah Sage.
SPEAKER_01Hello, fine people of the universe.
SPEAKER_00Now she has loads of amazing traits, but today's topic is actually one of the things I love and respect most about Hannah. Today, we're talking about self-awareness.
SPEAKER_01I probably have a little bit too much self-awareness, but we'll get into that.
SPEAKER_00When people talk about self-awareness, they phrase it like it's a line item on a resume, or like a badge you get after reading two books on emotional intelligence. We treat it like a box that we check, a static state of being where you just look into the mirror and say, Yep, I know exactly who that is. But the reality of living inside your own skin is a lot more fluid than that. Real self-awareness is less of a snapshot and more like a video feed that is constantly updating, changing, and honestly, sometimes getting pretty blurry. It's the absolute foundation of everything that we build in terms of personal growth, career progression, and our relationships. Everything rests on this single pillar. Because if you do not know where your feet are currently planted, any direction you choose to walk is just a wild guess. Self-awareness is one of the bedrock foundations of the self-worth and confidence coaching that I do. It is an absolute must. And my coaching would be wildly different if it wasn't included in it. It is how we figure out where we are so that we can go where we need to. It is absolutely essential for grounded, humble, true confidence.
SPEAKER_01Question for you. How quickly do you go into this topic with new clients? Is it something that gets brought up immediately? Or is it something that you kind of work your way into?
SPEAKER_00Great question. Some of that depends on the package and how long we are planning out the coaching. But just for an example, in a three-month coaching package, where in any given three-month period, there is actually 13 weeks, not 12. First, no matter what, if it's a new client, there's always like a, for lack of a better term, discovery session where I am explaining what I do and getting information from them. I also have them fill out an introductory coaching questionnaire so that I get all of the information that I need to help personalize the coaching to the individual. So it's a little different depending on the person, but in general, if after that intro kind of session they want to pursue coaching, then it comes in pretty heavily in about week three is usually when we start diving into self-awareness because once again, it is that foundation. We need to establish a certain level of self-awareness, which is often done through a lot of introspection and a lot of coaching questions. So I guess we're actually driving at self-awareness right away, but when it's really brought up as a topic is usually around week three.
SPEAKER_01Interesting. Okay. That was just a side quest thought that I had and wanted to ask you.
SPEAKER_00Okay, real quick, Hannah, I want you and the listener to follow along with me for a second here.
SPEAKER_01Rightio.
SPEAKER_00I want you to think about the last time that you had a massive reaction to something small.
SPEAKER_01This is pretty constant, I'll be honest with you. I think as most married women know, it comes up more often than you would hope, for sure.
SPEAKER_00No, I get it. Trust me, that happens to me too.
SPEAKER_01But I'm perfect.
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm. Yeah, I retract my statement earlier about perfect self-awareness. Also, it isn't perfect. Just to be clear, nobody has perfect self-awareness. It's actually truly humanly impossible to have perfect self-awareness because we can't fully view ourselves objectively. There are parts of our being that can only really be viewed accurately from the outside, which is actually one of the reasons why therapy and coaching are so helpful. Okay, but back to the thought experiment. So we're thinking about the last time that we had a massive reaction to something small. Maybe someone left a dish in the sink, or a colleague used a specific phrase in an email that just rubbed you the wrong way, and suddenly you felt this wave of heat in your chest. The surface event is microscopic. But the internal earthquake is like an 8.0 on the Richter scale. That gap between what actually happened and how we respond is a big portion of where today's conversation lives. We're gonna strip away the theory and look at what is happening under the hood when we look at ourselves honestly.
SPEAKER_01I like how you described the heat in your chest. When I'm thinking back to the example in my mind of this happening, I very much resonate with the fact that it feels like that tightness and heat in your chest and it kind of expands to the rest of your body. It almost makes you feel a little bit flabbergasted.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it like swells up.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, swells. That's a great word.
SPEAKER_00And I think the natural thing to do when that happens is to just immediately act on it. It usually comes up so fast that we don't even catch that this is happening. And we will get into this as we go through this podcast. And I think I'm getting a little ahead of myself
A Clear Definition Of Self-Awareness
SPEAKER_00here. We should probably slow down and start with what is self-awareness.
SPEAKER_01Merriam Webster's dictionary says, self-awareness is the conscious ability to recognize and understand your own thoughts, emotions, motives, and behaviors. It's expanded with it serves as the cornerstone of emotional intelligence, allowing you to see how your internal state influences your actions and how others perceive you.
