Why Self-Awareness Beats Talent | Ian Cron

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1:06New markdowns up to 70 % off are at Nordstrom Rack stores now Stock up and stay big on shoes, tops, dresses, accessories and more must-haves for summer Join the Nordic Club to unlock exclusive discounts Shop new arrivals first and more Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free Great brands, great prices That's why you rack. I came to him one time and I said, I had this interaction and I'm really pissed. And he goes, Ian, you need to give up the old idea that you know what just happened. And I just thought to myself that I'm a therapist. I was like, where did you get that?

1:42That is absolutely brilliant. Like I have assumed that I know what just happened when I don't. And so I need to have a kind of looseness on what I think is the truth and be open to the possibility that there's a lot more going on here than I can imagine.

2:06Welcome to the show, Ian. It's great to have you. It's a delight to be here. Thanks. For our audience members who might not be familiar with the Enneagram, can you explain to us what it is and what drew you to it? Yeah, the Enneagram is a personality typing system that teaches there are nine basic personality styles in the world, one of which we gravitate toward and adopt in childhood as a way to cope, to protect ourselves and to get our needs met and to navigate the new world of relationships that you find yourself in when you arrive on this planet. it. Yeah, I think for many of us, when we think about our personality, we think about it developing over time.

2:57And we often think more about our personality as an adult than we do about our childhood. So how should we be thinking about personality if that's what our listeners are thinking right now? Yeah, well, let's let's let me just offer a non-clinical definition of personality, right? Because it's one of those words that people assume they know what it means until you ask them to define it. And then they're like, well, you know, it's just... I would say for our purposes, the personality is how you predictably and habitually show up for life. So in other words, it's these patterns of thinking, acting, and feeling that just repeatedly show up in our lives, some of which are very self-limiting and others that are quite useful, right?

3:47The key is to develop enough self-awareness that you can monitor it in real time and show up as your best self. So paint a picture of this childhood, because I think, again, when we talk about personality and we think about personality, we're often thinking about it in how we relate to adults. We don't think about it as being shaped based on childhood events outside of maybe those in the audience who've faced some real trauma growing up. But much of this is patterning very early on in life, how we interpret certain people's behaviors, actions, the way we're treated, that then carry on into adulthood and present these same patterns and the relationships that matter to us.

4:32Yes. In part, what you're asking about, I think, is the nature-nurture question, and how does a personality arise, right? And I will tell you that it's probably one of the most hotly contested debates in psychology. You'll hear a wide variety of answers to that question. I think the answer to it is it's both. But we really don't know, like with any set idea, is it 50 % one and the other? Is it 30 of one, 70 of the other? Is it different for everybody, how it arises, you know? So I think there's a biological component, a genetic component, but it's largely shaped by, you know, family of origin experiences, some by trauma.

5:19You know, it's shaped by the unconscious messages that we assign meaning to and ascribe to, you know, in childhood. And so we think the nuts and bolts of personality are in place between the ages of five and seven uh and then you know over time it coalesces and becomes something stable and more uh fixed if you will not ultimately fixed you can work with it but um you know after a while it concretizes a bit so how did the enneagram impact your life because i think that story is really powerful for our audience. Yeah. So I was in graduate school studying to become a psychotherapist. I was on a retreat in Colorado.

6:10I walked into the library of this retreat center and I happened on a book by a guy who later became a good friend, a guy named Richard Rohr. And Richard had a sort of an interesting take. And I remember thinking, my gosh, I've been studying personality development and, you know, pathologies and all these different things, all of which are completely necessary. While at the same time, I saw this system and I was like, holy smokes, that is eminently useful. Like just for your regular person on the street, this is incredibly useful and uncannily accurate. Now, it's not a perfect system, like all models, you know, what's that great George Box quote, all models are wrong, but some are useful right it's like you know it's it's not perfect but it's good enough that it gives us a what i would call a low definition picture of the interior architecture of nine different kinds of people right or personality styles and there's an infinite variety of expressions within each, but some really striking similarities.

7:22And I was like, I'm hooked. I really want to figure out how to use this in my work. Well, I think many of us, when we think about personalities, we're oftentimes trying to diagnose other people's personalities, how to relate better to them, how to manage conflict, how to show up better in relationship to them. We don't often spend as much time thinking about ourselves because we feel like we have a deep understanding of who we are we're living and experiencing that so looking at your own enneagram like what was that self-discovery for you learning more about yourself not necessarily thinking so much about all the personalities we encounter well i mean that's the big epiphany in it right like um you know when people first learn the enneagram they're they're running around typing everybody including their dog, you know, and I'm like, this is a little frothy mouth and strange, but I get it because what happens is all of a sudden you have a very sudden awakening to these different patterns and you're like, oh my gosh, it's everywhere, right?

