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The book Insight by Tasha Eurich, summarized: the seven pillars, its feedback, and what shifts when the room doesn’t share your culture.
My first part-time job in the US was teaching Spanish to corporate executives at a language school. The one-hour class was pricey, and the executives were eager to learn. I would show up to class at precisely the starting time or maybe a couple of minutes later, exchange small talk with the student while I prepared the class materials, and then start the lesson. By then, we were well into five to 10 minutes of the hour.
Probably hinted by some of the students, after several weeks, the language school owner and director, a blond, energetic Austrian woman who had immigrated many years back, called my attention. “Susana, you need to be here 15 minutes before your class starts and ready to teach by the time the student arrives,” she said. In my naivety, I responded, “Do I get paid extra for those 15 minutes?” She kindly responded, “No, that is how we conduct business in the US.”
Looking back, I was lucky she understood where I was coming from and didn’t fire me. I guess she felt compassion for a newly arrived immigrant struggling with acculturation and a different understanding of how “the clock” runs in America. It took me some adjustments to be punctual, and I even used to tell this story in my training workshops for participants to understand that Latinxs are not late because we are lazy or bad people. It’s just a different cultural understanding of the value of time.
At some point in your career, someone has probably given you feedback or told you to “get more feedback.” This review covers what Insight teaches about doing that well, generously and in full, before asking the one question I believe every multicultural professional needs to add: whose mirror are you looking into?
In a nutshell, Tasha Eurich’s Insight and the inside-out approach I propose in Speak Up! are built for different jobs, and they work best together. Insight gives you a research-tested method for seeing yourself clearly and gathering honest feedback, and on that approach, it is one of the best books I know. The inside-out approach starts one step earlier, by asking where the feedback comes from and whose cultural template it reflects. Read Insight if the feedback you receive is specific. Add the inside-out lens if your feedback keeps circling vague words like “presence” or “fit.”
What is Insight by Tasha Eurich about?
Insight is organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich’s research-based book on self-awareness, which she calls the meta-skill of the twenty-first century. Its central message is hopeful: self-awareness is a skill you can develop, not a trait you either have or lack.
It is also humbling. In her Harvard Business Review article summarizing the research behind the book, Eurich reports that even though most people believe they are self-aware, her team estimated that only 10 to 15 percent of the people they studied actually met the criteria.
At the heart of the book is a distinction I find genuinely useful. Self-awareness, in Eurich’s model, is two separate abilities:
- Internal self-awareness is how clearly you see your own values, passions, aspirations, reactions and impact.
- External self-awareness is how well you understand the way other people see you.
Her research found that these two are distinct, so being strong in one tells you little about the other. A deeply reflective person can still be blind to how they land in a meeting, and someone who reads a room perfectly can still be unclear about what they want. That single idea is worth the price of the book.
What are the seven pillars of Insight according to Eurich?
Eurich’s research identified seven kinds of self-knowledge that highly self-aware people share. She calls them the seven pillars of insight:
- Values: the principles that guide how you want to live and work.
- Passions: what you love to do.
- Aspirations: what you want to experience and accomplish.
- Fit: the environment in which you thrive and stay engaged.
- Patterns: your consistent ways of thinking, feeling and behaving.
- Reactions: your in-the-moment responses, including your strengths and weaknesses.
- Impact: the effect your behavior has on other people.
I appreciate that the framework includes impact. Many approaches to self-awareness stop at introspection, and Eurich insists that knowing yourself also means knowing how you affect others.
What else does her book Insight cover?
Beyond the two types of self-awareness and the seven pillars, the book addresses the obstacles that get in the way, practical tools for building each kind of self-awareness, and how leaders can build self-aware teams and organizations. Two of her ideas stand out.
Why ask “what” instead of “why”?
In her HBR article, Eurich explains that introspection doesn’t always make us more self-aware. Asking “why” about ourselves tends to produce comfortable stories or rumination, while asking “what” points us toward patterns and choices we can act on. “Why did I freeze in that meeting?” invites a verdict. “What was happening when I froze?” invites a fact. It is a small change in wording with a real effect.
How does Insight say to get honest feedback?
For the external side, Eurich found that people who improved their self-awareness sought feedback from “loving critics”: people who have their best interests in mind and are willing to tell them the truth. Choosing the right people, she argues, matters as much as asking the right questions.
She also found that experience and power can get in the way. The more senior you become, the fewer people may be willing to tell you something unwelcome, which is exactly why a few trusted, honest voices become so valuable.
Where is Insight at its strongest?
Insight is strongest where many self-help books are weakest: it is grounded in research. The internal and external distinction is a tool you will use for years, and the shift from “why” to “what” is practical from the first day.
The feedback chapters are generous and humane. They treat receiving criticism as a skill you can learn, not a test of character, and they give managers and team leaders language they can use with their own people.
If you suspect that you and your colleagues see your work differently and you want a method to close that gap, read Insight first. The inside-out approach is a personal-branding approach, not a feedback manual. If a structured way to gather and process feedback is what you need, Insight is the book built for that job.
Whose mirror are you looking into?
Here is the question I want to add to Eurich’s excellent work. External self-awareness depends on the people reflecting you back. But every workplace also has its own cultural template, an unspoken picture of how a capable professional sounds and behaves. You are described and judged according to that template.
This is where role stress comes in: the double pressure of meeting your cultural expectations and the corporate norms around you at the same time. Two bodies of research help explain why it matters for feedback.
