 Hello, Tasha, welcome to the show. It is great to have you here. And I guess if we're gonna set this up, we should probably make it clear of what self-awareness actually is. That would be a good place to start. My research team and I came together about seven years ago and the reason I wanted to understand self-awareness as a concept, not just in work or leadership, but in life was it was a term that people kept throwing around, right? You would read a Forbes article about it or you would hear someone say, oh, my friend isn't very self-aware, but I really wanted to understand scientifically and empirically what actually was self-awareness. Where does it come from? Why do we need it and how do we get more of it? And you're right, the first thing we had to do was figure out what actually is self-awareness. So we reviewed, you know, thousands of empirical journal articles. We collected data from thousands of people all around the world. We did some in-depth interviews with highly self-aware people and it actually took us almost a year. So here this is, this is, we did the work so you guys don't have to. Self-awareness is the will and the skill to see ourselves clearly. But specifically it's made up of two very independent types of self-knowledge. So one we named internal self-awareness, which is essentially understanding who we are. What do we value? What's important to us? How do we behave in different situations? And then the other kind, which is just as important, is something we named external self-awareness. And in a nutshell, that means understanding how other people see you. And what was fascinating, at least to me, was we discovered that those two types of self-knowledge are totally unrelated. So you could be highly internally self-aware. You could feel like you really know what makes you tick and yet your friends say, oh, that person's a jerk or they never listen. Or vice versa. You could be someone who almost cares too much about how other people see you at the expense of understanding what's important to you. And obviously you can be high on both and low on both, but that's a really good place to start is kind of diagnostically. Where do you stand in your internal and external self-awareness? I think that's where some confusion lies because I've been with people and I've heard people say like, for somebody so intelligent, how can they be so unaware? And because you may be very aware internal with your internal awareness, but the external awareness might be oblivious or vice versa, then that leads to a lot of confusion of how can somebody be so on it over here, but so lost over here. And that's the nut that we had to crack. And as soon as we started to see those patterns of like, oh, maybe it's actually these two things, it becomes really valuable. So in my day job, I coach CEOs and senior executives, highly successful people to help them be more successful. And usually that's the missing link. I wouldn't say in all cases, it's the external piece because I think everybody's different, but finding that one type of self-awareness that maybe you haven't even realized was important can be such a huge moment. Well, what I find interesting is that our experience with coaching executives as well is that they have a high level of internal self-awareness, but they don't have a lot of input for the external self-awareness because they've achieved success quickly and they're surrounded by people who are working for them and may not always have the candor to give them that feedback that they need to really develop the external self-awareness that obviously leads to success. Is that similar to what you found in your experience in coaching executives? Very much so. The research on this is pretty clear. It says that the higher up in the organization you get, the more success and power you achieve, the less self-aware you tend to be on average, regardless of whether you started out more self-aware. And it's all the things you just mentioned, AJ. You know, it's a career limiting move for your team to tell you that you're being a jerk or it's an internal assumption that a lot of executives make, which is sort of fair if you think about it. It's like, well, I've gotten this far. I'm the CEO, I must be doing something right. And so what I try to help executives do is really tie that to the business decisions they're making, how much better they could be, the culture they're building, how much stronger it could be. And frankly, as a human, how much better of a life they can have. And so it's about seeing clearly and acting decisively. And so many of us sort of jump to step two, that there's a lot more work that can be done. And as you guys have seen too, it almost always pays off if you do it the right way. In those experiences, we love utilizing role plays for them to step outside of the role that they're in and start to develop that external self-awareness of how they might be perceived and how their communication may not actually be as impactful as they had hoped. Because again, they've risen to a place where that feedback loop is broken. Exactly. And there's also the element, I love the role play because they can't see their behavior without tying their intent to it. So I'll give you an example. This is a great story of an executive I coached many years ago, probably 10 or 15 now. And he was this brilliant engineer. He also had this secret weapon of being very empathetic and just great at bringing teams together and everything was going great. Until things started to fall apart a little bit around him. He noticed his team was getting sort of less engaged in things and they weren't coming to him as often. And at the same time, coincidentally and secretly, he had been dealing with this terrible lower back problem. And so he would come into meetings and he would, obviously when you're in pain, you can't focus. He would be going around in his chair. He'd be getting up and pacing. And obviously there were some other things going on there. But what his team said was, he doesn't even care about us anymore. He's too busy. He comes in meetings. He leaves, he comes back. There's this whole sort of conspiracy theory or other interpretation of his behavior that they had come up with. And I think that's such a clear example of what happens when other people don't understand our intentions, but we think they do. And so there's so much to that. But I think understanding our behavior through the eyes of others is essential really to be successful. So AJ had mentioned to me that self-awareness seems to be a new topic that a lot of young people are coming around to