Here is the full transcript of EQ Leadership’s founder Fin Sheridan’s talk titled “Are You Self-Aware Or Just Self-Absorbed?” at TEDxUnity Park 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Arrogance Game
In 2020, my friends and I started playing a game and it started just being a couple of us and then it started to spread and before long it was, I was getting voice notes from other friendship groups that I didn’t even know participating. And the game is we were asking one another, “What’s your most arrogant take about yourself?”
Now what I’d love to do is just press time out on the TED talk thing and let’s just do that. Open mic right now with this room. I’ve actually seen that happen and it was an absolute train wreck, except for the person facilitating. So that would be quite fun. Some of the answers that people gave.
One friend said that if all they needed was a job interview and they were convinced they could get any job in the world. Okay. Fair enough. Well, another friend said that as long as he, and it was a he, as long as he was better looking, he would have untakeable power, which is deeply concerning.
Another friend said that if they hadn’t stopped playing tennis at age nine, they were convinced that they could be any world number one. Another friend said in a room full of their peers, that they were the best leader in the room. And this was a leadership room that really felt like it was all the best leader in the room. And they just own that thing.
My Most Arrogant Take
I’m going to share my most arrogant take with you. And as I have prepared for this moment, I’ve really evaluated, for four years I’ve been saying this out loud in front of people, and it’s very rarely gone down well. So I thought on the biggest stage of my life, this would surely be the best place for it to come out.
My most arrogant take is that on average, any woman would be happier if they were married to me. See, that’s exactly what happens. There’s a smattering of gasps, there’s a lot of laughter, and there’s a couple of people thinking, “Really?” Now my wife’s here, and I’ve milked the British thing for eight years of our marriage, and it’s gotten pretty old.
It’s now just my irritating little voice, as she calls it. So I’m not sure where the delusion that any woman would be happier if they were married to me came from, but I’ve been saying it out loud for the last four years, and I still kind of think it at some level. But that’s not even the point of the talk, it’s just the way to get the thing going.
Most people give this answer, and we’ve had some real science, some actual science happen today. This is the least scientific study, but the most common answer is, “I’m too humble to have one.”
And I want you to know that if that’s the thing that came into your brain, because most of you stopped listening to what I was saying and just started thinking about your most arrogant take, but if that’s your answer, can I just tell you something? It’s not a fun game when you say that, because some of us are out here claiming to be God’s gift to females all across the world, and some of you are going, “Well, I’m too humble to have one.”
Self-Awareness
It’s just not really fair to us. The question that really me and my friends are asking is, “How self-aware about your strengths are you, and how willing are you to put two feet in the ground and say it out loud?” And ever since someone carved, “Know thyself,” into the side of the temple in Greece, self-awareness and self-knowledge has been part of the human story.
People have been thinking about, “What does it mean to be a fully self-aware person? What does it mean to be able to be reflective about what’s so much a mystery to so many of us, what’s going on in the inside?”
And so the pursuit of self-awareness has been well-documented and well-thought through, and really, we talk about self-awareness in two ways. One, internal self-awareness. This is your ability to know what’s going on inside of you, to recognize your own feelings, emotions, values, and have as much as possible objective sense about that.
And then there’s external self-awareness. External self-awareness is your ability to read a room full of strangers when you tell them that you think you could be better married to their wife than they can. External self-awareness is how we are perceived in the world, and our ability to read that and understand that.
And self-awareness, just like all skills in emotional intelligence, which is where most of my work is done nowadays, self-awareness is a skill that can be trained and taught. Even though it feels like some people have the propensity and the bias towards it, self-awareness is actually something, both internal and external self-awareness, we can all grow in. We can thrive in.
We can develop over time with the right level of skills and training. And it’s this self-awareness that leads to the unlocking of all of these incredible other skills like flexibility and empathy, resilience, stress management, decision-making, all of these pieces that are so valuable for us as we navigate this thing called life, that they find their foundation and their root in being self-aware. So if we can grow in self-awareness, how do we do that?
