Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva, and today we’re talking about how to be self-aware in your business. I actually tend to think that this episode will not perform well in the ratings because I also tend to think most people do not have an interest in being self-aware and don’t realize how critical it is when it comes to their business success.
Like legit, this is the number one reason most people aren’t as successful as they could be. I don’t want to take very much of the credit for this episode. I actually want to give the credit to
Carolyn Nizenkoff, who has been a long-time Thriver. She was in Wealthiest Year Yet at the end of 2022 in the intensive, and she was asking questions about self-awareness and she was like, “You know, one of the things I really want to focus on in 2023 is being more self-aware,” which is just such an impressive choice of focus. She was asking me for resources on it, and I’m going to share with you the advice that I gave her. But I actually want to share a resource that she shared with me.
Carolyn shared with me this Harvard Business Review article, and the title of it is “What Self-Awareness Really Is and How to Cultivate It.” It’s from 2018. I suggest looking it up if you’re looking to become more self-aware. It’s a resource I sourced a ton when I was putting this podcast together. If you want to follow Carolyn, you can follow her on Instagram @thehairstudiocorralitos. She’s amazing. So Carolyn, thank you for the inspo on this.
But when she asked me a bit about self-awareness and what I felt like was critical when creating it, I said, “You know, for me, I think that self-awareness and accountability go hand in hand.”
The reason I think it’s important to share that is for those of you who struggle with accountability, I think there’s much more awareness about struggling with accountability. Like “I set out big goals and I set out big dreams, but I have a hard time sticking to it,” right?
People say “I struggle with habit.” Those are all signs that you’re struggling to be accountable. I think that we struggle to be accountable when we are not self-aware.
Let’s actually start by talking about the signs that any person is struggling with self-awareness. I invite you to see if you might see yourself, identify yourself in any of these signs.
Number one, not admitting mistakes. The unwillingness to admit mistakes is a sign of insecurity. We do it because we think mistakes are bad. “Mistakes mean I’m stupid. Mistakes mean there’s something wrong with me. Mistakes mean I’m inadequate.” We put all of these labels on making errors. If you feel like often things are happening to you, like you are the victim of bad luck, people are out to get me, when something bad happens or you see somebody do something you don’t like, you take it as something that is yours. Like, “I can’t believe they did that to me.” Whoever did whatever did not do it to you.
It’s very rare that somebody does something intentional to hurt another person when it comes to business. Very rarely does that happen. Sometimes it does. Sometimes there are really terrible businesspeople who are truly malicious and are like trying to take others down. That’s very rare. What more happens is you see something go wrong and you say, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe that happened to me.” It did not happen to you. The reason you’re feeling a type of way about something going wrong, a mistake taking place, somebody else doing something cool that you wish you had done, is because you’re shaming yourself. It actually has nothing to do with the other person. But if you don’t believe that you are flawed, you don’t think that you make a ton of mistakes, you don’t allow yourself to make mistakes, that is a huge sign that you’re lacking self-awareness.
Number two, criticizing others. If you find yourself getting in rooms or in groups where you’re talking down about other people, other businesses, your peers, people you perceive as competitors, huge sign of lacking self-awareness because what we do as human beings—this is just human nature is it is much easier to point fingers at somebody else and somebody else’s flaws than looking at our own, right? Just naturally it’s so much easier. So if you find that you are critical, you say things like, “Well, I didn’t want to say it, but,” or “I don’t know if you noticed, but,” or “don’t say that,” “don’t tell that I’m saying this,” huge sign that you’re not self-aware. Instead you’re spending way too much time worrying about being critical about other people rather than looking internally at yourself.
Number three, avoiding hard decisions. People who are lacking self-awareness stay on the fence for too long. Often we don’t make decisions almost always because we’re worried about what other people will think of the decision we make. Almost always, like 90% of the time we’re like, “But what if I make the wrong decision and people think I look foolish? What if I make the wrong decision and it negatively affects my family?” Are our fears around making bad choices or hard decisions? Almost always. It’s how does this affect others or what will people say about me? Almost always, and again, that goes back to lack of self-awareness.
If you have a hard time making a decision, it’s generally because you don’t have the education or the confidence to make it. And so again, self-awareness.
Number four, being vague about your feelings. People who say, “I’m fine” or are wishy-washy, or when confronted with a tough decision, beat around the bush rather than just being honest and direct, are lacking self-awareness and lacking self-confidence in their decisions and their feelings.