as of lately. It's a new fatter trend to get self-aware. And have you linked that to all the escapism that we have in front of us to where it's taking us longer now to realize that we're gonna make strides in our lives or we're gonna have to open up some knowledge about who we are and ourselves where that has been covered up for so long by binge watching movies and the rest of the entertainment we have? Let me put it clearly. And I think this is something we should all keep in mind. So we have never had more time to do something, introspection that humans generally hate to do. And there was one study that I just love, I always come back to this especially when I'm trapped in my own living situation. Basically the researchers brought people into the lab and they said, you have two choices. You can sit here silently in this room without your phone for five minutes or you can give yourselves mild electric shocks. What do you think most people chose? Right, so this thought of being alone with our thoughts and our emotions and really knowing that we need to see ourselves more clearly but finding that very uncomfortable, I think is to your point, increasing our escapism. I've noticed it in myself and by the way, I have just as much work on my own self-awareness to do as the rest of us but I've found that I just spend like that screen time report that I get every week. It's embarrassing. It's so embarrassing. But we can't physically escape. I can't go fly to Australia to do a keynote for a cool bunch of business leaders. So I stay on my phone all night and it's a troubling trend. I wonder where it's gonna land. Well, there was a lot of opportunities in our lives where you had nothing to focus on except yourself and you had to deal with yourself. I always make this silly analogy that 40 years ago you're gonna go to the bank and you're gonna stand in line and you're gonna deal with yourself while you wait there. You don't do that now if you're even at the bank but if you go in any line, your phone comes out and you start swiping, you are distracted. There is no time, like you didn't have the opportunity not to check in with yourself. Your self was there constantly and you had to deal with it. And of course, we're seeing what people opt for. We're not only electric shock but you go anywhere and no one's just standing around staring off into space in thought. They are staring at their phones. And there's, I'm sure you guys are aware of this too. There's a different brain chemistry that occurs when you're swiping, right? We're getting hits of dopamine. And it's so challenging. Like it's funny that you brought this up because I've actually been trying to slightly reduce my screen time. I'm trying to be reasonable. But it's literally a physical need. Like I'll put my phone down and say, I'm watching this great TV show on Netflix. That's distracting enough. I can't, I focus on that. And it's just, and I'm noticing it's getting stronger as the months of the pandemic go on. So there's sort of a, I think a benefit for all of us to really think hard about not just where we are now but where we're headed if we stay in these habits. There's a self-awareness crisis throughout the world that our research indicated, which is basically 95% of people think they're self-aware and only about 10 to 15% of us actually are. And that means that pre-pandemic, by the way, that meant that on a good day, 80% of us were lying to ourselves about whether we were lying to ourselves. And now, so I really feel like this before COVID was a skill that was just absolutely essential for work and life. But now I feel like it's really what's gonna separate the successful mentally healthy, great people from everyone else in this new phase of the world that we're in. Well, I wanna unpack that a little bit because there's a couple of points in the book that I think are fascinating and this was written pre-pandemic. So I'd love to get your thoughts on this as well. Obviously, when I see social media posts, hashtag self-aware, I often find the Dunning Kruger effect where they're actually talking about things and representing themselves in ways that are completely unself-aware. And I think it's really interesting that it's become a trend and a hot topic of the self-awareness, but to your point, many of us are wearing it like we're enacting like we're self-aware, but in actuality, there's a deficit there. The question that I have is, as Johnny's saying, we're spending more time on our phones, on devices and now we're in work from home situations where we're not getting that external self-awareness and we're really just focusing on the internal level and picking it up from what's being represented online, which is distorted, is that leading to this gap in self-awareness and this deficit that you're seeing? It's interesting because I've been wanting to collect some data for a while now to see where we're at. I do believe that the forces you just mentioned are probably not helping us very much. Again, I think there are people who are using this time productively to take some time to get feedback or to clarify what's important to them, but you're absolutely right. I think what I try to remember on social media and in real life, which is now on screens, is that self-absorption or self-focus is not self-awareness. Right. And so many of us take to social media and try to show the world how self-aware we are, which is actually the last thing that a truly self-aware person would do. We found this is really interesting. So the people who we studied, who we did these really in-depth interviews with were individuals, business leaders, teachers, entrepreneurs, stay-at-home parents who didn't start out self-aware but who really became highly self-aware. And we tried to figure out what was it that they were doing differently on social media. They spent more time total on social media, but the way they used it was completely different than the rest of us, myself included, at the time. So instead of being what one researcher calls a me-former, where you just say, here's what's happening in my life. Our self-awareness unicorns, as we called them, we're spending time actually trying to make other people's lives better through what they posted. Here's a great article. Here's a beautiful photograph. Here's a funny joke. Things to add to other people's lives being informers instead of me-formers. And I just, I think that's a really powerful nugget. Absolutely. And one of the things that Johnny and I have felt for us that's helped us raise our self-awareness is creating and putting content out there. So not creating