I know, for example, that I need time to process information properly. I know that my mental, social and emotional batteries need monitoring. I know that some environments drain me more quickly than others, and I know that when I am depleted I cannot be there for people in the way they deserve or in the way I want to be.

I know all of this.

And yet I still occasionally find myself doing precisely the things I know don’t serve me particularly well.

Which makes me wonder what all that lovely self-awareness is actually for.

I’m beginning to think that self-awareness is useful information, but it isn’t the destination. It’s parts of the jigsaw that give me something to work with. What I do with that information is where the interesting bit begins. This is something I’ve learned repeatedly through my own messy learning journey. I can understand a pattern intellectually and still need to experience it before the penny really drops. Sometimes I need to try something, discover what happens, adjust my approach and try again. That process gives me information I simply couldn’t have gathered by thinking about it from the safety of my armchair.

And perhaps that is especially relevant to we introverts because thinking things through is something we tend to value. I certainly do. I like to understand the landscape before I set off across it. I like to know what I’m dealing with, consider the possibilities and make an informed decision. All perfectly sensible, until thinking becomes a substitute for doing.

I’ve caught myself there more than once.

I can analyse something beautifully. I can identify the possible causes, explore the consequences, consider what other people might be thinking and construct several perfectly plausible explanations for why I am behaving as I am. I can even persuade myself that I am making progress because I have understood the situation more deeply.

Meanwhile, nothing has actually changed, which is an uncomfortable realisation really, because there is a subtle difference between having insight and using insight. One can fool us into believing we have done some groundbreaking work when we have actually just become very well informed about the pattern we are still repeating. Still useful but far from transformational.
I’ve seen this in my work too. People can know an extraordinary amount about their personality, their strengths and their preferences. They can explain themselves beautifully. They can tell you exactly why something happens for them and where it probably came from.

Then the same situation arrives and they respond in exactly the same way. That isn’t a criticism as I’ve done it myself. Patterns are persistent little blighters.

So what do we do?

For me, the answer has increasingly been experimentation.

I love the idea that we can treat life as a series of small experiments because it removes some of the pressure to get everything right. I don’t have to know in advance whether something will work. I can try it, pay attention to what happens and then decide what the evidence is telling me.

That is very different from blindly following somebody else’s formula.

I’ve spent nearly 40 years in learning and development, and one of the things that still concerns me is how readily people are spoon-fed answers. Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon, as E. M. Forster put it so beautifully. Real learning needs the WHY, not simply the What and How, because every situation we encounter will be different and we need to be able to re-engineer a process for ourselves.

The same applies to knowing ourselves. I don’t want to collect more and more information about who I am and then use it as an excuse for staying exactly where I am.

I want my self-awareness to inform my choices.

If I know I tend to overthink, I can notice when I’m doing it and decide whether more thinking is actually useful.

If I know I regularly say yes when I really mean no, I can experiment with a different response.

If I know there is something I want to say, ask for, or change, I can explore what happens when I take one small step towards doing it.

And yes, that may require more bravery than I may typically demonstrate.

Not the sort that involves throwing yourself off a cliff metaphorically or otherwise, but the quieter courage of trying something unfamiliar, knocking knees and all, and being open to learn from what happens.

That is why I’m increasingly interested in what we do with what we know about ourselves because self-awareness is an ongoing journey, and a braver introvert is increasingly self-aware whilst also being willing to undertake small experiments without attachment to the outcome.

So, what do you know about yourself that you have been using to understand your behaviour?

And what might happen if you used that same knowledge to experiment with changing one small thing?

You don’t need another personality profile to answer that. You might simply need to notice what you already know, and then be curious enough to do something with it.

Sign-up for the 𝗕𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 here

—

𝗕𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗿 and 𝗕𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 are copyright of Flourishing Introverts

𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗿: Entirely human written and designed content without any AI assistance.