Building Habits of Reflection
Well, one of the things that we should do is to build into our lives a sense of reflection. We’ve again talked about habits several times today, and one of the ways that you can form a great habit that will lead to increased self-awareness is to build habits of reflection.
Now our society is rigged against reflection.
We would much rather sit down and watch Pookie and Jeff on TikTok than we would sit and reflect. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal says it like this, that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room by himself,” and he was right particularly about the man stuff, because in 2014, the University of Virginia in Science Magazine did a study. They put men and women alone in a room with their thoughts, and they gave them the option they could either sit quietly or they could give themselves an electric shock.
67% of men would rather give themselves electric shocks than sit… It’s not even a joke, it’s a real statistic, it’s the most scientific thing I’m saying today. 67% of men would rather give themselves an electric shock than sit quietly and do nothing for 6 to 15 minutes. Incidentally, 25% of women. Isn’t that remarkable?
We have rigged our culture against reflection. So, as we seek to grow and learn in self-awareness, I just want to offer to us that there actually might be such a thing as too much self-awareness, that if self-awareness is such a valuable skill and can lead to such unlocking in human relationships between us, what happens when self-awareness actually trips over the boundaries and starts to turn sour? Is there such a thing as too much self-aware? Can you be too self-aware?
Too Much Self-Awareness
And I would like to just offer to you in our time together that yes, you absolutely can. And that if self-awareness starts to grow moldy, it actually becomes and it mutates and becomes a kind of self-obsession and even a narcissism that even in our selfie culture is incredibly distasteful to be around. So how do you know?
How do you know where your self-awareness is? Is there a way that we can test that? There are absolutely ways we can test that.
One of the things that we can do is ask ourselves, “What happens when you make a mistake?” What happens when you make a mistake? Now, we’re all going to make them. There might be small mistakes like forgetting your car keys or leaving something important at the office when you were headed out somewhere else.
It may have been coming to a TED talk and not telling your significant other that they were going to be solo parenting for the day. There’s so many different things that you could, just little mistakes or big mistakes, transgressions of values. You said that thing that you would never say.
You did that thing that you said you would never do. You crossed a moral line that you said to yourself, “I’m never going to cross this and yet you find yourself doing it.” So what do you do when you make a mistake? Well, there’s a couple of places people go.
Some people just set up shop and blame and resent being caught. They wriggle. They don’t take responsibility. They’re a victim of this circumstance. And then there’s those of us who are quite the opposite. Actually, when we make a mistake, it almost absorbs into our sense of self.
We overly identify with the mistakes. It’s not just that I did something stupid. It’s that I am stupid. It’s not just that I did an embarrassing thing.
I am an embarrassment. Do you bounce back quickly from your mistakes? Are you able to say, “Okay, I did something wrong. That’s fine.
Tomorrow’s a new day. I’m starting afresh.” Or do you replay over and over again the same old rhythms of what you did when you were 15 and it’s still somehow running the show? These are all useful pieces of emotional intelligence data for us that can help us discover really how self-aware we are, how objective can we be about what’s really going on inside of us.
Invitation: Be Self-Aware About Your Self-Awareness
So I want to offer you, just in our time together, an invitation. Some of us may need to move from unaware to self-aware. But some of us may also need to pull the reins in a little bit and move from this constant self-evaluation, this constant navel-gazing, this constant introspection, and actually pull ourselves back into the healthy place where we’re just able to see ourselves as we really are.
Here’s what I want you to do. Become self-aware about your self-awareness. Become self-aware about self-awareness.
And now maybe that’s a little bit meta, a little bit Christopher Nolan, a little bit dream within a dream. So what does that actually mean, Finn? What do you actually want me to do with that?
Well, there’s a couple of ideas that I think could be really helpful as we seek to practice self-awareness on our self-awareness. Number one, I want you to be curious but not caught up. Be curious about what it is that’s going on inside of you but not caught up.
