on the limits of self-awareness

When I was a CEO and Ben was my coach, I went to him once and said, “Hey, I want to be more self-aware! I have blind spots. How do I fix that?”

Ben’s response was something like, “Um, you don’t. Self-awareness is knowing you have the blind spots. Self-awareness can’t cure the blindness. To manage your blind spots, you need people and systems outside of you. Enlist people to give you information that sits in the blind spot; enlist them to give you feedback when you’re acting or looking through the blind spot.” 

This was humbling and helpful at the same time. It was of a piece with Ben’s advice on email management and praising each member of my team - my most effective work in this wouldn’t come from heroic effort or sudden leaps in skill. It was likelier to come from a simple system that was easy to implement consistently.

-eric