SPEAKER_00It's what Socrates meant when he said things like, know thyself. And the unexamined life is not a life worth living. But the way that I think about self-awareness breaks down even further than the way the Webster's dictionary puts it, even though I it's actually a really good definition for obvious reasons. And I think it's helpful to break it down even further into subparts or different types of self-awareness. The primary split in self-awareness, the most psychologically validated division is a difference between internal self-awareness and external self-awareness. Internal self-awareness is the ability to clearly understand your own values, passions, thoughts, tendencies, and emotions. External self-awareness is the ability to accurately understand how you are perceived by others and how your behaviors impact them. I also think there's a big difference between in the moment self-awareness and retrospective self-awareness. In the moment self-awareness is your ability to, in the heat of the moment, in the thick of it, be aware of your internal and external self-awareness, your tendencies, how you are affecting other people, catching yourself when that swell wells up within you, your emotional intelligence, all the things that go into self-awareness, your ability to do that in the moment, as it's happening. Retrospective self-awareness is your ability to reflect back on an event and realize or be aware of your internal self-awareness in that moment in the past and your external self-awareness, how you impacted other people in that moment. I think some people are very strong at the first one, and others are very strong at the second. And I think those are both sort of separate skills that we can develop, whether you're weak at one or weak at the other. All of these things, self-awareness and its subtypes are skills that we can hone and develop and build just like a muscle. And then I guess the last kind of core parts to self-awareness, which are a little more peripheral, but I think they're worth adding, would be overall identity awareness. This is different than being aware of who you are in the moment, but retrospectively. This is looking over the past year and understanding your tendencies, your strengths, your weaknesses, who you are, your identity, your ego, your self-concept. And then the last one would be just a better understanding of overall human behavior. So if you have a better understanding of psychology or any of the other social sciences like economics, sociology, all of these things factor into how we act, and understanding of those things can also improve your self-awareness by understanding how all humans work or how humans in general work, a lot of those things are going to apply to you as well. A great example of this is understanding our cognitive biases. By understanding the cognitive biases, then when they pop up for you, you are more aware of them and more able to handle them. So internal self-awareness, external self-awareness, in the moment self-awareness, retrospective self-awareness, awareness of your overall self, your identity, who you are as a person, and awareness of human behavior in general. All of these contribute to our full self-awareness.
Internal Versus External Awareness
SPEAKER_01Do you think we could maybe go more into the internal versus external self-awareness?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for sure. I was planning on it.
SPEAKER_01Okay. So when I think about internal and the external awareness, my understanding, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding with internal, that's like being aware of your own everything.
SPEAKER_00I feel like it's what most people think of. It's being introspective. It's most of self-awareness. I think the definition of self-awareness expanded with the understanding of external self-awareness, but internal self-awareness is very much about you.
SPEAKER_01Right. Like where I excel at, where I need help in, what areas of myself need to be improved, that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's all your internal stuff. It's your thoughts, it's like everything going on inside of you. The external part is really just the mirror side. It shows how all of that affects the external world.
SPEAKER_01Okay. And I did like how you said that just because you excel in one, you may not excel in the other. And I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. Just different people have their different strengths and different weaknesses. Just using myself as an example, I think I'm relatively well versed in internal and external self-awareness.
SPEAKER_00I would agree.
SPEAKER_01However, I do think that I tend to focus more on external self-awareness.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01Than internal self-awareness. I can for sure go inward, but naturally, I think I think more about external self-awareness. I mean, even as a silly little example, is you've been hushed by me a million times in movie theaters or restaurants or just social situations when we're sharing a space publicly because I'm worried about being too loud and obnoxious to the people next to us.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think you have very good external self-awareness. And I do think that you have good internal self-awareness. So I guess this is breaching into the other part I was talking about. I think your internal self-awareness is actually incredibly strong retrospectively. I think you have really, really strong retrospective internal self-awareness.
SPEAKER_01I would agree with that. I think in the heat of the moment, not that I'm a hothead, I don't know how else to explain because I'm not like an angry person. But I think my ego gets damaged in the moment and I am quick to dig my heels in.
SPEAKER_00Sure.
SPEAKER_01Even just like within that five minutes of an argument or something that's happening. As a social introvert, I do my best thinking and self-reflection when I am truly alone. So I think just giving me that 15, 20 minutes to cool off and process without background noise or trying to juggle a conversation allows me to come back and realize, hey, that was dramatic, or hey, I'm sorry. The reaction was not justified based off of the circumstances.
SPEAKER_00And I don't think that this is atypical. I think it is both easier, and there are a lot more people that are better at retrospective internal self-awareness than in the moment. I think just in general, having to try and be self-aware in the heat of the moment when you're having emotions, when things are happening, when you're navigating a conversation is just harder.
SPEAKER_01Right. Fighting that little ego monster.
