How Do I Apply the Law of Awareness at Work?

In 1980 I was one merit badge and one service project away from Eagle Scout. The project was bicycle registration at the police precinct in my town. Stencil the serial numbers, fill out the cards, hand the kids a sticker. I also had an appointment with the fire chief that week, and I missed it. Did not call. Did not reschedule. I told myself I was busy. The Law of Awareness says you must know yourself to grow yourself, and what I did not know about myself at seventeen was that I was the kind of kid who let a thing die quietly instead of saying out loud that it was too much for me. I never made Eagle. I am sixty three and I still think about it.

The Law of Awareness is the second of John C. Maxwell's 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, and it sits that high on the list for a reason. You cannot grow in a direction you have not identified. To apply the Law of Awareness at work you do three things. You find out what you are actually good at, not what your title says you do. You go looking for the one blind spot the people around you have already noticed. And you stop confusing being hard on yourself with knowing yourself, because those are two different moves and only one of them helps.

That last one took me about thirty years.

What Does the Law of Awareness Mean at Work?

Maxwell states it in one line. You must know yourself to grow yourself. On a work day that means something narrower and more useful than it sounds.

Most of us carry a job description in our heads that is about five years out of date. We think we are the person who is good at the thing we were hired for. Meanwhile the work has drifted, and the thing we are actually valuable for now is something nobody wrote down, including us.

I ran into this in my own file. For years I would have told you my strength was fixing equipment. It was not. Plenty of people on that floor could fix equipment better than me. What I was good at was standing in front of a problem with four people who all had a piece of it and getting the pieces into one sentence. Nobody hired me for that. No review ever mentioned it. I spent a decade building the wrong skill harder because I had never once asked the question.

Applying the Law of Awareness at work starts there. Not with a personality quiz. With one honest audit of what people actually come to you for, which is usually not what your title says.

Why Are You the Last Person to See Your Own Blind Spot?

Because a blind spot is not a secret. It is public. You are the only one who does not have the file.

We had a machine on the line that kept throwing its labels. Months of it. The labels would peel, somebody would reprint them, two weeks later they would peel again. We held meetings about adhesive. We ordered a different stock. We blamed humidity.

Then one afternoon somebody finally asked the technician who stood next to that machine eight hours a day. He said the wash cycle upstream was running hot and the panels were still warm when the labels went on. He had known for months. He had told one person, early, and that person had not passed it along, so he had quietly stopped bringing it up.

That is what a blind spot is at work. The information exists. It lives in somebody standing within ten feet of the problem. It does not reach you, because reaching you is awkward and costs them something, and nobody has ever made it safe or ordinary to try.

So the Law of Awareness is not really a thinking exercise. If it were, you could solve it alone in a quiet room, and people have been trying that for a long time without much luck. It is a question you have to ask out loud.

How Do I Find My Blind Spots at Work?

Three ways, and you can start all three inside a week. None of them need your boss to run a review.

One. Ask three people the same narrow question. Not "do you have any feedback for me," which gets you nothing, because it asks the other person to pick the topic and take the risk. Ask this instead: "What is one thing I do that makes your job harder?" One thing. Specific. Then write down what they say and do not argue. The urge to explain yourself is strong and it is the whole test. Pick three people who see different sides of you. Somebody above you, somebody beside you, somebody who reports to you or works downstream of you.

Two. Read your own calendar like a stranger. Open the last two weeks. Add up where the hours went. Then ask what somebody who did not know you would conclude you cared about. Not what you meant to care about. What the hours say. My walkabout year would have failed this badly, and so did my Eagle project, which never once appeared in writing anywhere.

Three. Notice what people have stopped bringing you. This is the quiet one and it is the most accurate. Somebody used to raise a certain kind of problem with you and does not anymore. That is not the problem going away. That is them deciding it is not worth the conversation. The label technician did that to all of us and we called it an adhesive issue for three months.

The Four Questions Maxwell Asks, and the One I Add

Maxwell builds the Law of Awareness around four questions, and they are better than they look on first read. Do you like what you are doing now. What would you like to do. Can you do what you would like to do. Do you know why you want to do it.

The first one is the one people skip, and it is the one that decides the rest. Most people answer it with a shrug and a sentence about the economy. Answer it straight and the next three get easier.

