When I was in my 20s and early 30s, I thought I was very self-aware. I had read the books, I’d been to therapy, I could explain all my neuroses and dysfunctional patterns. I knew so much, supposedly. And yet, nothing was really changing for me. It wasn’t until I discovered coaching that I learned what self-awareness really means and why I actually knew much less than I thought I did about myself.

In today’s episode, I’m going to teach you the first skill of the Confidence Compass, which is self-awareness. I’m going to explain what self-awareness really is. It’s not just explaining all the ways your parents fucked you up and how to identify areas where you can increase your self-awareness.

Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.

All right, hello my friends. Today we are talking about the first element of the Confidence Compass, and that is self-awareness. Self-awareness is the foundation of confidence because you cannot actually resolve your insecurities and your negative self-belief unless you actually know what you really think about yourself, because most of us have no idea what we really think about ourselves. So we aren’t able to create more confidence because we don’t even know what thought problem we need to solve.

I have gone through this myself firsthand. Like any good Jewish New Yorker, I spent the majority of my 20s going to therapy. And this was traditional talk therapy where I showed up every week paying out of pocket to talk mostly about my childhood. And I fancied myself very self-aware. I had been studying psychology and using professional terms, probably incorrectly, for years. In fact, in my high school, we had a senior project where for the last six weeks of senior year, you did a full-time internship. Honestly, a genius idea for getting kids who are really done with school out of the school to stop distracting everybody else.

And I had chosen to intern at the Shepard Pratt Psychiatric Hospital, which is a private hospital in Baltimore. And my first day was very adventurous. They sent me out to supervise the patients on a smoke break in the yard, and one of them scaled the fence and ran away. And I went back in absolutely sure that I was getting fired, sobbing, and they were just like, “Oh, that’s fine. That’s just so and so.” And he does that pretty often, like his dad will bring him back. Wild times in the 1990s, I tell you.

But in any case, I spent most of my internship reading the DSM-4, I think it was, and armchair diagnosing myself and all of my relatives. My mother still talks about how I would come home with a new diagnosis for everybody every day. I shared the diagnoses whether they were solicited or not. So, by the time I was in my 20s, I could describe all my neuroses very clearly, right? Or so I thought.

I had this very analytical, descriptive way of being self-aware. I would analyze myself and describe what I thought were my motivations from like an intellectual standpoint. I could spend hours doing this. And I know I’m not the only one who thought this was what self-awareness meant, right? This is what the culture at large kind of tells us self-awareness is. It’s like an intellectual understanding of our dysfunction mostly, often talking about how other people have screwed up things for us in ways that made us who we are.

But what I didn’t realize at the time was that I really had very little idea what was actually going on in my brain. It’s not exactly that everything I was saying was totally wrong. I had correctly identified some patterns in my life and in my childhood that contributed to how I thought and felt as an adult, for instance. But I was missing two big things, and you may be missing them as well. The first is that I had no awareness of my subconscious thoughts. I didn’t have any tools for uncovering those thoughts. I went to therapy and I journaled and I talked to my friends, but all of that was just repeating my conscious thoughts over and over again in different forms.

Your subconscious thoughts are subconscious. They are not easily accessible to your conscious mind unless you have specific techniques for uncovering them. I did not have those. So I really was completely unaware of the thoughts that were driving my feeling and my behavior. Let me give you an example of how different a problem looks when you are listening to your conscious thoughts, being able to access your unconscious or subconscious thoughts.

So my dating life in my 20s and 30s was characterized by a lot of anxiety. I found the entire process extremely stressful. I didn’t like going to bars or concerts or trying to meet people in person because of all the negative thoughts I had about my body and myself and how social I was or not and what people thought about me. But I also found online dating stressful because I had so many negative thoughts about the same things: my body, myself, my dating appeal. So every online rejection stung. And in online dating, there are a lot of those, especially if you live in a fat body in New York City before body positivity has gone mainstream.

So my conscious analysis of this problem was the belief that I had anxious attachment. That was the lens I used to explain everything, right? All of my anxiety, all of my dating people I didn’t even like, or obsessing over people I barely knew, not fully putting myself out there, having such an outsized reaction to rejection, real or imagined. I thought and told everybody that it was all about anxious attachment. I talked about it for years in therapy. I even tried to use some kind of CBT adjacent tools on my attachment anxiety and none of it made much of a difference.