SPEAKER_00But I also know plenty of people that just have neither. And I think very few people are really good at in the moment internal self-awareness. And there are plenty of people that are very bad at in-the-moment external self-awareness, for sure. I think you're actually very good at both in the moment and retrospective external self-awareness.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Question for you. So say someone lacks internal and external self-awareness. Maybe this is an audience member's first time even thinking about this concept. It's something new to them. Is this something that can be learned, or is it kind of something that you inherently have, or can they work on it? Like where do they go from here?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So let's actually take a quick detour here.
Personality Traits And What Can Change
SPEAKER_00There are very few parts of your personality that cannot be changed. Most parts of our personality are actually just adaptations that we have developed over time, or beliefs that we have about ourselves, or self-concepts, or patterns and habits of action and behaviors. The mass majority of who you are can be built and trained like a muscle.
SPEAKER_01And changing these things doesn't make you any less you.
SPEAKER_00For sure. Because you didn't have all of these things when you were a baby, but you were still you.
SPEAKER_01What? Babies aren't self-aware.
unknownNo.
SPEAKER_00Not at all.
SPEAKER_01Socially, externally self-aware when they're.
SPEAKER_00There are, however, at least five. Whether they're fully inborn or developed at an early age is still somewhat up for debate or is some combination. But there are five largely unchangeable personality traits. They're called the big five personality traits, and they are some of the most validated things in psychology. Where you land when you get to your 20s, especially 30s, in these is largely unchangeable. They change a little bit through age. Naturally, there are tendencies that shift, but it is pretty hard to actually change these traits. They do not really follow the same logic as most things, where you can build them like a muscle. These are ranges of tendencies of a personality trait that you are kind of set with. So being aware of these, having self-awareness around these, and eventually self-acceptance surrounding these is going to actually be a lot more helpful than trying to fight against them. So these five personality traits are first, in no particular order, extroversion, so how introverted versus extroverted you are, conscientiousness. This is the personality trait of being responsible, careful, or diligent. People who have high conscientiousness take obligations very seriously and they tend to be more efficient and organized. Lone conscientiousness people tend to be easygoing and disorderly. The third one is openness, like openness to new experiences. The fourth one is neuroticism, how easily you are stressed or anxious, and how that affects the way that you experience the world. And the fifth and final one is agreeableness. A lot of this is about how easygoing you are versus how combative and how naturally friendly. This doesn't mean you can't become more friendly. In fact, all of these are just personality tendencies. You can still develop adaptations that can change your behaviors despite them. For instance, there are plenty of, Hannah included, introverts who have developed a adaptation or skillset to be social. So even though they don't naturally draw their energy from being social, and it can be a little bit draining, socially draining, they can still be very good at being social. So these aren't like your hard set destiny, but understanding that these traits are generally not going to change and you're still going to feel the pull of them, and accepting them so that you can have more awareness surrounding yourself is one of the major things you can do towards self-awareness.
SPEAKER_01However, I do think that there can be periods of your life, depending on what's all going on, that can kind of alter this just a little bit. Like I think about my early 20s when I was going out and drinking, partying. Alcohol and drugs make you much more social. And I thought myself truly completely an extrovert during that time. But when I think about myself before being that 21 age, it was more so like it is today. When I enjoy being social and I want to be an extrovert and I enjoy being around people, but primarily where I shine is like two or three people or a one on one conversation. That's my favorite type of social engagement today. And then even then, I still want my introvert time to just be by myself.
SPEAKER_00So it's interesting that you bring that up. The younger you are, the more fluidity these traits. Tend to have. If you're 10, they're actually a lot more fluid, and different things can kind of change and shape them. Even your early 20s, they're a bit more fluid. But the one that has had the most debate about how fluid it is compared to the others is introversion versus extroversion. So that one, I guess there is less of a hardcore stance on whether that one can change. But the point being, when you get to your 30s, generally that introversion versus extroversion kind of locks in much more.
SPEAKER_01I could see that. It's almost more circumstance-based at earlier years.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for sure. And you may have just had really strong adaptations and alcohol changes your brain neurochemistry. Literally, alcohol will change inborn traits in different ways. Like your openness goes way up on alcohol.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah. Give me like two or three margaritas, and I will be the life of the party.
SPEAKER_00Sure. And the yeah, extroversion tends to go up with alcohol. Openness to new experiences goes up. So yeah, there are definitely physical ways to change your brain chemistry that will temporarily do it, but that's a little different.
SPEAKER_01Right. Like you said, temporary.
SPEAKER_00But I want to circle back to internal versus external self-awareness and some of the research around it.
