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Wellness. We're your hosts, Jamie Cosmar and Sam Jayenti, and I'm very excited today we're going to be talking about probably what has become one of my most favorite topics and which we have talked about in previous podcast, which is the topic of self awareness and self reflection. Yes, and we're particularly excited to talk about it in the context of a quiz that we put together as
a team here at I do MIX coaching. It's really a tool to prompt self reflection for anybody, and it only takes a few minutes to complete and gives you a good data point and sense of where you are at some gift moment to allow you to reflect on what's working what's not. So Jamie, I want to start with a few rapid fire questions, let's do it, okay. So Number one, do most individuals in your experience have an adequate level of self awareness? No? Okay? Are most professionals in leadership roles
in your view self aware? No? Do most people take the time to reflect on a regular basis? No? Okay? Getting a lot of nose here? Three for the nose, and does a tool like my three sixty help someone to reflect on where they're at. Yes, absolutely excellent and then lost. If you had to pick just one activity that you enjoy in your spare time, what is it? Learning? Okay, could not have been more perfect answers. So let's kick off with what is self reflection and self
awareness? So self reflection is the idea that you are looking introspectively and so you're looking at your sort of below consciousness level, right, that's what introspection tries to get at, and that can you know, be whatever's in your mind. That's your feelings, your emotions, your values, your beliefs. It's self reflection is that process of being aware of what those are for you.
But self awareness also and actually there isn't one definition of self awareness out there if you look at the literature and the research amongst organizational psychologists as well as now, this idea of self awareness is really big in leadership development programs because everyone says, oh, the more self aware you are, the better leader, the more effective leader, and the more you get promoted and all
these things. But self awareness is not just how you are, what you believe, how you operate in the world, but it's actually about the impact that that has on others as well. So there's an internal component and there's
an external component to self awareness. I'm really glad that you mentioned both of those because for so long, I think, before this sort of new definition of self awareness really came into being, particularly in the context of leadership, there was this idea that it was just about the self and not about how
other people perceive you, and the two are just as equally important. And I think one way that I thought about this in reading the research in prep for our conversation today was that in a sense, self reflection is the car that's getting you to the destination, which is greater self awareness. So why are the important Well, again, the leadership development programs will tell you it's better. It's important because it'll help you be a more authentic, effective leader.
But I think that we should really take a much broader scope when we think about the power of self awareness. Self awareness is a building block, and if you are self aware, there are sort of all these benefits that can come and also negative impacts. By the way, too, it's not all roses, but framed in the right way, having self awareness is a building block for growth. For personal growth, for self improvement, for self
development. And that's why it's important because, let's face it, not everybody who gets coaching is out there to become the best leader they want to be, right, It's not always about leadership. It's about maybe making the world a better place, or being a better spouse or a you know, a parent, better parent. So there's all these different goals. That's that is
much broader than just about leadership. So, you know, I like to think of self awareness as again this this this basis for building and improving. That's a that's a great way of expressing it. And I think it's really interesting to think about the counter factual for a second. Let's just assume that
we never self reflect, right, what happens. I think where we end up is that, by default, each of us tend to impose our own frame of reference on everything we see and encounter, right, our experiences,
our history, our ego, our experiences, our education. And when we don't self reflect, we sort of elevate our individual preconceptions, almost to the point of narcissism in a way, right, because we're not integrating a sort of analysis of why we believe what we believe or why we are who we are and despite being at a point in our cultural zegeist where the elevation of individual behavior and the narcissism that's accompanied that, it's really it's an explanation for
why we're at the point that we're at in our political societal cycle where we confront so many mirrored problems. I absolutely agree is that it creates if you are, if you're not self aware and don't have that capability of self reflection, that you there's a failure to be able to appreciate difference right and think