8:29For me personally, I think I'm fairly typical. When I first learned my Enneagram type, I was like, oh, I don't really like that very much. or I felt very exposed. But over time, I came to see that each type has tremendous gifts to offer at the table of life. And I was able to say, well, to maintain an open mindset or a growth mindset and just say, look, I got stuff to work on. I'm not able to do that yet, but I think I can get there. You know, I can work on these elements of my personality that are unskillful and grow as a person. For our clients who absolutely love the test and understanding their personality, one thing that I find interesting about how they adopt it is it allows them to recognize and play into their strengths.

9:23I think for some of us, if we just focus on the weaknesses that arise or the self-perceived weaknesses based on understanding our personality, it can create a roadblock to that success that we're after. But when you actually recognize the strengths of what the Enneagram is for you, you can play to those strengths and actually get more out of life. Yeah. Let me just maybe from my opinion, let me just nuance that just a little bit. Yeah. So, you know, I spend the vast majority of my time working with CEOs, senior management teams, speaking in companies around the world. And one of the things I have learned is that a lot of leaders spend too much time thinking about their strengths and leveraging them to their detriment because they are unaware of those forces outside of their conscious awareness that are governing their lives in very powerful ways.

10:22So I think it's a both and, right? Like you need to be able to see your strengths, your gifts, leverage them while at the same time maintaining a kind of humility that says there is a lot I don't know about myself that could get me into trouble if I didn't, you know, if I wasn't aware of them. You know, Carl Jung, who's like a hero of mine, Jung has this great quote he says what's unconscious owns us so part of the gift of the enneagram is it brings into conscious awareness both your strengths and your weaknesses so that you can work with both yeah i can certainly see that of people who have already achieved a great level of status and power that they often don't have that feedback loop any longer because people are kowtowing to that status and power and telling them what they want to hear and recognizing that hey if i'm pointing out weaknesses i might lose my job or i might not have a relationship with this person anymore but for many of our clients who are trying to get to that level recognizing and not beating yourself up over weaknesses but recognizing strengths we found has been an unlock for how they actually read their Enneagram score.

11:40So what I would say is that I love that. And I feel like there is a tremendous benefit that comes with self-knowledge in its entirety. So there was a study done at Cornell University a number of years ago, and they were looking into the lives of 72 high-performing CEOs of companies ranging in value from$5 million to$5 billion. And what they wanted to determine was what was the single trait that accounted for their success, right? And here is the line from the conclusion of the study that actually upended the expectations of the researchers. It says, the key predictor of success among leaders and executives is self-awareness, which was when you stop thinking about that's kind of mind-blowing right like we tend to think it's grit determination strategic planning uh you know charisma iq all these things it's actually social intelligence and apart from social intelligence no matter how competent and talented you are you're going to find yourself handicapped in whatever it is that you want to undertaken life well i think many of us look at personality based on what we do i'm a giver i'm conscientious i care a lot about other people i give value but what's actually what you're sharing there and in that study is the why we do it the self-awareness to understand why we're behaving in that way and to contextualize it because we don't show up the same way in every environment in every situation.

13:29That's absolutely true. One of the cool things about the Enneagram as compared to, let's say, Myers-Briggs, StrengthBinders, DISC, all these wonderful instruments that help us understand who we are and how we move through the world, is it doesn't just describe what you do, it tells you why you do it. And the underlying motivation is absolutely critical if you're going to work to become the highest expression of who you are, right? Like what is driving it? What core need, what core fears, what core desires are under the dirt line, right? Influencing what's above the dirt line. So with your own, what is that why can you unpack for audience who maybe has an encounter to score like this and doesn't fully grasp what you're sharing?

14:19Yeah. So this comes with a caveat. All right. So when I go out and do a lot of this speaking work, many of those folks have taken my assessment in advance of my coming in. So they know their type. and uh almost in every single corporation i've worked in whether it's warner brothers google uh discovery channel whatever it is right my type is the type that is least likely to show up in the room so i just want to be clear before i describe it people may go like i've never met that kind of person um so i'm an enneagram four which is uh called the individualist and the individualist has this core belief from childhood that there's something fundamental that's missing in their essential makeup.

15:12So this belief that I'm really different from other people, I'm missing something that others were given. We are typically drawn to depth, authenticity, beauty, aesthetics, and ordinariness feels like a kind of death to us, right? So there's this unconscious motivation, a drive to be special and unique in order to compensate for the missing piece that, again, everybody else seems to have except them. It's like everyone else got the memo at birth except them. And again, they come with amazing strengths. Like you wouldn't have a, you know, a Kurt Cobain or a Bob Dylan without force. Right. And on the other hand, they come with some downsides that if they're not properly regulated, right, are going to they're going to trip over them and kind of repeatedly get in their own way.