I thought that I was totally self-aware about it because I could describe it and talk about it endlessly. But the reason those tools weren’t helping was that I actually was completely unaware of what was really going on. It wasn’t until I found coaching tools and started using them that I got access to the subconscious thoughts that were driving my feelings and behavior and which were not about attachment anxiety.

When it came to dating, I had the unconscious belief that if I wasn’t chosen by a man, I was less than and lacking. This belief, though, was at odds with my conscious feminist beliefs about not needing male validation for anything, much less for my inherent worth and value as a human on this earth. So I had totally repressed those thoughts. Before I learned how the brain worked and developed self-compassion, I would have been ashamed to admit that I had those thoughts to anyone, and I was ashamed to admit it to myself, and so I suppressed it and blocked it, and I wasn’t aware of it.

I kept them shoved down under the conscious level, right? I knew that I felt anxious about dating and that I only felt calmer and better about myself when dating seemed to be going well, quote unquote, or when I was partnered or had a boyfriend, but I wasn’t really aware of what was actually going on beneath the surface or why I truly felt that way. And when I did the work to change those beliefs, all of a sudden, I wasn’t anxious about dating anymore, right? It was not anxious attachment.

And I see this play out constantly with my clients. They come to coaching thinking that they know what their problem is, but they’re actually totally unaware of the thoughts that are operating at a subconscious level, which makes sense. If you understood your problem correctly, you would have solved it already, right? For instance, I was recently coaching a client who told me the problem they were having was that they found it really stressful when their kid had a meltdown. And their conscious, self-aware explanation was that, you know, they just had like a really short temper with their kid and so they wanted help to get better at self-regulating, so they wouldn’t get so stressed out when their kid melted down.

But when we started delving into the subconscious thoughts they weren’t aware of, it turned out that it wasn’t about having a short temper at all. In fact, they had recently gotten remarried to a man who didn’t have kids before they got together, and they were worried that the meltdowns would be too much for their new husband and that he would eventually leave them because he couldn’t handle the unpleasantness. So it wasn’t based on anything he was doing, it wasn’t like he was going to storm out that day, and he wasn’t even particularly upset about it. But she had these thoughts. And she wasn’t aware of this.

So while she thought she was being very self-aware by like knowing that she had a short temper, right? Self-criticism in disguise, she actually wasn’t really aware of what was going on at all. Her brain was registering the meltdown as a threat to her attachment and relationship with her husband. And that’s why she was getting activated, not because she had a bad temper or a short temper with her kid in some generalized way.

Let me give you another example, not about relationships or attachment at all, because this can happen in any area of your life. So I had a client once who was feeling really unmotivated in her business, and her self-aware diagnosis was that she had a money scarcity mindset. This is like a phrase you hear all the time online, that she didn’t believe she could make money, right? This is something she read about on Instagram and heard a lot about in the online entrepreneurship world. And since she wasn’t making as much money as she wanted, it seemed to fit, right? We pluck these concepts out of the zeitgeist just like I did with anxious attachment.

But when we dug into what was really going on, it turned out she had a really powerful story in her subconscious. Her family had told her since childhood stories of past generations of her family. She actually was Jewish and as well. And she had heard all these stories about times that the governments of the countries where they lived had levied huge taxes on Jews or seized their property or forced them off their land. So her subconscious brain thought there’s no point in making money. It can just be taken away at any time.

Which means all the work she was doing on believing she could make money, that was her supposed like scarcity mindset, was pointless. Her subconscious issue wasn’t actually believing that she couldn’t make money. It was believing that she could not count on keeping the money. I’ve seen a similar pattern with people who will make the money and then spend it all, right? It’s actually not a scarcity issue. It’s your thought about whether you can keep money or rely on it.

The bottom line is that we can think we’re self-aware and actually have no idea what is going on underneath. But it is imperative that we figure it out if we want to be able to actually solve our problems. When we feel mystified by our own thoughts, feelings, or actions, we don’t feel confident we can solve them. And sometimes the problem is we don’t feel mystified. We think we get it. But if you think you understand it and nothing’s changing, then it’s a good bet that you don’t actually understand it. And that means we can stay in the same patterns for years or even decades, right? Stuck without even knowing we could be having a different experience.

And I think that’s especially true for people socialized as women who believe they’re very self-aware because it often means that we have a lot of self-talk about all the things that are wrong or not good enough about us. We aren’t actually getting to the level of thoughts that truly explains our behavior. So after this quick break, I’m going to explain how to get more access to what’s actually going on in your brain.