that, oh, there is actually another perspective here. I'm gonna I'm gonna tell a little anecdote here, because you know, so much of who we are is about who we are as people and our personalities, right, personalities at the heart of everything. It's what encapsulates our beliefs and and our values. So I was I just saw meet this weekend and I was volunteering, and I was handing out rewards to people who won their what we call in
a swimming meat a heat, which is amazing. And so I had a co volunteer with me, uh and and and we sort of split up the job and what was interesting is his approach to handing out the ducks was to allow the winners to actually choose their duck, and my approach to it would have been, oh, no, here's your duck, which says something about who we are as people. And had I not, I would say, had I not had a level of self awareness, I wouldn't have appreciated that
difference of that approach. And I know that's a very small, anti anecdotal sort of example, but it's just interesting that having that self awareness then allowed me to be like, oh, yeah, that is a different way to do it, and here's why I would do it this way, and here's why you're doing it this way. And so I think that having the self awareness really gives us that appreciation of difference. Totally agree. So as you
think about it, what are the most common impediments to self awareness? I feel like I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and maybe I'll take a stab at some of what I thought Slash researched. One is the sort of a piece of research actually that I was reading was talking about how our understanding of anything is composed of three things. Right, our own understanding or our perception of something the other person's perception of something, and that maybe
one or more people, and then the truth. And those are three quite different things and are often at odds with one another. Yeah, absolutely, there are. There's three components. And let's go back to this idea of self reflection, because in order to be self aware, you have, as you said earlier, it's the car, right, self reflection is the car. You have to have moments of self reflection to then develop the awareness.
And whether that's like I'm quiet sitting by myself and I'm bored, or that's like I'm in the moment and I'm gonna take a pause and think about this. From my perspective, I feel like one of our biggest challenges as a society is as a culture is productivity culture, and this idea that you always
need to be doing and if you aren't doing, you're losing something. Because of that, there is our culture does not reward or value time doing nothing, and it's in those moments of nothing that there is room for self reflection. And so when a culture that says you should always be doing something, there is no time for that reflection. And I think that's I think that's
one element of it. And then the other is the how we choose now as a society to fill those times and many times, you know, it used to be that you were waiting in line for something and what would you do when you were waiting in line. Maybe that's the moment that you would take to think about something that had happened, pause, or something that you were going to do. And now we fill it by what I call doom scrolling or checking your email has anyone written me? You know, we every
single moment. If it's not being filled productively, then it's being filled by social media. So the reality is is that in our twenty four to seven culture, there's always something we can be doing. I think another factor is fear. Right. We all have our own inherent fears. I'll give you an example. So my family passed away when I was twelve, and every person I tell that too, when they learned that it happened in an airplane crash, says to me, oh, s, are you afraid of flying?
Turns out, I'm not afraid of flying, but I have this weird, irrational fear of ruches. It's very acute. I don't know what it is. It's partly what they look like, But most of the reason is probably that some of my earliest memories of my mother are watching her like run out of a room shouting every time she saw a roach, and that sort of became a default behavior in a way, right, it became my own
fear and a default behavior. And that role of our past in making us who we are our reactions and behaviors to things that we encounter is such a critical piece and warrants the need for self reflection because if we can't understand why we react and why we behave to things in the way that we do,
we can never actually change them. Yeah, absolutely, And again that's creating this right, you have to have this space to to do that, to realize that so much of who we are is our habits, actually, right, just habits that develop and and and some of them are adaptive strategies to
experiences of our past. But that actually leads me to another sort of point about sort of you know, what are the challenges when we think about self reflection, And one of them is that we don't always ask ourselves the right questions when we're self reflecting, and that's because we just don't really know how right and and you know, I think, you know, we oftentimes in the world of coaching, we get the what's the difference between coaching and therapy?