Emotional Agility
Susan David from Harvard Medical School coined the phrase “emotional agility.” I’m not going there. Emotional agility, just like that. It’s that we’re trying to be agile about what it is that we’re feeling.
We’re trying to be nimble around it, but we’re not trying to get hooked on it. We’re trying to be like a little fishy, just nibbling at the food but not caught on the hook. Be curious about what it is that’s going on inside of you but don’t be caught on it.
One of the best ways that we can do this is to ask ourselves “what” questions rather than “why” questions. Now, we are human beings and human beings love “why” questions. Why do I feel like this?
Why did he say that? Why did she do this? Why is this happening to me this way? Why am I reacting like this? Why, why, why, why, why? I ask “why” questions so much. They are so useless because I don’t know why. My favorite poet, Walt Whitman, says it like this, “I contain multitudes.”
There’s the algorithm of my family running me. And then there’s the algorithm of being British. And then there’s the algorithm of being Southern but also kind of British at the same time.
And then there’s the algorithm of my family of origin is doing stuff to me, but at the same time I’m trying to make independent choices. There’s all different stuff going on in me. I don’t know what’s going on, even on my best days.
Ask “What” Questions in Reflection, “Why” Questions in Community
So asking “why” just leaves me down a dead end. Let alone asking why did he do that or she say this. They’re just a mystery to themselves, let alone to you.
But if we ask “what” questions, what happened today? What did I feel? What did she say that was so troubling to me? What did he do that upset me?
These questions are gold nuggets for us to be able to understand a little bit about what’s going on inside of us. And if you really want to kind of ace the test, and the Enneagram Threes in the room are like, “Yes, I do,” if you really want to ace the test, you start asking “what” in reflection and asking “why” in community. If you ask “what” in reflection, you allow yourself to kind of get a little bit of an objective sense about what’s going on inside of you, whether it’s at work or in your community or in your team, in your individuality, all those sorts of things.
Really helpful to do in reflection. Ask “why” with someone else, a coach, a counselor, a family member. That’s why we’re here today.
We’re asking questions together. We know that there’s something collaborative and exciting that happens when we come and ask “why” alongside other people. I practice this in my own life.
Finding a Tether
I have a spiritual director and a coach. She works with the Enneagram. And we were talking the other day. We were asking “why” together.
She was asking me some things, and I just didn’t have the answer for her. I said, “Look, I feel extremely comfortable going 150 feet down in my own emotions and my own head. And it feels like you’re asking me to go 300 feet, and I don’t know what happens when I go down there, and I don’t know how I’ll get back up.”
She offered this wisdom, and I’ll offer it to you as well. She looked at me and said, “Finn, you’ve got a great tether.” We started listing together the things that are going to be able to keep me from getting caught up in all the stuff that’s going on in my emotional world. I’d offer the same wisdom to you.
You need a great tether. You need something to help you find your way back up, something to get your way back to the surface. After all, the only difference between drowning and diving is whether you made it back to the top.
The Downsides of Over-Analyzing
Being in such a way where you are evaluating and re-evaluating how you’re coming across to people is an exhausting way to live. It produces a fragile ego, it’s deeply detrimental to your happiness, and you’re actually quite unpleasant to be around. So I want to offer a different kind of life, as well as an idea worth sharing, perhaps, that maybe as you make the transition from unaware to self-aware, or the transition away from this self-obsession and self-reflection that’s constantly happening, that’s actually not helpful or useful to you at all.
What if you made your way back into this healthy realm of self-awareness? You’ll find that something starts to happen. You don’t become self-deprecating or putting yourself down, you just experience a kind of self-forgetfulness, where actually you’re not the central character of your own story or anyone else’s.
Being able to walk into a room without having to feel like you’re constantly proving yourself to a jury of your peers, jostling for space on a lifeboat of life, you’re simply able to offer yourself to whoever you meet, in love and wisdom and compassion. You’re able to give and receive love, which is what it truly means to be a human being. You’re able to experience the fullness of yourself, and when you experience that, everyone around you is grateful for that too.