I would add a fifth, and mine is less noble. Who already knows the answer to this about me?

Four questions you ask yourself will get you about sixty percent of the way. The last forty is held by other people, and the only way to get it is to go ask. That is not a failure of the four questions. It is just how self-knowledge works. You are using the one instrument in the building that cannot see its own face.

What If You Do Not Like What You Find?

You probably will not, at least not all of it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

When I finally sat with the Eagle Scout thing properly, decades later, the pattern was not "busy seventeen year old." The pattern was that when something got bigger than I expected, I went quiet and let it fade rather than telling anybody I was in over my head. And that had not stayed in 1980. It had followed me into jobs. It had followed me into a marriage. I could point at three places in my forties where the same move showed up wearing a better suit.

Here is what the Law of Awareness costs, said plainly. It costs the story you have been telling about yourself, and sometimes that story was the nicer one. Maxwell writes about knowing yourself and accepting who you are before you can start building, and the accepting part is where most people quit. Not the knowing.

But a pattern you can name is a pattern you can interrupt. Now when something gets bigger than I expected, I have a rule: I say it out loud to one person inside twenty four hours. I did not get that rule from being smart. I got it from finally looking at a forty year old habit and not enjoying the view.

Self-Awareness Is Not the Same as Self-Criticism

This is where I see good people get the Law of Awareness exactly backwards, and I did it myself for years.

Self-criticism feels like self-awareness because it is uncomfortable, and we have all been taught that uncomfortable means honest. It is not the same thing. Self-criticism is a verdict. Self-awareness is a description.

"I am terrible at follow through" is a verdict. It is also useless, because there is nothing to do with it on Monday. "When a task has no deadline attached to it, I do not start it" is a description. You can build around that one. You put a deadline on it. You tell somebody. You make the first step small enough to do standing up.

The test I use is simple. Can somebody else act on the sentence? If I handed it to a coworker and said do this for me, would they know what to do? A description passes. A verdict just sits there feeling bad.

Common Questions About the Law of Awareness at Work

What is the Law of Awareness in simple terms?

You must know yourself to grow yourself. It is the second of Maxwell's 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth. The practical version: growth has a direction, and you cannot pick a direction until you know honestly where you are standing and what you are carrying. Skip it and you end up working hard on the wrong skill, which is a thing I did for about ten years and would not recommend.

How is the Law of Awareness different from the Law of the Mirror?

They sit next to each other and they do different jobs. Awareness is about knowing what is true about you. The Mirror is about whether you think you are worth the investment once you know. Awareness is the diagnosis. The Mirror is deciding the patient is worth treating. People usually need them in that order, and plenty of us get stuck between the two.

Do I need a DISC assessment or a personality test to apply the Law of Awareness?

No. I am a DISC consultant and I will still tell you no. An assessment is a good mirror and a fast one, and it gives you language for things you already half knew. It does not replace asking three people what you are like to work with. If you only have the budget for one, ask the three people. It is free and it is more specific.

What if my boss never gives me feedback?

Then stop waiting for the review and go collect it sideways. Your peers and the people downstream of your work know more about your effect than your boss does, because they live in it. A boss sees you in meetings. The person who inherits your paperwork sees you honestly. Ask them.

Reflection Questions

1. What do people actually come to me for, and is it the same thing my title says I do?
2. If I read my last two weeks of calendar as a stranger, what would I say I cared about?
3. What has somebody stopped bringing me, and when did they stop?
4. What is one pattern of mine that showed up in my twenties and is still showing up now?
5. Which of my honest statements about myself is a description somebody could act on, and which is just a verdict?

The Bottom Line

You must know yourself to grow yourself. That is the Law of Awareness, and the part people miss is that it is not a solo activity. The information you need most is held by somebody who works near you and has no easy way to hand it over.

Here is the one thing to do this week. Ask one person the one question. "What is one thing I do that makes your job harder?" Then write down the answer and leave it alone for a day before you decide what you think about it.

And here is my question back to you. If the person who works closest to you could tell you one true thing about yourself with no consequences, do you already know what they would say?

Because if you do, that is not a blind spot anymore. That is a decision you have been putting off.

This ties back to The Law of Awareness — one of John C. Maxwell's 15 Laws of Growth.