the selfie, but actually trying to inform and add value and add to the conversation. It creates an actual loop of conversation and feedback to you to grow and realize, hey, this podcast episode didn't hit the mark or hey, this video wasn't as impactful as we thought versus the selfie me, me, me, doesn't often create that feedback loop for us. And I've noticed, especially in a work-from-home situation that many of us are not taking the time outside of these Zoom meetings to share that external bit of feedback. So oftentimes, even when we were working in the office and we saw a team member down or something going on that we would pick up on, we pull that member aside and ask and check in, is everything okay? But now in the Zoom world, it's like hop from call to call, there's less of that momentary relief and feedback that could help someone else grow or just show the empathy needed to really help them deal with this. And that's exactly right. The other piece to this that I think is really fascinating is self-view. So we went from a place of being in the room together, having no mirror image of ourselves to look back at and say, okay, how am I being presented in all of the self-loop that goes on there and self-talk? And now we're on Zoom and many of us have that self-view there and we're staring right back at ourselves while we're in these meetings. And I think it's leading to this false sense of self-awareness, like, oh, but I'm showing that I'm present. I can see myself as present. And for many of us, that's not how we're showing up on Zoom. That reflection is coming back from a fun house mirror. It's distorted. It's quite difficult to get any real sense of self from that. It is. I think you guys are bringing up such excellent points about sort of like this fun house mirror of self-awareness that we're experiencing. That's the theme that I'm hearing. And I think it's so spot on. I agree with you. Part of the reason I actually think that Zoom meetings are so draining is because we are sort of having to watch ourselves, which in real conversation, we never do. And so it's creating this almost like we're breathing our own exhaust. We're not focusing on other people. I'm doing it right now. I'm like, oh, does my shot look good? Is my hair okay? And it's just not productive. There's nothing productive in there for us. So one thing that I've actually started doing, other people may have figured this out as well, I just turn off my camera on Zoom meetings. And it doesn't completely bring us back to the way it is when we're all together, but it actually helps a lot. I think that's part of the reason that Clubhouse is gaining a popularity as well, because it's finally an outlet that's not video, where we can just listen and be a bit more present and not so worried about how's my lighting and how's my view and my angles. And I've been encouraging all of our participants in X Factor and everyone that's in our Zoom coaching groups to turn off self-view. You can hide self-view. So you're just more engaged and focused on the actual conversation and the feedback versus that internal loop that we're getting of, oh, how's my smile? What's this wrinkle in my forehead? All of those things that are just distracting. I'd love to talk a little bit about some other misconceptions and myths around self-awareness because there are a ton of them. And when we talk to people who may not be the unicorns in self-awareness, but are working towards gaining that self-awareness, they can fall into these traps that media and especially social media present around self-awareness. So what in your research were some misconceptions or maybe even counterintuitive surprises as you dug into the data? So another big surprise that actually almost arrailed my research program entirely was very early on. And we talked about introspection earlier, this idea of reflecting on who we are and why we are the way we are and what are our deep inner meetings and motives and how do we figure those out? I did a study very early on in our research program. I collected data from about 300 people and I was extraordinarily confident that the people who self-reflected or introspected would be better off. They would be less stressed, less depressed, less anxious. They'd be more in control of their lives. They'd be happier with their relationships, happier with their jobs because self-awareness. And so I collected the data, I got it back and I actually thought that I had done the analyses wrong. So I re-ran and re-ran and re-ran and I said, nope, this is what the data are telling me. And what we discovered was the more time people spent introspecting, not only were they less self-aware, they tended to be more stressed, more anxious, more depressed, less in control of their lives, less happy with their relationships and their jobs. And I just went, oh my God, I had sort of been thinking introspection equals self-awareness. But as we discovered, and I really started to dig into this, there was quite a bit of research, well, not quite a bit, but some research from the last 20 or 30 years where they had found similar patterns. And essentially what we discovered was it wasn't that introspection in and of itself is bad. It's just that most people, even well-meaning self-awareness devotees are making huge mistakes when they do it. So there was good news and bad news there. The bad news is the things we think are working maybe are not working. However, we were also able to find a pretty simple pivot that most people can make. So the best way to explain this is, everybody who's listening, think about the last introspective question you asked yourself. It might have been to try to understand a mood you were in. Like, why am I so drained from all of these Zoom meetings? Or to understand a fight about unloading the dishwasher with your spouse. You know, why did that go off the handle? Or something professional? You know, like, why didn't I get that promotion? And that word, why, as it turns out, is actually one of the most dangerous introspective questions we can ask. And there's two reasons for that. We can go very deep into this, but we might not have time, but just at a high level. Number one is, when we ask those questions, we're usually trying to, I call it like, excavate our psychological unconscious. We're trying to find those things that are just below our conscious awareness. Sigmund Freud told us we could do it so we can access our unconscious. Unfortunately, psychologists and a lot of neurologists have shown that no matter how hard we try, we can't access our unconscious thoughts and feelings and motives. So