How the most successful leaders handle self-awareness

The world of popular psychological ideas, which is largely the self-help industry, is not short of contradictions. For instance, it simultaneously promotes the benefits of emotional intelligence (the ability to empathize with others and engage in strategic impression management) and authenticity (the tendency to express what you really feel and think without much consideration for others’ opinions).

It also frequently celebrates self-acceptance and constant self-improvement (“love yourself as you are” . . . but also “become the best version of yourself”), mindfulness and relentless ambition (“stay in the zone, present and serene” . . . while hustling aggressively toward big goals), and even self-awareness and self-belief, which pull in opposite psychological directions.

Self-awareness requires confronting your flaws, limitations, and blind spots with brutal honesty, while self-belief requires ignoring at least some of that evidence to maintain high levels of confidence, optimism, and drive. One asks you to see yourself clearly; the other asks you to believe in yourself despite what you see.

This isn’t a logical flaw so much as a reflection of our human tendency to categorize things as either fully good or fully bad—when in reality, most psychological qualities operate in a yin–yang balance. As Aristotle argued in his doctrine of the golden mean, virtue itself sits at the midpoint between two vices—courage between cowardice and recklessness, generosity between stinginess and extravagance, and confidence between timidity and hubris.

In other words, even the qualities we most admire become dysfunctional when taken too far, and even the traits we distrust can be valuable in moderation. Human behavior functions the same way: Most psychological strengths aren’t inherently good or bad; they’re dose-dependent.

In a similar vein, emotional intelligence (aka emotional quotient, or EQ) isn’t inherently superior to authenticity, and self-awareness isn’t automatically better than self-belief. They each contain the seed of their opposite, and their value depends on the situation, dosage, and context. In fact, one of the most established findings in personality and organizational psychology is the “too-much-of-a-good-thing” effect: Virtually any trait or competency becomes dysfunctional when taken to an extreme.

Confidence turns into arrogance, humility into self-doubt, authenticity into impulsive oversharing, and EQ into manipulative charm. Every strength has a shadow side, every virtue has a saturation point, and every desirable trait comes bundled with its own trade-offs. The goal, then, is not to pick one pure ideal—authenticity or impression management, self-awareness or self-belief—but to learn to calibrate them, blending them in ways that make us more effective rather than more extreme.

Hidden drawbacks

At times, even traits that seem to have no downside, such as self-awareness, come with hidden drawbacks. Intuitively, one would assume that we are generally better off knowing ourselves, understanding how others perceive us, and being aware of our strengths, limitations, biases, and blind spots. After all, entire leadership models, coaching programs, and HR philosophies rest on the idea that insight precedes improvement. If you don’t know what’s broken, how can you fix it? If you don’t know how others experience you, how can you expect to lead them? And if you don’t understand your own motives, how can you trust your decisions?

To be sure, this intuition is backed by a substantial body of research. For example, many scientific studies show that:

1) Self-awareness predicts better job performance. Employees with higher self-insight (as measured through multisource or “360-degree” feedback assessments) tend to show greater effectiveness at work, including when they are managers and leaders.

2) Self-awareness enhances leadership effectiveness. Leaders who are more attuned to their strengths and weaknesses receive higher performance ratings and foster better team climates. (Note, however, that underestimating your skills and leadership talents is also linked to higher leadership effectiveness, compared with people who overestimate themselves.)

3) Self-awareness improves interpersonal relationships. Individuals who understand their emotional patterns and their impact on others display higher empathy and lower conflict. It’s simple: If you know how you impact others—which equates to knowing how others see you—it will be easier for you to adjust your behavior to make a desired impact on others. (This is what David Brent and Michael Scott fail to do, which makes The Office a great comedy value but their characters an absolute nightmare archetype of a boss.)

The value of selective ignorance

However, there are also well-documented benefits to poor self-awareness—or, more precisely, benefits to selective ignorance, including being unaware of your limitations or unjustifiably pleased with yourself. Think of people with the arrogance or confidence of Kanye West, Cristiano Ronaldo, or Muhammad Ali . . . but without the talent to back it up!

Consider the following findings:

First, people with inflated self-views tend to be more resilient and less affected by stress, being able to bounce back faster and stronger from setbacks. Along the same lines, decades of research on positive illusions show that overly optimistic people cope better with adversity and maintain higher motivation.

Second, self-deception can make individuals more persuasive. People who genuinely believe they are more competent than they are often appear more confident and convincing to others. If you can fool yourself, you are much more likely to fool others, since you don’t even have to pretend or lie.

Third, low self-awareness can fuel ambition. Many entrepreneurs, athletes, and leaders overestimate their odds of success—and this unrealistic optimism propels them to attempt things that a more accurate self-assessment would quickly veto. The world’s innovations are not driven by people with perfectly calibrated self-views, but by those who believed they could fly—even when the evidence suggested otherwise.

All of which is to say: The self-help promise of clean, linear psychological virtues overlooks how messy human functioning actually is. A bit like nutrition advice that alternates between demonizing carbs, demonizing fat, and demonizing sugar (sometimes all three, and at times none), the self-help world tends to spotlight traits in isolation, ignoring the context in which they operate. Authenticity is wonderful . . . until it’s not. Confidence is powerful . . . until it becomes delusion. Empathy is admirable . . . until it becomes people-pleasing. Even mindfulness has a dark side when it becomes an excuse for avoidance or emotional disengagement.

A more realistic (and scientifically grounded) way of thinking about psychological qualities is to view them as tools in a repertoire. A hammer is useful, but not if you treat every situation as a nail. Emotional intelligence is helpful, but not if it turns into strategic manipulation. Authenticity is refreshing, but not if it comes at the expense of tact, professionalism, or prosocial self-regulation. And self-awareness is enlightening, but not if it becomes rumination, self-criticism, or paralysis by analysis.

The true art of psychological competence, especially in leadership, is not picking the “right” trait but deploying the right trait at the right time. It’s knowing when to believe in yourself fiercely, and when to question your assumptions. When to be transparent, and when to filter. When to push ruthlessly, and when to pause reflectively. When to take a risk, and when to seek feedback. Most importantly, it’s recognizing that every psychological asset becomes a liability when unbounded, and every liability contains the seed of an asset when calibrated properly.

If the self-help industry were more honest, it would sound far less like a collection of tidy commandments and far more like a user manual for a complex operating system: one with settings, thresholds, sliders, and context-specific modes. But “it depends” will never be a bestseller, and “everything in moderation” is hardly a motivational tagline. So instead, we get a contradictory buffet of directives: Be yourself, but improve yourself; relax, but hustle; speak your truth, but avoid offending anyone; know your flaws, but never doubt your greatness.

The irony, of course, is that mature psychological functioning lies precisely in reconciling these tensions. Not by choosing sides, but by developing the agility to move fluidly between them. In the end, the real contradiction is not in the advice we receive, but in our desire for simple answers to complex questions. Human nature is too nuanced for single-variable solutions, and the qualities that make us effective are rarely pure. They are contradictions held in balance (the yin and yang of psychological functioning). And the leaders who thrive are those who learn to navigate this paradox elegantly, not dogmatically.