And we you know, therapy explores the why behind a certain behavior, whereas coaching explores the behavior is what it is. But I want to do this instead, I want to be this instead? So how do I get there? How do I how do I change that behavior? You're and self reflection is really what's really important is not about asking the why questions as much as the why questions. What is important to me? What do I want
to be? And so I think that the challenge too, when you start asking the why questions is oftentimes then you end up with an answer that's self deceptive because we never want to believe bad things about ourselves, right, it's I think it's a protection mechanism, it's a survival mechanism. But really asking the what questions that are very forward focused, and that's the beauty also of
working with a coach, because they help you ask those what questions. You perfectly segued into what was going to be my next question, which was about analytical tools, like what are the analytical tools that exist for self reflection? I think coaching is definitely one of them. It does it in a very forward looking, goal oriented way, right to your point of asking the question
of what are you trying toccomplish, and then working backwards from there. I also think I spent some time looking at a variety of different online and sort of hard copy like paper based assessment tools, and then there's sort of non assessment based tools. You could say meditation is a method of self reflection,
right, which some people love and others really struggle with. So there are lots of different mechanisms that exist, and I think the reason that we created my three sixty in the end was that there wasn't anything fast and quick that asked you a set of essential questions that you could think about in your own context and then get an output that identified very clearly where you might want to spend some more time thinking about how you can get to a place of greater
satisfactionsotely, and then my three sixty is designed to be the starting point, right, it's not, and it leverages again, it's this idea, you
know, we talked, I talked about it earlier. We're always on social media and you can find that quiz on social media and so it taps into the places where you are and then hopefully invites you or prompts you to take that moment while you're standing in line at the grocery store waiting for the bus, you know, waiting for the subway, and it's not you know, it's it's not meant to tell you everything about yourself, but it's a it's it's a again, it's a starting point of you know, what is working
for me? Where am I? Where where do I want to go with with my life? And where do I need to spend some time with some active thought or get some help, whichever the answer may be. So I want to bring this all back to sort of where we started in a sense, why is it that more self aware and self reflective people in general experience more success in their professional and personal lives? Like that, I think is the essential question, right, It's like, why should you be bothered by
any of this? It's that those people tend to be happier and more successful in their lives. Some of the research out there states actually that when we are self aware, we are also more self accepting. And once you have that self acceptance about who it is, again, it's the springboard idea, the building block idea. From there you can go anywhere, and so I
think that to me, that's how I think about it. You know, when you have awareness about who you are, then you can accept that and then you can work to change those things that you want to change, or you know, figure out what you value and where you want to go. You know, it's like the starting point on the Candyland game, you know, to get to the gum drop castle or whatever it is at the end of that game. You know it really it just it enables you to have
that foundation then to bring about happiness, to bring about success. That's such a great point. I also think realism is another part of it, right. It goes very hand in hand with acceptance. It's that we all have these ideas about who we are, and it's only self reflection that allows us to unify what we think of ourselves with what we're hearing from others around us.
Whether that's family members, partners, children, siblings, or work colleagues it doesn't really matter, and try to reconcile those two versions of who we are into the real who we are. I think, yeah, absolutely, And I think that in addition to sort of the my three sixty quiz and encouraging people to to take that step and find it and take it and reflect. You know, a lot of the research out there says, you know, put in a calendar update to do a micro reflection on your day.
What went well today, what didn't go well? What did I learn? So pr practicing micro reflection in order to help develop that that skill of being able to self reflect. You know. The other sort of I guess tip that I would leave our audience with is this idea of finding people who will give you feedback, like honest feedback. So people do that that, you know, and I would say this, I'm gonna and on a like this
is a very personal note for me. When I became a parent, uh you know, I had a child and children are super unfiltered, and I think sort of to me, one of the greatest joyes of being a parent is having had a child who is super unfiltered and tells me like it is. And I will say that I have learned a lot about who I am from from my child, you know, So I so find that find that person to tell you you know who you are. That's a great point.
Thank you for joining us today. I'm Sam Joyenti and I'm Jamie Cosmar and thanks for being with us for this episode of the Idea Mixed Coaching, Performance and Wellness Podcast. Thanks for listening, Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave us a review. Find your Ideal Coach at www dot viidmix dot com. Special thanks to our producer Martin Maluski and singer songwriter Doug Allen.