Catalyst’s research on emotional tax focuses on Black women and men. It describes the experience of feeling different from peers because of gender, race or ethnicity, and finds that it can leave employees feeling they must stay on guard, with effects on their well-being and their ability to contribute at work. Deloitte’s research on covering, most recently in Uncovering culture: A call to action for leaders, describes how people downplay known parts of their identity to fit in at work.
Neither study is about feedback directly. But together they raise a fair question: if you are on guard or covering, your loving critics may be reflecting a version of you shaped by that pressure.
Consider three common patterns, each a strength in the setting that shaped it:
- Deference to seniority shows respect and protects group harmony in cultures where expectations of hierarchy run higher. Geert Hofstede’s research, summarized in his paper “Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context,” calls this dimension power distance and finds that societies differ widely on it. A room that rewards interrupting may read that deference as “low presence.”
- Crediting the group rather than yourself is a mark of good character in more collectivist cultures, the opposite end of the dimension Hofstede calls individualism. A room that rewards self-promotion may read it as “not ambitious enough.”
- Guarding parts of your identity is common among LGBTQ+ professionals, one of the groups covering research has studied. Feedback may then describe, quite accurately, a careful version of yourself built for safety, and say nothing about the person underneath.
None of this makes the feedback wrong. It makes it incomplete, and telling the difference is the step the inside-out approach is built for.
Insight vs. Speak Up!: what an inside-out approach adds
The inside-out idea is that you define who you are from your own values and background first, then decide how to show it, as I explain in Self-Awareness: A Leadership Skill That Can Cost You. My book, Speak Up! Tell Your Story to Influence Others, builds that approach, and the pillar most relevant here is cultural attributes.
The two books start from different questions:
- Insight asks: How clearly do I see myself, and how accurately do I know how others see me?
- The inside-out approach asks: What parts of me others see are about me, and which ones are about the room?
The inside-out approach adds one step before you act on feedback. You sort each reflection into one of three groups: a real blind spot, the room’s template, or a strength the room has not yet learned to read. For the first group, Eurich’s method is exactly what you need. The inside-out approach is a layer on top of her work, not a correction of it.
Which book should you read first?
It depends on what matters most to you right now. Here is how the two compare on three criteria:
- A tested method for gathering and processing feedback: Insight is built for this, with research behind its tools. The inside-out approach is not designed to teach a feedback process.
- Attention to how culture and identity shape feedback: this is where the inside-out approach starts, with cultural attributes as a core pillar. Insight starts from individual clarity and accuracy.
- Turning self-knowledge into a visible personal brand: the inside-out approach is a personal-branding approach from the first page. Insight‘s goal is seeing yourself clearly, which is the essential step before branding.
Read Insight first if your feedback is concrete and consistent, such as missed deadlines or unclear emails, and you want a disciplined method. Start with the inside-out approach if your feedback is vague, clusters around “presence” or “fit,” or if you suspect you are covering.
Who may want to read Insight second?
If your main question right now is about identity rather than accuracy, you may want to read Insight second. The book’s subject is seeing yourself clearly, so readers whose question is “Why does this room misread me?” will find the method sound but may need to start somewhere else. In that case, begin with the inside-out approach above, then turn to my review of Kindra Hall’s Stories That Stick for shaping your self-knowledge into a leadership story, and come back to Insight when you are ready for a structured feedback process.
Who may want to read the Speak Up! inside-out approach second?
If your feedback is concrete and consistent, and you mainly want a disciplined way to act on it, start with Insight. The same is true if your goal is building self-awareness across a whole team, which Eurich covers in the later part of her book. Come back to the inside-out approach when the feedback you receive starts describing your background instead of your work.
To work through this on paper, download Your Story Bank, our free worksheet with prompts for each of the four pillars to remember, capture, and shape the leadership stories your background gave you.
Two mirrors, one clear picture
Eurich’s research shows how rarely we see ourselves clearly, and how much we gain when we do. The inside-out approach adds one question to her method: before you change yourself to match the mirror, check whose mirror it is. Used together, the two give you something neither gives alone: a clear view of yourself and of the room you are standing in.
FAQ
Who is Tasha Eurich?
Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist, researcher and New York Times bestselling author. Her research on self-awareness, summarized in Insight and in her Harvard Business Review writing, is among the most widely cited work on the subject.
What is Insight in simple terms?
In Eurich’s book, insight means seeing yourself clearly: both who you are on the inside and how other people experience you. She treats it as a skill you build with practice, not a trait you are born with.
Is Insight by Tasha Eurich worth reading?
Yes. It is one of the best research-based books on self-awareness, especially if you want a tested way to gather honest feedback and act on it. If your feedback keeps describing “presence” or “fit” rather than your work, read it alongside an inside-out, multicultural approach that asks where the feedback comes from.
Does Insight address cultural differences in feedback?
Insight‘s focus is individual self-awareness: how clearly you see yourself and how accurately you understand other people’s view of you. If your question is how a workplace’s cultural norms shape the feedback itself, research such as Deloitte’s work on covering and Catalyst’s research on emotional tax speaks to it more directly.
How do I find my strengths as a multicultural professional?
Start by separating real blind spots from the room’s template. What remains is often a set of strengths your background already gives you: ways of showing respect, building trust or solving problems that your workplace has not yet learned to recognize. Naming those strengths, and the stories behind them, is the foundation of a personal brand built from the inside-out.
Explore more of Susana G Baumann’s work on leading from your own story.