what happens is we think we're doing it, we find an answer that feels true, and it's usually wrong. So that's the first reason. The second reason why questions are bad is they lead us into something I call the rabbit hole of rumination. Typically, why questions lead to answers like, why did I have a fight with my husband about unloading the dishwasher? Well, it's just because I can't be here anymore with him or I don't even know if I can do this for another month or whatever anyone might hypothetically say in a situation like that. But it's usually kind of get self-focused, you get self-critical, you have a victim mentality. And so that explains why not only were our participants less self-aware, they were worse off psychologically. But as we discovered, our unicorns were asking similar questions with a slightly different twist. So fight over the dishwasher. Instead of asking, why did that happen? They might ask a question like, what role did my behavior play in that situation? Or what signal can I pay attention to next time that things are about to go off the rails? Or what can I do differently in the future? And that subtle difference between what and why questions, as it turns out, has really big implications for our self-awareness and wellbeing. So the tool is called what not why, but it was very dramatic to get there. We originally thought, maybe I shouldn't be writing this book about self-awareness at all. But as it turns out, we can actually overcome a lot of those myths and wrong turns. That myth is very strong. And I've seen it in our programs and when I'm coaching and there is every once in a while, somebody has it in their mind that they are broken inside and if they could just dig and they'll, once they fix it, it's over. When an actuality, and you talked about this in a book, you're going to need tools to just deal with moving forward and how to move forward with tendencies or patterns that you have, they can either get better or that you can overcome them. One being CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Another incredible tool. It is a little bit less acknowledged, but it's making great strides by Dr. Stephen Hayes, which is ACT Acceptance Commitment Therapy. And Stephen Hayes even says that your brain works like a calculator with no subtraction or delete button. So you can enter things in, but then you have to accommodate and compromise with that information that you have to roll through. We're all going to end up taking on trauma and loss and damage through our lives. We're not going to heal ourselves with it. We overcome it, we take it on and we learn how to function despite that trauma. That's right. It's interesting that you say that because I'm actually working on a new book right now on turning our pain into strength. Not just thinking about it from a resilience standpoint of getting back to where we were before, but using those experiences, those stress or trauma or feeling betrayed as a way to build strengths that will help you be, I'm calling it unbreakable in the long term. So I couldn't agree more. And I don't think it means that there isn't a role of looking back in our lives, but to your point, Johnny, it's about how you do it, right? With CBT and ACT, those are more sort of insight-oriented approaches versus just getting down that rabbit hole and deciding that since you were never loved as a child, you'll never be anything of value in your life. That's the unhelpful part. I've noticed that a lot of that, how they look at what the issues are depends on their field of study. For instance, a lot of our clients are computer software engineers, programmers. And so they see things as it's either broke or it works. And if it's broke, you have to fix it. And so when we start providing tools such as ACT ideas or CBT, like, wait, but I'm broke. We have to fix the problem. Like, no, no, no. It's the lens that you were using on at work. You're using on yourself and it's getting you into this hole. And if you continue to try to use those tools that you use at work, the hole that you're trying to get out of is going to get deeper. That's interesting you say that. So I work with a lot of engineers too. That's actually my, when I was in the 4200, 500 world before I went out on my own, I worked in a big engineering company. And I think what I love about engineers more than almost anyone else is their desire to make things better. Is like, if I can fix that one gear in the system. And usually it's just a matter of keeping that desire and replacing the tools that they might have tried that aren't working. And PS, tools that are grounded by scientific research tends to be pretty helpful. So I just love that. I love that you guys are doing that. And I think it's spot on. What strikes me about that is the what versus why. Why tends to lead us down a path of deeper meaning that becomes more difficult for us to break. It creates belief systems that are flawed. Whereas what takes more of an empirical data approach and is more flexible in that the why can change as well. But oftentimes when we look for that deeper meaning we hold on to it. If we look at it through the lens of what, well, it could be symptomatic of that emotion at that time and not of a deeper meaning that we ascribe to ourselves or an identity that we take on that could impact us from showing up and being self aware. One of the points of the book that I thought was fascinating and we talk a lot about journaling and how important it is but it actually has some traps as you were saying based on research. So, you know, in reading the book I was anticipating, oh, highly self aware people they must be journaling absolutely number one thing to do but actuality is, you know, there's a certain type of journaling that is impactful. I'd love for you to talk about that for our audience and share the insights there. This is a really important one because I think it sort of falls in the category of all of the commonly accepted pieces of wisdom about self awareness are often either wrong or more nuanced than we think and journaling exactly is one of them. So a couple of maybe tips I would just give your listeners in creating a process where you're journaling for insight. You're not just journaling to journal but you're journaling for insight. So the first thing the research shows on this and our unicorns kind of verified is to take a balanced approach. And what I mean by that is to sort of logically process what is happening at the same time processing your emotions around it. So if you just focus on what happened or you just used your journal as an emotional dumping