Number five, worrying about the future. Number six is ruminating on the past. I want you to ask yourself how focused on the present are you? Are you making decisions based on your fears of the future? What may or may not come together? Are you stuck in the past trying to heal old wounds? Labeling people as their past mistakes, labeling yourself as yours, those are huge signs that you’re lacking self-awareness.
The seventh bonus sign that I’m going to layer on is if you find yourself in challenges or conflict over and over and over. If you have a lot of family drama or work drama or you seem to be at the center of, “Oh, these things always happen to me,” huge sign that you’re lacking self-awareness because you continue to put yourself in those situations where those things are happening whereas those who are self-aware do the things that I just talked about. They make hard decisions. They’re not vague about their feelings, they’re honest about how they feel about different situations, things that are going on, positions that they get put in. They’re not worried about being critical of others because they’re just worried about themselves and they’re very self-aware of it and they’re very open to admitting mistakes, admitting wrongdoing and continuing to be a lifelong learner.
If you feel like you struggle with any of those things in any capacity, you don’t like to admit when you make mistakes, you don’t like to admit when you’re wrong, you find yourself sometimes being critical of others or having feelings of jealousy, you avoid hard decisions, you’re vague about your feelings, you worry about your future, or you spin your wheels on the past, or you find yourself in challenges and conflict, huge signs that you’re lacking self-awareness, so listen up.
This Harvard Business Review study that I’m going to start referencing now did 10 different studies with 5,000 participants over a series of years, and what they found is only 10 to 15% of people are actually self-aware. 85 to 95% of us are walking around massively lacking self-awareness. And the challenge is when you’re lacking self-awareness, you don’t realize that you’re lacking it, right?
I want to share with you some of the things that this study uncovered ‘cause I found them to be so fascinating. First, it uncovered that there’s two different types of self-awareness, internal and external. Internal self-awareness is what we think of as traditional self-awareness, so what are my passions? What are my values? What are my aspirations? How do I react when something goes wrong, right?
I was talking about conflict, I was talking about owning up to mistakes. I was talking about not having the fear of judgment. How you react to things is a judgment of your self-awareness. Am I a hothead? Do I jump to conclusions? People who are not self-aware don’t ask those questions, and instead they say things like, “Well, this is just who I am. Take me as I am. This is just part of my personality.” That’s choosing not to be self-aware, which we’re going to get into external in a second.
But the last piece of internal self-awareness is realizing how you impact others. So peoples who say things like, “Well, this is just the way that I am, or take it or leave it,” are choosing not to be self-aware and are choosing not to do the work, which, unfortunately, it only holds them back. When you’re lacking self-awareness, you are the person who loses the most. But it’s a really comfortable place to be self-aware and just be like, “I am who I am. Take it or leave it. Life is as it comes. Oh, well.” That’s the lacking-self-awareness person.
Then we have external self-awareness. For me, I actually find the external self-awareness to be much easier for me. I am obsessed with external self-awareness is what I found after reading this study and the internal is the really hard part.
External self-awareness is how people view us. I actually think I’ll talk about myself for a minute and then I invite you to think about how you react in these situations. I am very concerned about how people view me. One of my big things, and I realized this when I was very young, I think because of the way I was raised in the environment I was raised in, I really for my entire adult life wanted everybody to walk away from an interaction with me feeling good and feeling positive. Even if I let them down, even if I break their heart, even if I disappoint them, I want their overall feeling of me to be like, “But you know what? She was great.” Or, “You know what? She brought a lot of joy to my life.” Or, “You know, relationships are reason/season/lifetime, and Britt was a seasonal person for me, but damn it was good while I was in it.” Like the external self-awareness for me is crystal clear because I am very clear on how I want people to see me in this lifetime.
I want you to ask yourself, have you decided how you want to be seen by people in this lifetime? And if you simply say things like, “Well, as successful, as powerful,” you’re lacking massive self-awareness. Those are simply buzzwords and those are almost like masks we wear to hide our insecurities. But really thinking about how do people view you and then you know how you want to be viewed, but is that how you’re viewed? Is that the takeaway that people are getting from working with you?
