Self-Awareness: Life Skills To Help You Flourish and Build Your Happiness

What is self-awareness?

Self-awareness is about seeing yourself clearly. Sounds simple but it’s not as easy as you might think - we aren’t even self-aware about how self-aware we are! Research shows that 95% of people believe they are self-aware while only about 10 -15% are (Eurich, 2018).

Being self-aware means understanding your thoughts and recognising your behaviours and your emotions honestly. It takes a bit of emotional intelligence to do that because our brains have built in biases which make it difficult for us to take a more neutral perspective on things. It is a practice worth developing though because more self-aware people are generally happier and more satisfied with life. A bold statement but read on and I will explain why.

Why do we fall so short with self-awareness?   

We all have biases, both negative and positive, about ourselves. We view ourselves and our lives through a lens we developed from childhood, our culture, family and experiences. Add to this the fact that many of our thoughts and behaviours are unconscious, running as background programming. Much of the time we are on automatic pilot and there is nothing wrong with this, it’s our brains being efficient, we wouldn’t make it out of the house otherwise!

Taking the time to stop those automatic processes in their tracks on a regular basis and checking in with ourselves is how we build self-awareness.

What self-awareness isn’t

Self-awareness is not just self-reflection. On its own, self-reflection is subject to that tricksy bias of ours and can lead to rumination, where our thoughts spiral into negative self-criticism. That isn’t helpful.

We tend to rationalise our behaviour and how people responded to us retrospectively, that is, after the event. We interpret rather than evaluate. And we map this rationale on to quite fixed ideas about ourselves and others – a self-narrative. Usually ideas that defend the status quo, like ‘I always do that’, ‘there she goes again..’. This reinforces pre-held beliefs because we are looking inwards at our internal storyline rather than taking a neutral perspective on what is actually happening. This is why self-awareness doesn’t come naturally to most of us.

Self-awareness and positive psychology

Building more awareness is key to positive psychology interventions and coaching. If we can make self-knowledge more conscious then we can use that information to help us make better, healthier choices. As a coach, you want your client to walk away with the ability to look inwards, and outwards, in a non-judgmental way. If you can give your client that skill you have set them up for a brighter future!

It is useful to separate out self-awareness into two aspects (Eurich, 2018). We can be good in one, both or neither of these, so the distinction is helpful for recognising what needs attention.  

• Internal self-awareness: This is how we understand what is going on within ourselves, recognising our emotions, our strengths, weaknesses, values and motivations and how these impact our behaviours and actions.  

• External or public self-awareness: This is understanding how others perceive us. This awareness helps us understand why people react to us in certain ways. It is the information we use to help us conform to social norms.

  
  

Getting other people’s views on how we are can be really useful for building a more rounded picture of ourselves, but external views need to be balanced with our own internal understanding so we feel aligned and authentic. Self-awareness isn’t about changing who you are to accommodate others, we don’t want to mask ourselves, but we can make short term adjustments for particular situation, like when we ‘put our work head on’.

Self-Awareness, Happiness, Wellbeing and Flourishing

Having a sense of agency is that feeling of being an active participant in our own lives rather than being thrown about by life’s waves. Agency builds our resilience and enhances wellbeing. It isn’t about control as such, because who knows what curve balls life will throw us, but an ability to ride life’s storms and steer ourselves to calmer waters. Without this we start to feel anxious and stressed.

Internal self-awareness helps us recognise what motivates us and notice the behaviours and people who align with our values and goals. This supports our decision making and helps us recognise the things that make us happy or unhappy, so we can offer ourselves support and compassion and better emotionally regulate.

External self-awareness helps us in our relationships with others. With fewer blind spots about ourselves we can be more adaptable in relationships and social and work situations. We can communicate better when we know what we really think. We build authentic relationships.

The benefits of self-awareness for personal growth

Let’s face it, you can’t change what you can’t see. Self-awareness allows us to reflect on what is going on inside, not just the facts but how things make us feel, and how we react and how that impacts others.

It is a human trait to want to allocate blame – pushing it inwards or outwards. ‘You made me do / feel…’ ‘ it’s all my fault..’ But how we react to life events and other people is the thing we have most control over and with some insights about our thoughts and behaviours we can make changes. We can see things from other’s viewpoints, and we can communicate all that better.

It helps us be more measured and less reactive. When we respond to things on automatic pilot we can only make the same old choices. Self-awareness places us in charge of our decision making processes. Informed, conscious decisions are less impulsive, more in line with our values. We show up in the way we want to.

My next blog will be exploring how to build a practice that supports self-awareness and helps us to flourish so be sure and sign up to my newsletter and keep updated on future messages.

Reference

Eurich, T. (2018). What self-awareness really is (and how to cultivate it). Harvard Business Review, 4(4), 1-9.