How to Improve Self-Awareness: See Yourself as You Are and as Others Do

To improve self-awareness, work on two things at once: how clearly you see your own reactions, strengths and values, and how accurately you understand the way other people see you. Reflect with “what” questions rather than “why” questions, write down patterns as they happen, and ask a few honest people for specific feedback.

If a comment of yours has ever landed very differently than you meant it to, or a piece of feedback described someone you barely recognized, you already know the gap this is about. What surprises most people is that thinking harder about yourself rarely closes it on its own. Some ways of looking inward actually make it wider.

Two kinds of self-awareness, and why you need both

Self-awareness is not one thing. Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, writing in Harvard Business Review, separates it into two dimensions. Internal self-awareness is how clearly you see your own values, passions, aspirations and reactions. External self-awareness is how well you understand how other people see you. The two are independent: being strong on one says nothing about the other, which is why someone can know exactly what they want from their career and still be baffled by how they come across in meetings.

The distinction matters because the methods that build one side do not build the other. Reflection works on the inside view. The outside view depends on information that only other people hold, and no amount of quiet thinking can produce it.

There is also a reason to treat this as something to build rather than something you already have. Eurich’s research found that although most people believe they are self-aware, only 10 to 15 percent actually are. Feeling that you know yourself is not evidence that you do. The encouraging side of that finding is that the gap is common, and it responds to practice.

Internal self-awareness: seeing your own patterns

The instinctive question after a bad day is “why”: why did I snap at that colleague, why am I so anxious about this presentation? According to Eurich, “why” is a surprisingly poor self-awareness question. We have little access to many of the unconscious thoughts, feelings and motives we are searching for, so the mind fills the gap with a plausible story. The story feels like insight, but it may be wrong, and it tends to pull you toward rumination rather than change.

“What” questions work better because they stay with things you can observe and act on. Instead of “Why am I so anxious about this presentation?”, ask “What exactly am I feeling, and which parts of the presentation concern me?” Instead of “Why do I keep clashing with this person?”, ask “What situations set it off, and what do I tend to do next?”

Writing helps here, as long as you read it back. Note a reaction shortly after it happens: the situation, what you felt, what you did. A single entry rarely tells you much. A few weeks of entries show you which situations trigger which reactions, and which reactions keep repeating, which is where internal self-awareness actually comes from.

External self-awareness: seeing how you come across

The outside view has to be borrowed. Eurich found that people who improved their external self-awareness did it by seeking feedback from what she calls “loving critics”: people who have your best interests in mind and are also willing to tell you the truth. Honest feedback costs the giver something, so it tends to come from people who combine goodwill with candor. People who mainly want to please you, or who don’t much care, are less reliable sources.

In practice, that means choosing two or three people deliberately rather than asking everyone or no one. Make the question specific and forward-looking, so it is easy to answer honestly: “In the project meeting today, what could I have done to make my point land better?” works far better than “Any feedback for me?” When the answer comes, first make sure you understand it, then add your own view, then take time to reflect before deciding what to change. The goal is not to accept every comment. It is to find where your picture of yourself and other people’s picture overlap, and where they don’t.

Where to start improving self-awareness: four profiles

Put the two dimensions together and you get four recognizable profiles, each with a different next step.

Introspectors

High internal, low external self-awareness. Introspectors are clear on who they are but rarely check that picture against anyone else’s. They often have the hardest time improving, because they believe they have already done the work, while the people around them may experience them as disconnected or unaware of how they come across. Reflection without an outside check can reinforce a distorted self-image rather than correct it. The next step is feedback, from people chosen with care.

Pleasers

Low internal, high external self-awareness. Pleasers are finely tuned to how they appear to others, so much so that they can lose sight of what matters to them, and end up making choices that don’t serve their own success or satisfaction. The next step is inward: regular, honest reflection on what you value and what energizes you, separate from what you think others expect.

Seekers

Low on both. Seekers don’t yet have a clear sense of who they are or how others see them, and they often feel stuck in their work or relationships without knowing why. This is a common starting point early in a career, not a verdict. The next step is to start both habits at once, in small doses: a few written notes a week, and one specific feedback question to one trusted person.

