(And no, it does not involve a vision board)
Let me paint you a picture. A business owner walks into a meeting, absolutely certain they are an exceptional communicator, a decisive leader, and a joy to work with. Their team, meanwhile, has a group chat named something unprintable, where they collectively process the experience of working for this person.
This is not a hypothetical. This is Tuesday.
Self-awareness, or rather the spectacular lack of it, is one of the most common and most costly problems I encounter in my work as a business consultant, business advisor, and business coach. And the genuinely tricky part? The people who need it most are often the last to know they need it.
The skill nobody puts on their LinkedIn profile
We live in a world that rewards confidence, celebrates hustle, and moves fast enough that nobody has time to stop and ask, “Wait, am I actually the problem here?” Strategic planning, financial literacy, leadership skills: all firmly on the agenda. Self-awareness? Buried somewhere between “miscellaneous” and “we’ll get to that.”
And yet, in my experience as a business advisor, self-awareness is the invisible thread connecting almost every business challenge I work on. Underperforming team? Usually, a leadership style that is invisible to the leader themselves. Recurring revenue plateau? Often, a founder is brilliant at starting things and allergic to finishing them, but has never quite connected those two facts. Difficult client relationships? Sometimes the market, sure, but frequently, a pattern the business owner has been cheerfully repeating for years.
“The most dangerous thing in any business is a leader with absolute certainty and zero self-awareness. They are efficient, decisive, and absolutely catastrophic.”
So, what exactly are we talking about?
Self-awareness in a business context is not the kind of navel-gazing that requires a retreat to Bali and a significant investment in linen clothing (although I’m a big fan of both). It is, simply, the ability to see yourself clearly: how you make decisions, how you show up for your team, what triggers you, what you are genuinely good at, and, perhaps most valuably, what you are not.
The research on this is both fascinating and mildly confronting. Dr Tasha Eurich, organisational psychologist, New York Times bestselling author, and the world’s foremost researcher on self-awareness, found that while 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only 10 to 15% actually are. That means on a good day, as Eurich herself puts it, roughly 80% of us are lying to ourselves about whether we are lying to ourselves.(Take a moment. Sit with that.)
Which means there is an excellent chance that at least some of the people reading this right now are in the vast majority who think they have got it sorted, and do not. The joyful irony of self-awareness research is that it is most likely to be dismissed by the people who need it most.
What it actually costs you
A lack of self-awareness is not just an interpersonal inconvenience. It is a genuine business liability. Eurich’s research, published in the Harvard Business Review, found that self-aware leaders are more confident, more creative, make sounder decisions, build stronger relationships, and run more profitable companies. Meanwhile, working with leaders who lack self-awareness can cut a team’s chances of success in half and significantly increase stress and turnover.
When you do not know how you operate under pressure, you make reactive decisions that you later have to untangle. When you are unaware of your communication style, you create confusion that costs time and trust. When you cannot see your own blind spots, you hire people just like you, build businesses with the same structural weaknesses, and wonder why you keep arriving at the same frustrating destinations via slightly different scenic routes.
As a business coach, I have worked with people who have spent years trying to fix the wrong thing, because the real issue was one they could not yet see. The business model was not the problem. The strategy was not the problem. The leader, specifically their unexamined patterns and assumptions, was the problem. Expensive ones.
Three questions worth actually answering
Here is where I ask you to resist the urge to skim. These questions are deceptively simple, deeply useful, and almost universally avoided:
First: What story do you tell yourself about why things are not working? Write it down, then ask yourself whether it conveniently positions you as entirely blameless. If so, worth a second look.
Second: How do the people who work with you, or for you, actually experience your leadership? Not the version you intend, but the version they receive. If you do not know, that silence is itself information.
Third: Where are you avoiding something? A conversation, a decision, a difficult truth about your business or yourself? Avoidance has a cost, and it compounds daily.
Eurich’s own research suggests a useful reframe here: swap “why” questions for “what” questions. Instead of “why did this go wrong?” ask “what do I need to do differently?” It is a small shift that bypasses the spiral of self-criticism and moves you straight to useful insight.
The good news (finally)
Self-awareness is not a fixed trait; you either have it or you do not. It is a skill, and like any business skill, it can be developed. It just requires something most high achievers find mildly excruciating, slowing down long enough to look inward.
That might mean working with a business coach to get a genuine external perspective. It might mean building structured feedback loops with your team. It might mean sitting with a question longer than is comfortable before you reach for an action plan. (I know. Horrifying.)
The business owners and leaders who do this work do not just feel better in some vague personal growth sense. They perform better. They build stronger teams, make clearer decisions, and lead in a way that is actually sustainable. In a market where everyone is looking for an edge, knowing yourself, genuinely, clearly, and honestly, is one of the most powerful competitive advantages available.
It just does not come with a certification. Or a LinkedIn badge. Which is probably why we keep overlooking it.
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” — Rumi
Ready to lead with greater clarity?
If any of this landed a little close to home, that is probably a good sign. I work with business owners and leaders across Australia as a business consultant, business coach, and business advisor. Let’s have an honest conversation about where you are and where you want to go.
Want to learn more from Tasha Eurich? Watch the TED Talk “Increase your self-awareness with one simple fix”. Tasha Eurich: Increase your self-awareness with one simple fix | TED Talk
