Is Your Self-Awareness Only Skin-Deep?

Is Your Self-Awareness Only Skin-Deep?

Most people believe that they see themselves clearly and that they have a good grasp of how others perceive them. But the vast majority are wrong.

Research shows that only 10–15% are actually self-aware.* Even more surprising, the confident, capable, and experienced are more likely to overestimate their level of self-awareness. This leads to a growing “self-awareness gap” that affects the quality of relationships, leadership, and effectiveness.

To complicate matters, it turns out that self-awareness is multifaceted, involving a balance between internal and external awareness. Internal self-awareness is how clearly we see ourselves. External self-awareness is how clearly we understand how others perceive us.

People can lack both kinds of self-awareness, but some have internal self-awareness without external self-awareness. For example, you can know your own values, feelings, strengths, and weaknesses, but this knowledge will not automatically translate to an accurate picture of how others are experiencing you. This is critically important because external self-awareness is correlated to how well others feel they relate to you and how satisfied they are with your leadership.

Developing external self-awareness can be difficult and cannot be done by increased introspection alone. In fact, the more you introspect, the more misled you can become, because it is easy to get caught up in negative feelings that cloud your judgment.

What’s needed is both a clearer picture of yourself and a clearer picture of how others perceive you.

That’s where Consentia Group can help. Our relationship assessment and distinctively Christian training programs give you both pictures of yourself, using an experiential process to raise the level of internal and external self-awareness.

We equip ministry leaders to cultivate gospel-centered cultures where relationships thrive. Through our certification programs, you can bring the Strengths Deployment Inventory (SDI) to your unique context.

Discover how deeper relationships can lead to greater ministry impact in 2025.

*Tasha Eurich, “What Self-Awareness Really Is,” Harvard Business Review, January 4, 2018, hbr.org/2018/01/what-self-awareness-really-is-and-how-to-cultivate-it.

Del Fehsenfeld
dfehsenfeld@lifeaction.org