The Aware

High on both. People in this group reflect regularly and also seek outside feedback to catch blind spots. It is not a finish line. It is what the two habits look like once they have become routine.

If you’re unsure which profile fits, that uncertainty is useful information in itself, and it’s exactly the kind of guess worth testing. A structured look at your work skills gives you an outside reference point to hold your own impression against, which is the same move feedback makes.

How to improve self-awareness in practice: a simple loop

The methods above fit together into one repeating loop: notice a pattern, check it against how others see it, then adjust what you do and watch what changes. Each part depends on the others. Noticing without checking stays unverified. Checking without noticing leaves you with feedback you can’t connect to anything. And neither one matters until it changes a choice you make.

The loop matters because the patterns worth catching tend to build slowly, through habits you carry from one situation to the next, and they are hard to see from the inside while they are forming.

My biggest fears are probably not being good enough professionally and eventually burning myself out.

I’m also afraid of ending up in a job where the work feels completely meaningless. Getting up every morning to do something that serves no real purpose would feel like a waste of my time and everyone else’s. But that feels easier to deal with. If the work has no meaning for you, you can recognize it and make a change.

What worries me more is not performing well enough or gradually pushing myself toward burnout. Those problems are harder to spot because they are often connected to habits and patterns that I bring with me myself.

They can develop almost unnoticed. You keep behaving in the same way, and little by little it builds up. That is what makes them unsettling: they creep up on you, and by the time you notice what is happening, you may already have pushed yourself too far.

That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, describing a worry he had rather than something that had happened to him. His point about patterns is the one that matters here: the habits you bring with you are the hardest things to see, which is exactly why a regular loop of noticing and checking beats an occasional burst of soul-searching.

The loop also pays off beyond catching problems. Once you know which tasks you do well and which leave you drained, and what you actually value in work, you can steer toward the work that fits you instead of guessing. That is the practical return on self-awareness: better choices, made on better information.

What makes self-awareness easier to build

Look back at what the loop asks of you: noticing your own reactions honestly, staying steady when you do, and using what you learn to decide where to put your effort. None of these are personality traits, and each one gets easier with practice.

Building Self-Awareness is the direct work of the loop. It means finding the strengths that are genuinely yours, not just tasks you can manage, and recognizing the exaggerated beliefs about achievement, acceptance or control that can drive an overreaction before you have decided anything. It also means handling feedback well: understanding it first, adding your view, then reflecting, and asking for specific advice about what to do next time.

Building Resilience keeps the inward look from turning into self-criticism. Between an event and your reaction sits an automatic thought, and learning to catch it is where self-awareness becomes usable. When you can ask whether that thought is actually true, or what you would tell a friend in the same spot, a surprising piece of feedback becomes information rather than a blow.

Setting Goals is where self-knowledge turns into direction. Knowing your natural strengths and your work values lets you choose tasks and roles that fit you, rather than chasing what others expect or forcing yourself into a plan made before you knew what you were good at. Self-awareness supplies the evidence; this skill uses it to decide what to try next.

A short, free self-assessment can show you how these three, and the other work skills that sit alongside them in a set of twelve, stand for you today, so you can see which ones to build first rather than working on all of them at once.

Seeing yourself more clearly is a skill you can build

Some of this may already be part of how you work. Maybe there’s a colleague you already trust to tell you when something didn’t land, or you’ve caught yourself rereading a message because you could hear how it might sound to the person receiving it. That is external self-awareness in action, and it is the raw material everything else builds on.

The parts that don’t come naturally yet can be learned, and you can learn them without becoming someone else. Choose the one that matters most for you right now and start there. An accurate read on yourself tends to count for more as your work starts to affect more people, and the habits that build it are small enough to begin this week.

Find out where your skills stand

The only thing left is to get a clear starting picture. The Job Skills Test is a free self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it shows where you stand across all twelve, including self-awareness, and which ones will make the biggest difference for you.

Take the skills test

Free, takes 7 minutes, and your results appear instantly.