The Research That Flips Assumptions
SPEAKER_00When we look at the architecture of self-awareness, we have to look at the most prolific research surrounding it, which comes from Dr. Tasha Urick. She spent years studying this, and she discovered something that flips the traditional narrative completely upside down. Most people assume that if you spend a lot of time reflecting, you automatically understand how the world sees you. However, her data showed that internal self-awareness and external self-awareness are actually two completely independent variables. There is virtually zero statistical correlation between them. You can be off the charts in one and completely blind in the other. This is what happens when you have the person that's done a lot of personal development and seems to know all of their tendencies and is just completely unaware of how they came off in different interactions. Social awareness, emotional awareness of others and how you affect them is a completely different skill set. This is why Simon Sinek, author of the book Start with Why, often stresses that people need to remember that they live in the world with other people. Now, I think that's an overstatement, and I think he's talking about internal self-awareness without external self-awareness and situational awareness. So if you know your own tendencies but don't pay attention to how you affect other people at all, it's actually a lot less useful. But because it starts here, let's first dive into internal self-awareness. This is your relationship with your own internal landscape, your values, your passions, your aspirations, your emotions, your goals, your interests, your desires, your thoughts, your self-talk, your traits, your tendencies, your personality, your purpose, and your specific reactions to your environment. It's knowing whether you value autonomy over security, or realizing that you get highly anxious when a schedule changes at the last minute. It's the internal compass that tells you what feels aligned and what feels like a compromise. Then we have external self-awareness, which is a different beast altogether. This is understanding how other people perceive and experience you, your leadership style, your communication, your presence, and your energy. It is the ability to walk into a room and accurately read the impact that you are having on the people around you. This is where it gets incredibly interesting. Because you can have someone who is deeply introspective. They journal every single morning, they know their childhood wounds inside and out, they understand their core values perfectly, but they walk into a board meeting and completely dominate the conversation without realizing that they are sucking all the oxygen out of the room and not letting anyone else talk. They have high internal awareness, but next to zero external awareness. And on the flip side, we have the chronic people pleaser. This is someone with massive external self-awareness. They can read a room instantly. They know exactly what the boss wants. They know how their words affect their partner, and they adjust their behavior constantly just to keep the peace. But because they focused entirely outward, they have no idea what they actually want. They've lost touch with their own values, and they are completely hollow from the inside out. They're running on empty because their internal lens has gathered dust.
SPEAKER_01A buzzword that we hear often is being an empath. Is this a word that you would almost use to describe someone who is very attuned with external self-awareness or overly self-aware?
SPEAKER_00Sure. I think empathy is a major part of external self-awareness. It's a part of emotional awareness. It's a big part of social awareness. And we'll get more into empathy in another podcast. We'll talk about the difference between intellectual empathy and affective empathy.
SPEAKER_01It's interesting though, because I think sometimes when for myself, when I'm overly self-aware, it takes my joy from being in that moment and truly enjoying the people that are with me because I'm too focused on how we're being perceived by, like I said, the tables next to us or other people around us, when honestly, they probably don't give a shit. They're just enjoying themselves. So I think sometimes I wish that I could reel that in a little bit and not be as aware. So I can truly enjoy my here and now.
SPEAKER_00I think it's a great point. And I will be touching on this in a bit. I think what you're talking about is definitely related to external self-awareness, but I think it's bordering into self-consciousness. And we will cover that in just a little bit here.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00Basically understanding people's emotions versus feeling other people's emotions. To be truly self-aware, to reach the top tier of personal effectiveness, you have to develop both of these lenses simultaneously. You need to know what is true for you, and you need to care about how that truth lands on the world around you. But before we leave Dr. Tasha Urick's work on internal and external self-awareness and self-awareness in general, I want to double-click on an absolutely baffling statistic that was uncovered during her research. So when she was doing the studies surrounding self-awareness, 95% of participants in her study self-reported or thought that they were self-aware. The actual number of people who met the criteria for the study of being self-aware was actually somewhere between 10 to 15%, depending on which study. Let that sink in. Close to 100% of the people surveyed in these studies thought they were self-aware. The real number was, we'll be generous, and say 15%. That is a massive gap between perception and reality. Now, there were a series of things that were looked at to determine self-awareness. I know two of the major categories were the person had to self-report as self-aware. They had to believe themselves to be self-aware. They had to show that they were self-aware in a number of different ways. And then somebody who was close to them and knew them well had to also