ground that is actually not going to help you. If you use both in a balanced way the research is pretty clear that that's what helps you gain insight and make meaning and better understand your reactions and how you can improve. Another thing that I was really surprised by frankly was to not journal every day for the same reasons that asking why can get us in that just almost like endless cycle of self scrutiny not writing every day and using cues can help you. So let's say you've got a really difficult decision you're trying to make at work or you're having trouble. You've noticed for the last seven days in a row you've just felt really not great about something. Those are good signals for you to say, okay, this might be a high impact journaling time but the people that write in it I mean it might be fun and that's fine I guess if that's what makes you happy but if you're journaling for insight it's a common pitfall. And then I think the last thing and this is what we learned from our self awareness unicorns it's a nuance that I think is so powerful. So one of our unicorns was telling us about a fight she had with a friend and how a couple of days later she let herself calm down and she started to journal about it. She deliberately spent time writing about the situation from what she thought her friend's point of view was. So not just her own point of view but this is what she must have seen in me. And no surprise she was able to actually really figure out a better picture of what had happened and she was able to go back to her friend and they had a really productive conversation and were able to patch things up and move forward. So I think it's again action oriented insight oriented journaling. The good news is you actually don't have to spend as much time on it as you might think. I think another big part of it in our experience with clients in journaling and pitfalls is they focus too much on the negative and they're so self critical that the journal prompt over and over again just brings you down and it becomes a source of depleting your self-esteem. And we always encourage our clients to have a healthy dose of understanding the emotion but then also be rational and look for the positives and the wins in the journaling process as well, not just ruminate and focus on the negatives or the things that didn't go the way that you wanted. I call that reframing. Yeah, to be able to say this is a bad situation, what's good or if it's a good situation to ask what risks are here, what might I not be seeing, really powerful. It was a few years ago where I had ended up with some time and you were up about two weeks by myself and I was trying to figure out what would I be able to do to extract as much from this experience as possible. It's very rare that you find yourself traveling alone like that, especially for that long a time. So for myself, I was like, this is such an incredible opportunity for me to really tap in and learn about myself, detached from friends, home, other influences that would normally be messing with me. And I'm alone, I'm detached, I'm traveling. So what I had done was I opened up a pages on my phone and started doing all the touristy stuff and I started putting myself in front of beauty, whether it was man-made or natural-made beauty and allowed my emotions to well up and just describe what I was feeling in those moments. And I did that for two weeks and I was so surprised of what I had gotten out of it, what I learned about myself, how I felt. And I had also realized that I had been shutting off those emotions for so long, but now that I'm allowing them to come out, I'm writing about it, I'm describing them to myself about what is actually going on. That habit stayed with me and I always encourage everybody if they want to get into self-awareness or really learn about themselves, A, you have to detach from what influence you can. It's quite impossible to detach from everything, but as many influences as possible and to put yourself in front of monumental beauty that is indescribable of words and see what you can come up with when you're overwhelmed like that. The scientific research on the experience of awe, which I think is what you're describing is pretty incredible. I don't know too, too much about it, but I've read a couple of articles here and there and I love that as an internal self-awareness tool, especially, so I'll come back to this, I struggle with this myself, but especially if you're having trouble sort of really, not overly interpreting, but getting in touch with your emotions, figuring out what you're feeling, how to detect patterns in your emotions. I love the idea actually of just sort of opening the floodgates in a positive way. We think so often about, yeah, about negative emotions, but I just love that, I think that's great. One of the things that exposed to me was just when my emotions are now kicked in, where I didn't, a lot of that, as we know in marketing, goes on behind the scenes, it's all subconscious and before you realize that you're logically rationalizing some emotions that you are feeling, but they've been already worked up well before you've been alerted to them and putting myself in that position and writing about it allowed me to begin to discover what those triggers were, what they felt like, when my emotions were getting kicked in and being a little bit more sensitive to that, so when that is happening, I'm just more aware of it and able to do what is necessary so I don't do anything stupid because of those emotions or that I know I'm in a heightened emotional state and will act accordingly. Right, right, exactly. There's another, one thing I'd even add to that as a challenge that I try to do, I actually have from my therapist a list of emotions that I carry around with me in my wallet because psychologists heal themselves, right? That's something that I struggle with, but there's a tool called emotion labeling or affect labeling and I think maybe the extension from that is even, okay, now that I know I'm feeling something very strongly, how do I put words to it? And there's again, a lot of research that shows, especially in negative situations, when we can label it, like I feel betrayed, I feel surprised, I feel angry, it disrupts a lot of those kind of fight-or-flight responses that are automatically triggered in our brain when we experience those emotions. So I sort of love the idea of like understanding that the emotion is happening and then labeling it to get even more understanding. It's like painting with color. Yeah, exactly. So I'm just allowing the emotion to overwhelm you. One