Can I just tell you a really vulnerable share? This year in my company, we have had to let some people go and it’s been really difficult. And the majority of people, even those that I had to let go—some people chose to leave, some people I chose to let go—as the time has gone on have written me these beautiful thank you notes that were so unexpected about how wonderful and how enjoyable their time working with me was. And I just think, “Man, that’s got to be so rare.” And it made me feel like, “Okay, I’m doing a lot of things wrong, but maybe that’s one thing I’m doing right.” And having that external self-awareness of how people view us, how you want to walk through the world and how you want the world to see you really helps with that.
People who deeply understand how others see them are more internally self-aware and can show empathy. So working on that external self-awareness of do people see me as snappy? Do people see me as sharp? Do people see me as rude? Do people see me as smart? Do people see me as a poser? Do people see me as a leader? Do people see me as sad? Asking those questions will help you with your internal self-awareness.
My advice is start with the external and really get to thinking about how the world sees you and views you.
Now that we know that, I want to get into the four self-awareness archetypes. This is part of this article that I referenced earlier, so I did not make this up, but if you know anything about me, you know I love a good chart. You know I love archetypes and I just thought this was so well done and it’s why I wanted to bring it to you on the podcast.
I want you to imagine a grid. If you’re in Thrivers, you know I love a good grid. Running up and down vertically would be internal self-awareness and then running horizontally would be the external self-awareness. We just talked about internal and external, so on this graph, people who have low external self-awareness and low internal self-awareness, meaning they don’t know who they are, they don’t know how the world sees them, are called seekers and it just means they don’t know yet. They don’t know who they are, they know what they stand for, they don’t know their values, right?
One of the things I talked about with internal self-awareness was being very aware of your values. 90% of people are walking around this lifetime thinking they know their values. They don’t know shit, they don’t know their values at all, so they fall into the seeker category. They don’t how their friends see them, they don’t know how their family sees them, they don’t know how their teams see them, and as a result, they feel stuck, frustrated with their performance and frustrated in their relationships.
Seekers often feel like victims. Seekers often feel overlooked, overwhelmed, lost, and confused. That would be if you feel like, “Oh my gosh, that’s me,” that’s a huge sign you’re lacking both internal and external self-awareness.
Then we have those who are very externally self-aware, but are low on the internal, so they are pleasers. I always say I’m a people-pleaser in recovery, so when I saw this chart and I knew off the bat, I was like, oh, the external self-awareness for me is easy because I think at a young age, for whatever reason, I externally figured that out. So I think I spent a lot of my lifetime in this pleaser category.
Pleasers have high external self-awareness, very aware of how the world sees them and how they want to be seen by the world, but low internal self-awareness. They’re called pleasers. They can be so focused on appearing a certain way to others that they overlook what matters to them. Again, they don’t know their own values, right? Over time, they tend to make choices that aren’t in service to their own success and fulfillment, so they’re called pleasers, I might also call them chasers. I think that there’s a lot of people in this industry right now who are so hyper-focused on being seen as successful. I think the influencer culture really effed us up in this way. They want to be seen externally and so successful that they are making terrible life choices that are causing them pain, discomfort, to feel lost, to feel less than [that] it’s destroying their confidence, but they’re playing the game and it looks great the way the world they see them, sees them as great, but internally they’re lacking the self-awareness to be like, “But shit, I’m not even making a good life, right? I can’t keep this up. This is not sustainable. This isn’t authentic to me.” Those are called pleasers.
Then we have those who have high internal self-awareness. They know just who they are, they know their values, but they are fully blind to how the world at large sees them. You and I have both met some of these people. We’re like, “You seem confident, but do you realize how you’re coming across?” Those people are called introspectors. They’re clear on who they are, but they don’t challenge their own views or search for blindspots by getting feedback from others. This can harm their relationships and limit their success.
The challenge with introspectors is they feel generally confident. They’re like, “I am a badass. I know what I’m doing, I know what I’m talking about. I know my values. I am deeply rooted in my values. I know who I am, what I want to stand for. I don’t stay stuck in bad relationships,” but it’s almost like the ego gets in the way and they get blind to how they are walking through the world. They don’t challenge their own views, like they’re almost too deeply rooted in their beliefs that they can’t see beyond that maybe, just maybe somebody else has a point of view that could enhance their values because they’re so deeply rooted in their internal self-awareness that they’re not even paying attention anymore to the world around them. That to me, is arguably the most dangerous.
Then we have those who are internally self-aware and externally self-aware, and this is what we should all seek to be. That archetype is simply called aware. They know who they are, what they want to accomplish, and seek out value in others’ opinions. This is where leaders begin to fully realize the true benefits of self-awareness.