agree that they were self-aware. Both Hannah and I have done an assessment that analyzed the same requirements, and we both ended up coming back in the category of self-aware. Now, I think we both definitely still have a lot of room to improve on self-awareness, especially in different areas. I know we could definitely both improve on in-the-moment self-awareness. I think we're well above average, but I definitely have times where there's a good gap between my in-the-moment self-awareness and my retrospective self-awareness. We've also done a lot of the things that help develop self-awareness. We'll get into those in a bit. But let's go through some of the criteria. First of all, you need to be open to hearing and learning from other people about you and not just assuming that you are always right about you, especially if you want external self-awareness. You need to be taking in those feedback cues. And I think a lot of different skills culminate in self-awareness. Some of the things that I think are the biggest factors are developing emotional awareness of yourself and of others. Developing social awareness of how social interactions work, what other people are thinking, how your actions affect other people. Actually paying attention and getting better at noticing these things makes a big difference. Another one is metacognition, thinking about your own thinking, not just accepting your thoughts as the truth, but like understanding that you are the consciousness that experiences your life and that all of the things surrounding you may not be true. You are a culmination of stories that you tell yourself, that you have different beliefs, paying attention to your self-talk, thinking about the way that you're thinking, being as honest with yourself as you can, even when it's uncomfortable, even when it's not fun, reflecting on events to see how you can improve, being honest with yourself about your strengths and your weaknesses. That doesn't just mean tempering your strengths. That also means not overly downplaying your strengths. If you're good at something, being honest with yourself about that. If you're weak at something, being honest with yourself about that. That's not fun. Nobody enjoys doing this. In fact, most of the time, self-awareness is not comfortable. It's not easy. It's not fun. This isn't an exciting part of personal development. But if you want to really make progress, you have to know where you are. You have to be honest with yourself. Being aware of your biases, learning about psychology, being aware of your ego, your tendencies. The more that you accumulate these different skills and do these different actions, the better you're going to develop both your internal and external self-awareness, depending on which strategy. Another great way to enhance your external self-awareness is to practice perspective taking, putting yourself in other people's shoes. I guess this is where empathy comes in, like you were saying, Hannah, but like thinking about how they must feel in different situations, or thinking about how, if someone said what you said to you, how you would feel. These are ways that you get yourself outside of your own perspective. Understanding that your perspective of reality shapes your experience of reality, and that that is the same for everyone else is also huge.
SPEAKER_01Are there any tips or tricks that you could give us to help us start thinking about these kind of things? Is there anything that you can do in your daily life that can even help you start shaping and processing and learning about yourself more?
Mindfulness Therapy And Journaling Tools
SPEAKER_00So some of that I was touching on before. But yeah, let's move to the practical application about developing self-awareness. So there are three common practices that are known to improve self-awareness. One of them is mindfulness in general. Being able to be in the moment and being able to be aware of your thoughts makes a big difference. Understanding that you are the consciousness that experiences your life and being aware and sitting with your different thoughts and emotions dramatically improves your self-awareness. But specifically, especially meditation. Now, I get it, meditation may not be for everyone, but meditating is not just about becoming this Zen figure. A lot of what it's doing is teaching you how to catch when you're getting distracted, how to train your focus, how to be aware of your own thoughts, sensations, emotions, and how to sit with that. Meditation is one of the best ways to develop self-awareness. Another one is actually therapy. One of the best things that therapy does is it gets you to introspect, it gets you to examine your life and the choices that you make, the behaviors that you have, the things that affect you, your past. Therapy teaches you the skills to become more self-aware. And then lastly, would be journaling. Putting your actual thoughts out on a piece of paper is one of the purest forms of being able to examine your thinking. You are literally pouring out your thoughts, and then you are looking at them. You are reading them. You are developing metacognition, thinking about your thinking.
SPEAKER_01Can I share an example of a way to look at journaling that I heard the other day?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, please do.
SPEAKER_01Cool. I can't exactly remember where I saw it. Maybe it was from a YouTube video short or a podcast. But someone had used the example of journaling. Say someone gives you a complex math problem. 374 times eight. Sure. In your brain, that's gonna be so much harder to do. But if you have a piece of paper and a pen or pencil, you can use the skills that you have to break it down and to actually see it physically. It's an easy problem to do. However, in your head, it's gonna be so much harder. And that's kind of how journaling can be. Once you have it down there, you can actually see things. And seeing that our brains are so much more complicated than a math problem, but just makes so much sense to put that down on paper to examine things and see things in a different way.