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18:03Sign up online. Three months of wireless for just$15 a month. That's it. I'll be honest. I kept waiting for the fine print. There isn't any. Go to mintmobile.com slash charm. That's mintmobile.com slash charm. Cut your wireless bill to$15 a month at mintmobile.com slash charm. That's it. There's no catch. $45 upfront payment required equivalent to$15 per month new customers on a first three month only plan speeds slower above 40 gigs on an unlimited plan additional taxes fees and restrictions apply see Mint Mobile for details and have you found that happened to you like specifically how you've gotten in your own way and how you've used this to sort it out oh my gosh are you kidding me I mean like yeah Yeah.

18:54And it has been terrifically helpful in my friendships, in my marriage, in ways I can't even explain professionally. um and again part of it is part of my work is how do i help leaders develop the capacity to stand back from their moment to moment experience turn off autopilot and be able in real time without a lot of energy expense to notice what they're feeling thinking and doing so that, and then to gently and compassionately interrogate it, right? Like probably four times a day I ask myself the question, is the story I'm telling myself right now about this person or this situation true? Like, can I know it's true?

19:49How is my type influencing my interpretation of what's going on right now. I probably go to, you know, in lots of meetings, oftentimes my default thought is I don't fit in here. I'm different. And I am able now to be able to know where that lives in my body to somatically go, oh, there that is. And then make a different choice, like as to how I'm going to show up and what I'm going to believe. And I could, you know, So gosh, there's a zillion ways that my understanding of the Enneagram has helped me. The other thing I'd say just really quickly is because I understand all the other eight types really well, I'm able sometimes to kind of guess what a person's type is as I'm interacting with them.

20:39I don't do this all the time. I'm not always thinking about the Enneagram. There are lots of other things I love to do besides the Enneagram. That said, it helps me reduce inefficiencies in relationships like misunderstandings, miscommunication. I know how to talk to different types in different ways that they'll better grasp instead of presuming that my way of seeing the world is normal and everybody else's then is not so normal if it's different than mine. Right. And so it just is it's a delight to be able to work with it. What strikes me about that explanation and how you've unpacked it later in life in relationships is these two driving forces of fear and attachment underlying what's going on for you and that Enneagram type in any of our Enneagram types.

21:33So how should we be thinking about that? Because I think many of us, when we look back at our childhood, we think very positively about it. We had great experiences with their family. We can't really think about the fears when we think of attachment. And we think, oh, yeah, you know, my parents loved me and took care of me. So how should we be thinking about those two forces, which are really driving a lot of our behaviors? Yeah. So if a lot of people have charmed lives as children, right? Like they get by relatively unscathed as compared to the rest of the population. That said, I don't know anybody that doesn't carry some core wounds that powerfully influence their self-perception and their perception of the world, right, that distorts it.

22:20The best of parents can't protect a child who has no critical filters from getting messages in childhood that are, you know, really unhelpful to them. and so understanding core desires and core fears is like um really essential as long as the work is done i think you referenced this earlier right like the work has to be done with a kindness and a compassion towards yourself you know what i mean like if you i always tell people you can't shame yourself into being a better person right it just doesn't work right so uh How do we kind of step back from these things and go, oh, yeah, I'm doing human stuff right now.

23:05And it's not very helpful in this situation. It may have been really helpful to me as a little kid to get my needs met. But as a 50-year-old or a 40-year-old, whatever, it's just not serving me anymore. So how do I mitigate that? And by the way, I don't think you're ever going to get rid of it. You're just going to be able to steward it better and be a person who exercises good self-governance. Um, so I, and by the way, I love attachment theory. Um, there's no correlation between type and attachment styles, you know, um, any, a one could have a disorganized attachment style or, uh, an anxious attachment style or avoidance, you know, it doesn't matter.

23:49Um, I think there's probably some, you know, very soft predictions you could make about different types, uh, and their attachment styles. but not in a way that's determinative and certain. Something you mentioned that I think bears repeating, which is children don't have the filters or the critical thinking systems for all of the input that is happening to them constantly from every direction. um i i i find it funny the things that people get hung up on um or that has impacted their lives well into their adult years uh just because of how it happened or how young they were when when those things do happen and for another child it could be relatively harmless or not even make a blip uh on their mind yeah whereas for others it the impact is uh there's no telling how that child has been impacted and you will only find out later and it can be in the most bizarre ways yeah man you're so spot on like everybody i wrote a book called the story of you it was a follow-up to the road back to you.