of the things that's the most rewarding for me and Johnny is helping our clients recognize blind spots and it's obviously a big part of self-awareness and in the book you discuss three types of blind spots. Can you unpack those for us and help our audience start to overcome those blind spots that as blind spots they may not even realize. Sure, so the first one is knowledge blindness and knowledge blindness is to vastly oversimplifying it, thinking we know more than we actually know. And there is a lot of work showing, done in Kruger effect sometimes, right? But the opposite of that, which is the more we believe we're an expert about something, the more confident we are about our predictions in the absence of accuracy. So there's one, I wish I could remember all the details but there's one study I talk about in my book Insight About This where they took baseball experts and they had them try to predict the outcome of the World Series and no one got it right, no one even was close. They said that a monkey throwing a dart at all the teams would have gotten it better. So it's this overconfidence, not just in what we know but our ability to predict what's going to happen as a virtue of what we know. So that's an interesting one. And I think for me, what helps me combat knowledge blindness is a beginner's mindset is saying no matter how much I know about what the research says on this or what my experience is with this, there's always more to learn. And so actively reading new things and talking to different people and hearing different perspectives is huge. The second type of blindness is emotion blindness and this one is fascinating because it's another situation where we trick ourselves. So let's do a quick experiment. The experiment is think about this on a scale of one to 10, one being worst ever, 10 being best ever, how happy are you with life right now? And then if I asked you like how would you guys go about computing that number? What mental process would you use? For me, I would immediately think about the past and use some sort of comparison to relate to where I am presently. Awesome. What about you, Johnny? It's funny, anytime you quantify anything, the first number you put on it is your general sense. And then you begin to think about it and you realize how off it actually probably was. But my first instinct would be to put up, to label it a seven would be, but then when I think about it and I look at things such as gratitude, practice and appreciation and all of a sudden that number starts to climb. So both of you are describing what I would answer for myself, which is, oh, I would make a very sophisticated calculation. I would consider multiple data points. I would arrive at a mental average of all this. Here's what scientists have shown. When you answer that question, basically here's the question you answer. What mood are you in right now? And they figured that out by manipulating people's moods. Like there was this one study where they left a dime on the German equivalent of a dime on a copy machine. And they found that people who picked up the dime were happier with their lives. So it's like, we really can't have a sense of overconfidence in understanding our emotions. And we have to remember that a lot of what we experience is based on, what am I feeling right now? So to me, that was just fascinating. And then the third is behavior blindness, which I think we've covered a little bit already, but it's this idea, going back to my client with a back problem is no matter how hard we try, sometimes even if we watch video footage of ourselves, we just have this blind spot when it comes to objectively evaluating our behavior that other people seeing us don't seem to have. So we miss things. We think, I remember I used to teach at the Center for Creative Leadership before I went out on my own and it was a bunch of psychologists and these great programs, but we would literally sit, they would have a two-way mirror and we would sit and observe them and take notes and these very senior leaders. And I remember there was this one executive who really thought he was just dynamic and engaging in his conversation in this particular exercise. And I came back to him and I said, you know you didn't say one single thing over the course of that entire conversation, right? I was like, what? So, and again, that doesn't make him a bad person. It doesn't make him, you know, terminally unself-aware. It's just, it's a sort of innate blind spot that humans seem to have. And as much as we can appreciate that and get feedback from other people on how we're coming across, it's really, really valuable. I know for us in our programs, video work was a big part of it because- Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're like- Many of us will dismiss other people's perspectives because our sense of self is so strong and our perception of what's going on often bends reality. But when you film clients doing an activity and they get that video view which doesn't have your perception or feedback and they get to process it, they often realize that they do have those behavior blind spots. And oftentimes they're not as expressive or showcasing the emotion that they're feeling on the inside. And I think that's a really powerful tool for you to start to realize like, yes, these blind spots are in all of us. And as you said, these are leaders, these are executives who also have these blind spots. What makes them so successful is they actively seek ways, strategies to overcome them, to elucidate them, to work through them. I wanna add to that as well is we would do two rounds. On the first day we would do a round and we would point out some things and then we would do another round a few days into our training. And on the second training, we wouldn't say anything. We're not picking it out because we're the instructors now. We let everyone else now in the class because now everyone knows what to look for. And even though if the person who was being filmed, they couldn't see it, but the whole room saw it, it was more powerful coming from all the other guys in the room than it could ever have been from AJ or I pointing it out. That's exactly right. One thing that I do with my CEOs is I help them get real-time feedback in their natural environment. And so I, cause I think there's value in both, right? There's value in kind of coming away from your life and having people who don't know you who can be really objective. But there's also the element of, hey, how did I do in that town hall meeting? And I basically have them ask two questions to, between eight and 12 