SPEAKER_00That is such a good point. You're breaking down the math problem step by step and not forgetting where you were. You can only hold so much in your mind at one time. So by getting it out, it allows you to, like you said, examine it without forgetting parts of it and see all of the thoughts fully. So yeah, all three of these are actually some of the best ways to improve, specifically mostly internal self-awareness, but they can have benefits on external self-awareness as well. So why does this matter so much on a practical day-to-day level? Why should we spend the energy required to manage both of these channels of self-awareness? It comes down to a massive psychological friction point called the intention behavior gap. We all know what this feels like. You have the best intentions in the world at 8 a.m. You're going to eat a clean lunch, you're going to finish that difficult project, you're going to be incredibly patient with your kids when you get home. Your intentions are pure gold. But then 3 p.m. hits, you're tired, your glucose levels drop, someone throws a wrench in your timeline, and suddenly your behavior looks absolutely nothing like your intentions. You are reaching for the sugar, you're procrastinating on the project, and you're snapping at the first person who asks you a question. Self-awareness is a major tool for bridging that chasm. When you develop high internal clarity, you start to catch the subtle shifts in your physiology and psychology, in your emotional state, before they manifest as behavior that you don't want. You notice the tightness in your shoulders. You notice the speed of your thoughts increasing, the swell. And you can intervene in real time by creating a gap. You move from automatic reaction to conscious execution. And this goes for almost all of the cognitive biases. Being aware of them, what we were just talking about was primarily about temporal discounting, but being aware of them helps you catch them so that you can reframe, change your perspective, do whatever you need to do, or catch a strong emotion, and it makes a big difference. There's a powerful quote by the psychologist Carl Jung that summarizes this perfectly. He said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. This is exactly what we're talking about here. Without self-awareness, you're just a passenger in a vehicle driven by old habits, evolutionary survival mechanisms, and childhood programming. And you spend your life wondering why you keep hitting the same walls over and over again. So to get into the actual work of building this, because insight without action is just a form of entertainment. And we're not here to just entertain ourselves with nice ideas. We're here to take action. We need things that work when life gets messy. I want to give you three concrete daily habits that you can start using today to sharpen both your internal and external awareness.
The Two-Word Emotional Check-In
SPEAKER_00The first habit is a tool for your internal self-awareness. And we're going to call it the two-word check-in. Multiple times a day, especially during transitions, when you move from your car to your office or from your laptop to the dinner table. I want you to pause and ask yourself a simple question. What am I feeling right now? And you have to answer it using only two words. You cannot say, I'm feeling stressed because my boss is being annoying, because that is a narrative, not a feeling. It's a story that you're telling yourself. By limiting it to two words, it removes the ability to tell yourself stories. You have to use raw emotional data points, words like anxious, excited, depleted, focused, or restless. What this does is it forces you to bypass the story your mind is spinning and connect directly with your actual emotional state, which builds emotional granularity over time. And the research shows that simply naming an emotion reduces its intensity and gives you back control over your behavior.
SPEAKER_01Using only two words also takes out the butt. I'm tired, but I didn't have that hard of a day. Which I tend to use as like dismissing my true emotions. So, like you said, you can't give more insight to it. I'm frustrated because of my boss. I'm frustrated, but I'm being dramatic. You can't belittle your own emotions. You have to be Straight up, honest with yourself. I'm sad. I'm anxious. I'm mad.
SPEAKER_00And this isn't going to overnight change your self-awareness. You're just building the muscle of checking in with your emotions and being aware of how you're feeling, which is one of the major parts of self-awareness.
The Feedback Loop Without Defending
SPEAKER_00The second habit shifts our focus to external self-awareness. And this one requires a bit of courage. It's called the feedback loop. Find two or three people in your life who you trust implicitly, people who want the best for you, but are completely uninvested in validating your ego. Ask them a highly specific question. Do not ask them for general feedback. Because that leads to generic answers. Ask them something like, What is the one thing I do in meetings when I get stressed that shuts down conversation? Or how does my tone of voice change when we're disagreeing on a project? You're giving them permission to hold up a mirror to your blind spots. And your only job when they speak is to listen and say thank you. You do not defend yourself. I'm going to repeat that. This is data. And if you get defensive when you're doing this strategy specifically, you are trying to get people to not tell you the truth.
SPEAKER_01A way to maybe work around this, with of course the person you're talking to permission, record the conversation so you can listen to it again later because you may not even notice that you get defensive and try to.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, that's fair.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I feel like maybe if you have an outside look into how you're sounding for that conversation, it might change how you go about another conversation in the future or how you approach this topic.
SPEAKER_00But I guess what I'm getting at is the idea is that you are not responding to their answers. You may feel defensive, but you are not saying things to defend yourself. You are just taking what they said, and maybe you will need to do more of a retrospective self-reflection on your external awareness. Maybe your feelings in the moment hearing that are too defensive and too strong, right? And maybe the recording is the best way to do it. But you don't really get to dispute how you came off to them. This is what this is teaching you. It's teaching you how other people experience you. So it makes sense that you can't really dispute them on that. Yes, you may have thought you were trying to do one thing. Yes, your intention may have been something, but this is specifically training your ability to see how other people experience you. Not how you want to be experienced. So do your best to just listen and say thank you. Don't defend yourself, don't explain your intentions, just gather the external data so that you can see the reality of your impact. This one is actually going to make a big difference in your external self-awareness. Not that the first one won't make a difference in your internal self-awareness. It's just the first strategy is one piece of the puzzle. A major piece, but just one.