I do believe I am working very hard on being aware. If you have had any kind of intimate, one-to-one conversation connection with me, you’ve worked with me in a professional sense more than just listening to this podcast—one of the things that people who spend a great deal of time with me often say, I hear this back a lot, is, “You’re a really great listener,” and I actually think I listen better than I speak. And I don’t think I’m perfect at being aware. I think I’m fatally flawed at it. But I think that I am striving so hard to be both self-aware internally and externally that I choose to listen to others. When I say, “I want to be a lifetime student,” I invite you to really adapt that mindset of constantly asking yourself when things go wrong, how could I have done better in that? How could I have shown up better? Instead of pointing blame or passing blame or feeling like the world is against you, saying, “You know, what did I do to contribute to these thoughts and feelings? What am I not aware of that’s causing me to go through this?”
This is one of the pieces of advice I gave to Carolyn when she asked me, “Britt, can you tell me more about self-awareness?” I said, “You know, I don’t feel like I’m an expert of it, but here’s what I know.” I said, “I ask the question all the time”—and this is one of my biggest self-awareness crosschecks, is when anything goes wrong, when somebody gets mad at me, when I hurt somebody’s feelings, I say, “How did I contribute to this? What was the part I played in this?”
I put on the hat of initially accepting all the blame initially, assuming everything was my fault, and not in a low-confidence way, in a very high self-awareness way. Sometimes in putting on that hat, I’ll run through the exercise and be like, “Nope, I didn’t do anything wrong. I actually handled this really well,” and I think the person on the flip side is maybe not self-aware, but in taking that moment and in asking that question, it changes how I show up to the other person who is maybe lacking in self-awareness. It changes how I walk through the world. It changes how I see things, feel things, watch people make decisions. And I think just asking that question of like, if I’m in a bad relationship, if I’m in a bad situation, if I’ve made a mistake, if I feel like I’ve hurt somebody, how did I contribute to the mistake? How did I contribute to the flaw? How did I contribute to the failure? What could I have done better? That alone is such a great exercise and self-awareness.
An example, I want to give a real-life industry example just to help you understand. If you’re asking, “Am I self-aware?”, remember 90% of us are not. So probably no, but here’s an example of being internally self-aware. If you’ve chosen a specialty based on what you love in the industry, you’re like, “You know what? I love dimensional brunettes. That’s going to be my specialty.” That is an example of being internally self-aware. Internally saying, this is what I love. This is where my values lie. This is where I feel passionate about, this is where I feel confident. This is what brings me joy. This is what people celebrate. I could work the schedule. I love doing this. There’s enough demand for it. I want to do this. That is an internally self-aware business decision. You figured out what you love, you know what you’re good at, you’re confident in it, and you go all in. That’s an internally self-aware, confident choice.
An example of being externally self-aware is does the world see you as that? Can you pull that off? It’s nice that you want to be that, but if the world doesn’t see you that way, all you’re going to end up is frustrated. There’s some of you who feel like you’re spinning your wheels in business and you’re like, “I’m doing everything right. I know who I am. I’ve done the work, I know my values,” but you are close-minded to the external self-awareness.
There’s a couple people right now I could share as an example whether where they’re like, “I’ve made it, I’ve done it, I’ve got it, I know who I am,” and then I look at how you’re showing up on social and you look disinterested. You look like you’re lacking passion. And then when you come to me and you’re like, “I don’t understand why things aren’t coming together,” it’s so clear to me. I’m like, man, they are internally so self-aware of who they are, who they want to be, but they are blind to how the world sees them and how their actions are being perceived.
Now, on the flip side of that, there’s some people who are showing up painfully inauthentically on social media because all they’re worried about is how the world sees them. And they are not aware of what they’re actually good at, what actually brings them joy, and the internal self-awareness. When those two things come together, that is how a happy, successful life is built. When you’re both internally and externally self-aware, which ends up being just aware on our chart, that’s where true joy comes from.
So I encourage you, I know this was a real heady episode, but to really think about awareness, self-awareness, how you’re showing up who you want to be and start asking these powerful questions.
Y’all, if this hit you hard, if you want to continue this conversation, hit me up on iTunes, leave me a rating or review, or you can find me on @brittseva in the DMs.
As I always like to say, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you, my friend, on the next one.