25:18And it was a book about how each of the types in many ways is a story that that type tells itself about who they are and how the world works, right? Because we understand our lives narratively. That's why we say things all the time like, oh, I'm in a new chapter of life, you know, or, you know, it's all story based, right? Or I'm turning the page on this relationship. I mean, however we see it turn up in our just our common daily parlance, right? And, you know, my feeling is you have to uncover the story, the root story that seems to be operating under the surface of your life. Like, you know, if you're an Enneagram 8, let's say, the challenger.

26:02And, you know, part of the story you tell yourself is I live in a hostile universe where people either get are controlled or are in control. And I will not be controlled by anybody or at anybody's mercy. And therefore, I am going to assert control and strength over others in the environment in order to mask vulnerability and weakness in myself. That's just a story they're telling. Right. And until you surface that story and work with it, you are at its mercy. You're just living on autopilot inside that story. And it's just not helping you. Learning about yourself is certainly a key component to that.

26:43And probably all of that, I would imagine a majority, if not all of the CEOs that you have spoke to or worked with do some sort or have done in the past journaling to understand their learning processes, how they view the world, what is going on around them. because that how are you able to read other people or to motivate other people or influence other people if you can't influence motivate and understand yourself yeah this is why with all of our clients we start with them first understanding what their core values are how those core values affect their decision making their prioritization their their motive their motivations.

27:35And once people finally have a working, intimate relationship with how they communicate those, all of a sudden, that's all you hear from other people is how they communicate theirs. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I'm actually surprised sometimes at how little, I mean, serious leaders understand themselves. Like they have managed to leverage a certain set of gifts and impose those gifts on the external world without having to do a lot of internal work, right? Like they're just imposing their influence onto the world. And that can work to an extent, and for quite a long time for certain types, until they hit some important, you know, difficulty or struggle where it drives them to kind of direct their attention more inwardly.

28:36And I think that's like one of the most important moments in a leader's life. Like, I have to figure out who I am. There's one of the things I tell teams is, you know, if the best way to help us is to start with me, right? Like you have to start with you. Like whenever I meet a, like someone will say to me, I really want to learn the Enneagrams so I can, you know, help these people in my organization. And I'm like, well, why don't you start with you first and then we'll focus on how it can help other people. Right. And it's like, you're just going to manipulate this tool to get an outcome that is in your own interest, right?

29:20When actually you have to do the work yourself and then model the benefits of it to the people around you. If I had to hire a new editor tomorrow, I wouldn't say must edit audio. I'd want someone who's worked on conversational podcasts, knows our software, understands our style, someone who could jump in and handle the chaos. This is a job for sponsored jobs. Indeed, sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Reach candidates that meet your specific criteria, skills, certifications, location. Sponsored job boosts your posts and search results so you can reach people who can help your business thrive.

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30:45Indeed.com slash charm. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsor jobs. When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything. So people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. Well, I think that's an important part of it. Because we can very easily feel manipulated by someone who thinks they're persuasive or influential when they haven't done the work on themselves.

31:36When it's very clear that they're overcompensating for what we're talking about, these fears and this attachment. And now they're directing this overcompensation at us in hopes of getting us to act or behave in a way that suits them. And I think for many of us, those are the leaders that we try to avoid, we run from, we struggle with. So if you're a leader currently and you're thinking about this purely from, well, how can I learn this to help my team understand other people better, motivate and influence others in directions that matter to me? It's really important that we self-influence. We recognize that we're falling into these same traps and patterns that we're trying to help our team members through just as frequently as they are.

32:21But it just feels more frustrating when we're experiencing it from other people. Yeah. Self-leadership, good self-leadership is a prerequisite for other leading others. Right. And without it, it's just, you know, it's interesting when you were saying that I was thinking about a study that was done where they were talking about, let's say you have a company that's flagging. Now you can bring somebody in that is a hard driving leader and in the, and maybe in a way that's not very skillful, right. But effective, those people tend to do very, very well in the short run. They can turn things around in the short run, but in the long run, it peaks and then starts to work against them, right?

33:03Whereas if you get a self-aware leader, they tend to come in and the improvements are slower, but more consistently trending in the right direction over a long period of time. So it just, you know, I'm always like, well, you want a short-term game you know get a bully to come in and kick ass and you know uh and and you know bang guardrail to guardrail through your organization causing all kinds of bloodshed or you can get a self-aware leader to come in the timeline will be a little bit longer but in but in terms of the overall health of the organization long term it's a better move if you if you can afford it obviously to me i mean it just brings up

33:51many people in the in the past or working with who have fixed ideas of what leadership is and because they haven't done their work on themselves and it's just a fixed idea that they have picked up uh that's what then it's about opposing their will upon everybody not creating change, not inspiring people, not from rebuilding processes from the ground up with a more aware of people's strengths and weaknesses. Well, what we say with our clients is information is cheap. And I think a lot of people view self-awareness as, well, I took the diagnostic. I know my number. That's actually not self-awareness.