When Self-Awareness is bad for us

“This question is for Steve Mesler,” a voice rang out from the reporter pool during the U.S. Men’s Olympic Bobsled Team Press Conference taking place inside the IOC’s International Broadcast Center (IBC) a day before the Opening Ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics in downtown Vancouver. The voice continued along the lines of…

 “Steve, while you and your team head into these Olympics as one of the favorites, how does it feel knowing that the U.S. hasn’t won an Olympic gold medal in your sports premier event, the 4-man competition, in 62 years? Do you think your team can break that streak?”

There were definitely a lot of ways I could answer that question at that moment as I sat beside my teammates. After all, I’d heard that question asked of other American athletes in my previous two Olympic pressers. The fact was, we were facing the formidable German team led by Andre Lange, undefeated in Olympic competition, not to mention the numerous other competitive teams. The self-aware answer would have acknowledged the difficulty and gravity of the task at hand. But is the self-aware answer really what the situation called for?

By around 2010 the societal focus on self-awareness had been a long time in the making. This progress was in no small part thanks to incredibly impactful resources such as Daniel Goleman - Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ; Brené Brown - Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (this one was 2012); and Stephen Covey - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. Together, these three books have sold over 50,000,000 copies in the past few decades alone.

Over the past decade and a half, I have benefited greatly from improving my self-awareness skills and leaning into them as often as I am currently capable… which, admittedly, still has a long way to go. As highlighted in Dana Talesnik’s piece on NIH.gov’s site, Dr. Tasha Eurich (org psychologist & exec coach), everyone thinks they’re self-aware but only about 10-15% of people have achieved that status. And, to quote Dr. Eurich, “People who are self-aware at work are better performers and more promotable.”

So self-awareness = performance and success in the workplace. Got it.

But like all things in life - nothing can be all good, all of the time.

On a recent family vacation, I spent a fair amount of time watching Netflix’s recently released docuseries: “Sprint”, a 6-episode look at the lives of the world’s top 100m and 200m men and women during the 2023 run-up to the Track & Field World Championships in Budapest. If you’re looking for a pump-me-up for the Paris Summer Olympics, this is it. I’ll be watching it with my seven-year-old daughter (yes, 99.9% of it is age-appropriate) to get her excited about knowing the top men and women sprinters in the world.

What Sprint gives us, and will be appreciated by the readers of this newsletter, is an opportunity to look inside the personal lives, the personal self-affirmation journals, and the insecurities of the top sprinters of both sexes across the world. Americans are a heavy focus, but we also get to spend a lot of time with the top female sprinters in Jamaica, the top male in the UK, the top male in Italy, and more.

And what we see is these athletes’ ability to turn their self-awareness up and down as it suits them. Because make no mistake — and I can say this with firsthand knowledge across 25 years in high-performance sport and business as an athlete, coach, administrator, and a human who has buried far too many teammates -- the self-awareness needed to perform at that level of sport is second-to-none and creates a massive downside for many once they leave the proving grounds of their youth.

Due to this level of self-awareness, many of the top athletes (and business execs, artists, architects, etc) in the world can be extremely low-confidence individuals. The inception, deep in their minds/psyche, of the repeated belief that they are not _______ enough (insert fast, strong, heavy, light, focused, knowledgeable, etc.) provides a nuclear power source of motivation and determination to fix that problem. 

Their self-awareness of their deficiencies is what drives them to be great, sacrifice, and show up for the brutality of their training day in and day out.

But they also know that on race days and weeks, when it’s time to perform, the self-awareness of not being enough has to be turned off. 

What does “turning off” one’s self-awareness look like and when is it advantageous? 

This is where much of the literature and the experts who speak about  “the self-awareness of top performers” completely miss the boat to high-performance land. The nuance of turning down one’s self awareness isn’t a road to self-ignorance or poor performance for high-performers. 

What’s missed is: what happens when highly competent people choose to be confident when it serves them?

To me, turning down self-awareness is an obvious, absolute necessity to achieve the confidence necessary to do giant things in life!

If a high performer’s determination to fix a problem they’re aware of is a nuclear power source of motivation, their ability to recognize when they’ve run out of time to address that problem — and go forward with confidence — is the ultimate mental skill.

Being actively self-aware of an issue one has but cannot address is part of the definition of a self-defeating attitude on “game days.” The high-performer learns to turn off the “active” self-awareness part of their mindset when it does them no good.

And thus the high-performer learns we have the opportunity to hone our self-awareness skill to the point when it becomes a decision to use it or not.

The continuum to think of this in shouldn’t be from Self-Awareness to Self-Ignorance with a goal to stay as far into Self-Awareness as possible -- as is generally preached by the “experts” in the domain. Instead, I would argue it should be looked at as a Self-Awareness to Confidence continuum. 

On this continuum, high-performers will live their day-to-day training in Active Self-Awareness Mode and, like the flip of a switch, decide to shift their mindset into Confidence Mode when heading toward big performances.

It looks something like this:

Long-Term day-to-day use of the Self-Awareness Skill to drive determination and discipline

Special short-term use-case of the Confidence Skill to drive performance in the moment

In Sprint we watch these athletes at the pinnacle of sport performance live 99% of their days in Self-Awareness mode and only bring out their Confidence Mode when it suits them. And we see some are better at this than others. 

Noah Lyles is getting better at it as he approaches stardom. Sha’Carri Richardson, though still with a long way to go, is evolving beyond the chip on her shoulder from her 2021 debacle. The defending Olympic Champion in the 100m, Italy’s Marcel Jacobs, admits he lived too long after the Olympics in Confidence Mode. 

All the greats can do it. Michael Phelps, Apolo Ohno, Shelly-Ann Frasier-Pryce, Lindsey Vonn, Donovan Bailey. The list is quite long and very distinguished. Who will show up in Paris to join them?

The inability of athletes, or any high-performer, to decide to put themselves back into the hunger of Self-Awareness Mode is why it’s so difficult to repeat success in any sport. And with four years in between, repeating Olympic Gold is the toughest of them all.

Which brings us back to a 31-year-old Steve Mesler sitting at the IBC in Vancouver in early February 2010. In what may have seemed to some as an “arrogant,” or in today’s words “not self-aware,” response, my answer to a question of that 62-year Olympic Gold Medal drought didn’t tip a hat to the formidable Germans nor to the enormous task in front of us as all of American media turned its attention to the Olympic Games.

Instead, with my three teammates looking at me like I’d lost my mind, my answer was something to the effect of:

“You know, I’ve been here before. And this is the first time I’ve felt this way. It’s a funny feeling to be at the Olympic Games and know that if we do our jobs, we’re going to win.”

And with that, I began to flip the switch for myself and my teammates from Active Self-Awareness Mode to Confidence Mode. We began to leave our insecurities behind us and focus on simply doing our jobs to get the result I knew we were capable of.

Walking off the press conference stage that day, I gathered Holcy, Olsen, and Curt quickly and looked at them as if to say - it’s time. We’re ready. Know it, feel it, be it.

They understood and they bought-in.

So the next time you are told that your self-awareness holds the keys to your success, I encourage you to believe it. All the way up to the point that you don’t.

- Steve