stakeholders every month. It takes two minutes. So they say, as you know, I'm working on, let's just say empathy. Number one question is what feedback do you have for me in the last 30 days on how I showed up with that goal? And then the second question is what ideas do you have for me in the next 30 days? And literally what makes it a two-minute conversation is at the end, the executives doesn't say, oh, well that's not really what I meant or no, here's why you're wrong. You just say, thank you. And you don't have to take all the feedback. You don't have to use all the feedback but getting that real-time assessment from other people I think is one of the best ways to combat behavior blindness cause it's not a one and done thing. Right. Now, one of the points in the book, and this is something that Johnny and I have been preaching for over a decade now is the importance of feedback. And many of us don't have effective feedback loops in our life. You don't even have to be an executive to have broken feedback loops. In fact, candid honest feedback is really lacking. And for many reasons, trying to save relationships, save face, not wanting to have those difficult conversations. But yet it's so important to us in growing our external self-awareness and removing these blind spots. So for our audience members who are in that position where they're struggling to get the feedback that they crave or need to grow, what are some strategies? And that was a great example of one that they can use with coworkers, with friends and family to get that honest feedback for growth. So since I gave a sort of work-related tool, I'm gonna give a tool that is, it really can be used anywhere but I think it's especially powerful in our personal life. And it's something that I learned from a colleague of mine, a communications professor who, and I named it the dinner of truth, which is meant to sound ominous because it actually is, but here's the way it works. And I'll actually tell you the story through the first time I did this because I would never ask other people to do anything that I haven't tried myself. I have to go first. So the exercise is essentially what you do is you find someone in your life who you want to improve your relationship with, who's relationship that you value and you invite them to either a Zoom happy hour in our current times or a meal of some kind. And in that conversation, you ask them the following question. What do I do that is most annoying to you? Full stop. Yeah. And the first time I tried this exercise, I was like, whoa, that sounds intense but potentially valuable, but maybe terminally scarring. So I better check this out for myself. And I picked my kind of most crotchety friend on purpose. His name is Mike, because I really just wanted to go all in. And so, we were at happy hour with a couple of our friends and I pulled them aside and I asked him the question. And he sort of looked at me and I was stunned that he immediately had an answer as if he had thought about it before. So he said, but then I was worried because he started to say something and my inclination or my worry was, oh my God, Mike is about to tell me that he never liked me in the first place, that I actually suck as a person and I'm a bad friend. And I think all of us in that moment where someone says, well, that's what we think they're gonna follow up. But here's what he said and this is really important. He said, well, Tasha, here would be my feedback for you. I love you in real life, but I hate you on social media. I was like, Mike, tell me more. Cause that's the only thing you're allowed to say. You either say thank you or you say, tell me more, right? And then you just, and what I discovered through that conversation was an incredibly actionable piece of advice for something I had complete control over, which is how I was showing up on social media. I too was being a me for her. And what I loved about that conversation is he gave that to me in the spirit of love, right? He wanted me to be better and he was happy I asked. And every time I've had this conversation with someone, it's a net positive, not just for my self-awareness, but for our relationship and even my mood. You leave like, yeah, okay. Cause unless they're not really a true friend, they're gonna give you something helpful and something that you can decide what you wanna do with. But it's just an incredible exercise. And I'll point out a sense of relief because you were expecting the worst, like, oh no, what are you gonna say? And it was actually something that was really helpful for you and your growth and development. It's so powerful, I love that. There's value, tremendous value. Now, many in our audience are reaching a place in their career where they're moving into management and leadership roles. And in the book, you touch on, part of this self-awareness issue as leaders is we're not cultivating in our teams and we're not able to bring people to a level that will allow them to be successful. And I know many in our audience haven't gone through leadership training and haven't received leadership coaching. And because of that, they don't have the tools that they need necessarily to grow. And that's one of the reasons they tune in. So what do you say to those members in the audience who are in these roles and ready to become not only self-aware themselves, but help the team become more self-aware? Gosh, that's such a big question. Well, the first thing I'd say is check out my online course about self-awareness, the Future Ready Leader, futurereadyleader.com. But there's a lot of things you can do just on a day-to-day basis that are incremental. And that's the first thing I would say is if you're feeling overwhelmed by the journey ahead of like, oh no, no one ever taught me how to be a leader and now I have to be one, I need to be up to speed in two months. Let that go, just let it go. Release yourself from that burden. And think about how can you engineer micro reflection or micro feedback forever, right? These are practices, it's like eating healthy. You can't just eat healthy for a month and then go back to the way you were. So what I would recommend is, we've talked a lot about a lot of these tools today. Another one I'd give you, especially for leaders that's really powerful, maybe I'll come back to it in a second, but loving critics. So don't let me forget to talk about that. But maybe pick one tool from today or go out there and read more about leadership and say, oh, you know, that's a skill that I think I could really improve. And just focus on that. What can be really powerful, I call