Evening Review And The Intention Gap
SPEAKER_00And finally, the third habit is about managing that intention behavior gap that we talked about. It's a practice called the evening review. Before you close your eyes at night, take 60 seconds to look back at your day, not through a lens of judgment or self-criticism, but like a scientist looking at a lab report. Identify one moment where your behavior did not match your values or your intentions. Maybe you lost your temper, or you avoided a hard conversation, and you ask yourself, what was the trigger? What was the physical sensation I ignored right before what happened? By analyzing the breakdown in a calm state, you reprogram your brain to recognize that specific sequence of events the next time it happens, which gives you a split second of awareness you need to choose a different path. Okay, we've been through what self-awareness is, the different types of it, the different ways that you can assess it, how it manifests. We've talked about real life examples. We've even talked about how you build and cultivate it.
Self-Awareness Versus Self-Consciousness
SPEAKER_00So now I want to talk about some of the shades of gray surrounding self-awareness. Self-awareness is not just a 100% purely good thing. So let's get into a little bit of the nuance before we wrap up today.
SPEAKER_01Ooh, I'm excited to get into this.
SPEAKER_00All right. First, I want to look at how this plays out when we talk about self-awareness compared to something that feels very similar on the surface, which is self-consciousness.
SPEAKER_01And this is kind of what I meant when I said I can be a little too self-aware sometimes in the beginning of our conversation.
SPEAKER_00While they have some similarities, they're not the same. They both involve turning your attention inward, and they both require you to notice what you are doing, what you are saying, or how you're moving through the room. Self-awareness functions a lot more like a camera lens. It gathers objective data about your current emotions, your breathing, your tone of voice, the reasons that you're doing what you're doing, or the reasons that you may be feeling defensive. These concepts sit very close to each other in our minds. Both require you to point your attention inward. Both ask you to pay attention to how you're showing up in any given moment. Self-awareness is the practice of pure observation. You may notice that your jaw is tight. You recognize that you're feeling defensive in a conversation with your partner. You observe your own patterns with a sense of curiosity. You are simply gathering data about your own experience so that you can make an intentional choice about what to do next. Self-consciousness takes the exact same observation and adds an often imagined hostile audience. You notice your tight jaw and immediately wonder if everyone else in the room sees you acting anxious. You recognize your defensiveness and start thinking that the other person thinks you're entirely incompetent. Self-consciousness involves looking at yourself through the critical, assumed eyes of someone else. It introduces shame to the equation. It introduces a heavy layer of judgment. And it often changes from looking at yourself objectively to putting a magnifying glass on your flaws. It's not the same as just being honest with yourself. It's being overly conscious of yourself and how you may come across to others. Self-awareness gives you the information that you need to understand yourself, which is absolutely necessary if you're trying to improve yourself. Self-consciousness makes you want to hide from the world. When you catch yourself feeling completely paralyzed by how you're coming across, you are dealing with self-consciousness, not self-awareness. The best way to bring yourself from self-consciousness back to normal self-awareness is to just gently guide your attention away from that imaginary audience or even a real audience and bring it back to just simply observing yourself without judgment.
SPEAKER_01So in a nutshell, self-consciousness restrains you. Whereas self-awareness can frees you.
SPEAKER_00For the most part, I don't know that self-awareness always frees you. It can be very freeing, it can be very illuminating, but I definitely agree with self-consciousness does the opposite. What did what did you say it does?
SPEAKER_01I think it was more in comparison that I was saying it. Like self-consciousness restrains you. Keeps you bound up. At least in my experience it does. It steals joy from the moment. It makes you not live in the moment because you're just so caught up in what other people around you could be thinking. You don't even know if they are.
SPEAKER_00So my a little bit revised version would probably be something like self-awareness reveals you, and self-consciousness makes you want to hide and it restrains you. But transitioning from self-consciousness back to self-awareness can feel very freeing.
SPEAKER_01Can we go back to something you just said? You said something about self-awareness can be uncomfortable. Can we talk about that a little bit?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
When Awareness Turns Into A Trap
SPEAKER_00So I want to be clear. While there are tons of benefits to developing self-awareness, and it is the absolute cornerstone of personal growth and development, it's not exactly fun. If you're doing it right, if you're being really honest with yourself, it can be really uncomfortable. And I think in the short term, becoming more self-aware is often something that has a negative effect on your self-esteem in the short term. Because you're coming to terms and being honest with yourself about your weaknesses, about your shortcomings, about your motivations, about lots of things, right? And it's not fun to face your flaws. Yes, you're also facing your strengths and everything in between, but that part of it is pretty hard. And I would say that while the most obvious downside of self-awareness is the fact that it's uncomfortable and it may come with mild negative effects in the short term, like being more self-conscious and lowered self-esteem, there are also some long-term downsides to it as well. There is a real trap inside the work of developing your self-awareness. And I think it's something that we should also talk about here, honestly. When we cover self-awareness, like it's something something that's purely and absolutely good, we're not being fully honest. And most people talk about it like it is just pure good. Like everyone needs more self-awareness. You cannot have enough self-awareness, the more the better. And it definitely helps the more that you are self-aware, but there is the possibility of having an overabundance of it, or it tricking yourself into false versions of it, or even using it in a way that keeps you completely stuck in your own head. When your observation turns into hyper-vigilant monitoring, you can easily find yourself trapped in analysis paralysis. This is a situation where, just like learning, self-awareness can be a quote unquote smart person's favorite way to procrastinate. When you're tracking every single micro-emotion and questioning the deeper psychological motive behind why you picked a certain cereal, or why your energy dropped at two in the afternoon, or why you felt a flash of irritation at a text message? You can become so busy evaluating your internal state that you lose your capacity to simply live in the moment, to live your life and connect with the people around you.
