Internal vs External Self-Awareness: What You Can’t See About Yourself

“You know yourself better than anyone else.”

I’ve always liked that idea. It sounds reassuringly sensible. You are, after all, the only person who has spent every waking second of your life inside your own head. You know what you meant, why you made the decision, how much thought went into it and what you were trying to achieve. Surely that puts you in the strongest possible position to understand yourself.

Having just recently had the self-awareness kick in the teeth, I can tell you it’s only half the true narrative.

There is a difference between internal and external self-awareness that I’m starting to better understand and align. Internal self-awareness is how well you understand your own thoughts, motivations, emotions and behavioural patterns. External self-awareness is how well you understand the way other people actually experience you. You can spend an enormous amount of time developing the first and still be spectacularly wrong about the second.

Internal vs External Self-Awareness: The Gap I Couldn’t See

I discovered this rather violently while preparing a talk for the CEM Africa conference.

One of the challenges I have deliberately set myself is becoming good enough at communicating complicated ideas that people will pay me to stand on a stage and talk to them about. Understanding an idea myself is only half the job. I need to make it understandable, compelling and, ideally, entertaining enough that nobody begins checking whether the bar has opened halfway through.

So, while developing my CEM conference talk, I went looking for proper feedback. Not the sort where somebody politely tells you they liked slide seven and everyone goes home feeling marvellous. I took the talk to people from the Story-to-Stage speaking community who were considerably further along the speaking journey than I was and effectively said: tell me what isn’t working.

They did. Shoh, did they ever. The diagnosis, condensed somewhat, was: “You have no talk here. You go from X to Y, then B to C. I don’t understand how any of this connects.”

And crisis, there is an uncomfortable moment after somebody tells you something like that where your brain instantly appoints itself senior counsel for the defence. Of course it connects. Here is why that example matters. Here is how this framework relates to that one. Here are the seven invisible steps I have already completed in my head that make the entire thing perfectly logical. And that, right there, was the problem. It was logical to me.

I had spent weeks inside the material. I had researched it, connected it, dismantled it, rebuilt it and thought about it while walking, driving, showering and occupying all the other entirely reasonable locations in which adults apparently construct conference presentations instead of remembering to buy milk. I could see the whole thing. They couldn’t.

Once I got past the instinct to explain myself, the feedback forced another question: what am I doing that makes something feel completely connected to me and completely disconnected to someone else? And with that I gained considerably more than a better presentation. It gave me information about myself.

The first realisation was that I see a web where other people often need a path. My brain seems to understand complicated things by connecting them. An example connects to a system, which connects to an implication, which connects to something I read months ago, which connects back to the original problem from another direction. Inside my head, this feels coherent. For everyone else, I have apparently invented teleportation.

I also realised that my instinct when something is complicated is often to add. Another framework might clarify it. Another example might help. Another connection makes the model more complete. The additional information genuinely helps me understand the whole, which is exactly why it can be so difficult for me to recognise that it may be making the explanation worse.

I’m comfortable holding several ideas as simultaneously important, while somebody listening still needs me to tell them which one matters first. I jump between levels and implications because my brain has already completed the intermediate steps. And I partly judge the quality of an idea by how much it explains, while the person hearing it has a more immediate problem: can I actually understand what you are saying?

None of these behaviours felt particularly unusual before somebody reflected them back at me. They just felt like thinking.

That is where external self-awareness becomes so important. You know your intention; other people experience your impact. You know why the dots connect; they know whether they could follow them. You know how hard you worked on something; they know whether it worked. Those are different sources of information, and one cannot completely replace the other.

Which brings me to something I have written before: we say we want feedback. What we actually want is applause.

Applause is lovely because it confirms information we already possess. Useful feedback does something much less comfortable: it gives us access to information we don’t.

Why the Right Feedback Matters

That does not mean every opinion fired in your general direction deserves equal weight. The feedback has to relate to what you are trying to achieve. If I want to become a better public speaker, I want to find people who are already very good at public speaking and ask them to show me where I am falling short. If I want to become a better guitarist, I should probably find somebody who can actually play guitar rather than asking Dave from accounts because he once owned a Limp Bizkit CD.

The point is not to outsource our judgement. It is to deliberately seek people who have the experience to see the gap between where you are and where you are trying to go.

That often means stretching beyond the comfortable circle of people who already know you, like you and understand your intentions. Their support matters, but familiarity can sometimes fill in gaps on your behalf. Someone with the relevant experience but without all that context may see the thing far more clearly.

There is, unsurprisingly, a temptation to become defensive when they do. Somebody is challenging an interpretation of ourselves that has been perfectly comfortable to live with. But there isn’t much point asking someone for information you cannot see and then immediately explaining why the information they have given you is wrong.

One comment during the CEM process stayed with me in particular: I had gone too far down the line before testing the talk. That was true. By the time I asked for the most useful feedback, the structure existed, the slides existed, and the clever bits I was particularly fond of definitely existed. I had become heavily invested in the answer, which made changing it considerably more expensive.

The feedback effectively broke me for a week. I rebuilt almost the entire talk, worked through the weekend, killed ideas I loved and deleted slides I had spent hours building. At various points the presentation resembled a small town after a mildly vindictive tornado had passed through.

Eventually the argument got stripped back until the audience had one clear path to follow instead of being invited to roam freely around the entire contents of my head with a compass, emergency rations and instructions to meet me somewhere near the conclusion.

It was absolutely worth it.

The room at CEM wasn’t large, but roughly a quarter of the people in it wanted to continue the conversation afterwards. For something I had almost completely rebuilt a few days earlier because people could not understand what I was trying to say, that felt like fairly compelling evidence that the feedback had done its job.

But the more valuable return was not the talk. It was discovering something about how I operate that I could not properly see while standing inside my own perspective.

What External Self-Awareness Changed for Me

I still see the web. I still synthesise. I still make connections quickly and become disproportionately excited when one idea suddenly explains another. I don’t particularly want to lose any of that. I now simply have a better understanding of what those behaviours can look like from the other side.

And perhaps that is the flaw in “you know yourself better than anyone else.”

You know what it feels like to be you better than anyone else ever could. But you cannot fully know what it feels like to experience you.

For that, sooner or later, you need someone standing on the outside.