this the daily check-in is at the end of every day, right? So you're saying, all right, I am going to work on getting feedback from my stakeholders and asking them those two questions. And at the end of every day, you could say, all right, number one, what, what well today for that goal or even for being a leader? Number two, what didn't go so well? And then probably most important, number three, how can I be smarter tomorrow? And I think what's so fascinating about that tool, which by the way I learned from our unicorns is it doesn't take a lot of time. You can do it when you're getting ready for bed at night. But it gives you this really targeted, focused opportunity to kind of pull back and look at your behavior from a different perspective. So I know that's not a completely satisfying answer because there's just so much to it, but I think that's the mindset and the process that I would encourage people to start building. And by the way, don't go too fast. I've seen so many leaders crash and burn. They get the results of a 360 or they go to a great course and they say, I'm gonna do these 10 things. Then they do none of them. They hate themselves, they're discouraged and they just don't do it. So I would rather honestly, and I tell my, by the way, I don't get paid unless my CEOs actually change their behavior as rated by their stakeholders. So I've got skin in the game. And what I tell them is, we're only gonna work on one behavior at a time. That's the only way that I know for leaders to actually create sustainable change. It doesn't mean you can't work on many behaviors, right? But it's one at a time. Still anyway, most, well, I would say everybody can change, but it is one thing at a time. And something that you touched on, and it was in the book, and this is why AJ and I were really piqued our interest, which you laid out stats about unaware people on teams in an office and how that productivity goes down, how the morale goes down. And I can say, there has been, and AJ and I have been in business for 15 years and we've had many different teams over those years. And once for myself and AJ, when we started working on ourselves and going through that process, you start to recognize patterns in yourself that are not leading to good results. So you begin changing behaviors that will get rid of those patterns that were released. But when you're monitoring that, you can only, you can't help but see it everywhere else. So when you're in a meeting having the same issue, having the same meeting for the third time, you're like, well, there's a pattern here that we're not breaking. Why are we having this meeting again? You've been given feedback. You've been given criticism. Yet here we are, same meeting. So you haven't done any work. And so to speak on those numbers and how serious your awareness is to not only yourself and your thriving in a company, but as a team member, that company moving forward. That's it. There's three building blocks to a self-aware team and there's a reason that the number one building block is a leader who models the way. So if you are expecting things of your team, feedback, candor, awareness that you are not, you're not going first, that's the number one area to focus. You know, the second thing is the safety and expectation to tell the truth. How do you handle bad news? You know, are you actually rewarding people for putting hard things on the table and saying, this is the third time we've had this meeting? Why is that? And then last but not least is an ongoing process to stay self-aware. So there's a lot of different ways you can do that. I talk about one in my book about my friend and mentor, Alan Mulally, who was the CEO of Ford. He's on the board of Google, but he basically turned Ford around from going out of business to their second best year ever in five years because of these practices of what he calls awareness for everyone. If anybody's interested, there's a great book. I didn't write it, but it's by Bryce Hoffman called American Icon that I think is the Bible of team and organizational self-awareness. Well, the example in the book with Ford, with all the execs driving other vehicles and parking them in a garage, no one was there, you have problems. Right, exactly. If you work at Ford and you're secretly driving a different car and parking it out of sight, like maybe it's time for a change. Well, what I found fascinating in chapter 10 is the question you get a lot is, well, how do I deal with other people who lack in self-awareness, right? It's great. I read the book on self-awareness. I already got that. How do I deal with these people who are delusional around me? And thus, my current book I'm working on is I think what's behind that is people asking, how do I deal with the day-to-day pains and slights and feeling wronged by other people? How do I manage that through strength and power versus just getting kind of beaten down by it every day? So I'm on it. Yeah, well, I think an important takeaway from that is less concerned about changing someone else. That is a losing battle. It's not get a new scientific strategy or what's the latest research show. It's again, looking at, well, maybe what are the behavior patterns that you're bringing in to the communication, the relationship that's triggering these things and also maybe creating this space for the other person to downplay or be delusional or whatever you want to label it as. That's it. That's exactly right. We can change ourselves and have 100% control over that. We may help others, but we need to recognize the potential worst case scenario and the fact that it might not work. So I would tell people, redirect that energy to you. You deserve it. You know, the saying that is stuck in my head that put me on this trip was, the answer to consciousness is more consciousness. So the more you're aware and the more you realize that you have room to grow and there's places to become more aware about and more fields of study that you can participate in, the better your chances are of being able to navigate any hardships, which hardships come in regardless, but you can certainly navigate. You don't have to hit all of them. We love wrapping every episode by asking our guests what their X factor is. What's the skill set or mindset that's made them successful? I believe self-awareness might be part of this equation for you. What do you think your X factor is? I think it's a sheer dogged determination followed by the realization that I too needed to get more self-aware. I love that. Thank you for joining us, Tasha. Thank you. Thanks, guys. It was a great conversation.