Okay, so how do we get more access to our subconscious thoughts? When we are not aware of a thought, it’s often because there’s an emotion in the way that is blocking us from being willing to access it. It could be anxiety. Maybe the thought underneath makes us anxious, like the idea that your husband will leave you if your kids melt down too much. It could be shame. The thought underneath feels shameful, like the idea that you’re a feminist who thinks a man needs to choose her in order to be worthy and who thinks she’ll feel more validated by society if she’s married.

It can be the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, right? Again, that example works, the idea of being a feminist who thinks a man needs to choose her to be worthy. It can be overwhelm or hopelessness, like avoiding the awareness of the story that money will always be taken away, because when you think about that story, it feels true and you feel overwhelmed and helpless, right? So if we want to get more access to our subconscious thinking, we need to try to bring our awareness to what our brain may be blocking. There are a couple of techniques you can use to try to do this.

The first one is to just ask yourself questions that help you get to a deeper level. My very favorite question for getting to the subconscious level of something is, “So what?” I don’t ask myself that in a dismissive tone, right? When I ask a client that, it’s never dismissive, or it’s not the way your teenager says, “So what?” Right? It’s more in the sense of like, okay, and why does that matter?

For instance, for the client who’s upset that her kid is having a meltdown, asking, okay, so, so what if the kid has a meltdown, right? What, why does that matter? Why is that a problem? Would lead her to discover this consequence she’s afraid of, her husband leaving her. If you’d asked me back in the day, like, okay, so what if you don’t find a partner? Why is that a problem? I would have been able to get to realizing that if I didn’t get a partner, I was going to make it mean I was not worthy or good enough. I probably wouldn’t have been able to get there before I knew a little bit about coaching because there was so much socialization there, but it would have helped me move towards it.

Another variation could be, “What are you afraid of?” Right? If my client who wasn’t making money had asked herself what she was afraid of if she made money, she would have uncovered these thoughts about it being taken away. Or you’ll also discover often that what you’re afraid of is a feeling that you don’t want to have. This isn’t foolproof. That client probably would have been asking herself why she was afraid of not making money rather than of making money, which is why, you know, working with a coach or inside of a structured coaching program is always the most effective way to do this work, because if you are asking yourself these kinds of questions, but you’re really have the big subconscious blind spot, it may not always be enough to fully get you there. But you can learn a lot about your thinking and you can start to see where you might have a block that you need help with just by asking, “So what?”

The other avenue you can use is to try to become aware of what feeling you are avoiding. When you get mad at your kid for having a meltdown, what feeling are you trying to avoid? For my client, it was fear. For someone else, it might be shame if their thought is that, you know, the kid having a meltdown means they’re a bad parent. When you think about making money, what feeling are you trying to avoid? When you think about not finding a partner, what feeling are you trying to avoid?

So you can ask yourself, “So what?” and kind of that pursues the cognitive thread, or you can ask yourself, “What feeling am I trying to avoid?” to kind of pursue that somatic thread. Self-awareness is the first skill that’s required for confidence because when you don’t know what you really think, you don’t have any self-control. You don’t have self-possession or self-authority. It’s like trying to feel confident driving a car when you don’t know how to drive and you don’t know how the car works, right? You just feel out of control to yourself and your brain and your behavior feel like they’re happening to you mysteriously or against your conscious will.

And then you have all this shame about not being able to think and feel and act the way you want to. And you try to ignore the problem until it happens again, and then you feel bad about it and you resolve to change, and then as soon as the feeling goes away, you just go back to what you were doing until it happens again. And you assume it’s hopeless because you think that you know what your problem is and you haven’t been able to solve it. But if you think you know what your problem is and you haven’t been able to solve it, it’s not the problem. All problems are solvable. You can be whoever you want to be. If you’re not able to do that, it’s not because you’re not capable of it. It’s because you don’t have awareness of what’s really getting in your way.

So self-awareness is the foundation of true, authentic confidence because it means you’re not hiding from yourself, you’re not lying to yourself. You’re not pretending you’re someone you are not to yourself or anyone else. When you’re transparent with yourself, when you have true self-awareness, when you are willing to look at any thought you have, you have no fear of being found out, of being uncovered. You are yourself. You know yourself. You’re grounded in that self-knowledge.

Doing this effectively requires a healthy dose of self-compassion. So that’s what we’re going to talk about in next week’s episode on the second element of the Confidence Compass. I’ll see you then.