Does Ignorance Really Help
SPEAKER_01So what about the guy who says ignorance is bliss? Why should we be self-aware? Because you're kind of laying out some negatives. Do the positives outweigh the negatives, or what are your thoughts on the whole ignorance is bliss saying?
SPEAKER_00I personally disagree for the most part with ignorance is bliss. I think there are some situations where ignorance is bliss some of the time. I think there are some things that you might be better off not knowing. But the origin of that quote actually had to do with somebody watching a bunch of children play, and you know, the fact that the children didn't have to worry about terrible things going on in the world, and therefore they could just be children and play. So ignorance is bliss.
SPEAKER_01Interesting, because I feel like it gets used more as an excuse.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that is. That really wasn't the intention behind it. It was really about childhood and that there's there is like a magic to childhood, and we shouldn't try and get people to grow up way too fast. But I think it's really grown since that initial time that someone said it and taken on a meaning of its own. I think some people take it as like, ah, stupid people have more fun. Maybe, but that's really not great. I mean, to be honest, I just think there's in most cases, it's just not true or helpful.
SPEAKER_01I do think stupid people probably have more fun.
SPEAKER_00Not if they're putting themselves in really bad situations all the time. Like, I don't know. I think on its surface, there are times where it's true, but it's discounting all of the things that come from being aware and avoiding really bad ideas and situations and stuff. If you were watching the news like crazy and you had to know every terrible thing going on everywhere in the world, it probably would have a really negative effect on your mental health. So I think to some degree, you don't need to be aware of everything. We're not omnipotent. So, yes, for some things it's unhelpful to know. I'm not saying you should be totally ignorant, but I guess in that situation, ignorance is bliss. I don't really believe that applies to self-awareness. I think being aware of yourself and how you work is much more important than these disconnected things that can bring strife to your life. What I am more saying is that it's not the only thing that matters. If you're doing it instead of actually living your life, being in the moment, having a conversation with somebody, this is where the black and white comes in. I'm not saying it's so good that you need to be like, hold on, I can't talk to you right now. I need to analyze myself because I felt the twinge of whatever emotion. Like, no, you it's just a piece of the puzzle. If you spend all of your time analyzing it and none of your time doing, it's really not that useful. That's kind of my major take on it, is that it's the first step in a lot of situations. It's the information that helps you take action or improve or make better choices or whatever it is. But its value on its own is kind of limited.
SPEAKER_01That makes sense.
SPEAKER_00So this is the reason that insight can also become a very comfortable substitute for real practice. It might feel like you're doing heavy personal development work because you can explain your behavior patterns perfectly. You know exactly why your past makes you hesitate to speak up in meetings. And you can map out the exact moment that your confidence drops. But if that insight stays locked in your head without ever translating it into the small, messy, uncomfortable action that we need to take in the real world, it's just spinning your wheels. Awareness is supposed to be a flashlight that shows you where to walk. But sometimes we get so obsessed with studying the light itself that we forget to take a single step down the path.
SPEAKER_01So ignorance is not always bliss.
SPEAKER_00No.
SPEAKER_01As we've discussed. And I think you're making some very good points.
Final Thoughts And Closing Message
SPEAKER_00All right, as we wrap up today, I want to leave you with one final thought. Self-awareness is not a destination where you arrive and you're suddenly enlightened and you never make a mistake again for the rest of your life. It's an ongoing, lifelong, operating system. The moment you think you have yourself completely figured out is usually the exact moment a new blind spot is forming. It takes work, it takes a willingness to look at the parts of ourselves that are messy and unpolished, but the payoff is the start of an absolute freedom. You stop reacting to your life based on old programming, and you start creating a life based on a conscious choice. And remember, you are enough, and you deserve to fill up your inner cup with happiness, true confidence, and resilience. Thank you for listening to the Sage Solutions podcast. Your time is valuable, and I'm so glad you choose to learn and grow here with me. If you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on more Sage advice. One last thing. This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. No coaching client relationship is formed. It is not intended as a substitute for the personalized advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional.