Importance of Self-Awareness

What is self-awareness?

Anyone who is dedicated to self-improvement, personal development or the higher goal of spiritual growth needs to actively seek to understand oneself. This is because only when one understands where one lacks, can he or she focus their efforts on what to improve.

Definition of self-awareness:

1. Self-awareness is the capacity that a person has to introspect.
2. It includes gaining an understanding of and insight into one’s strengths, qualities, weaknesses, defects, ideas, thoughts, beliefs, ideals, responses, reactions, attitude, emotions and motivations.
3. Thus, introspection also includes assessing how one is perceived by others and
4. How others are impacted based on one’s behaviour, responses and conduct.

Psychologists often break self-awareness down into two different types, either public or private.

1. Public Self-Awareness: This type emerges when people are aware of how they appear to others. Public self-awareness often emerges in situations when people are at the centre of attention, such as when giving a presentation or talking to a group of friends. This type of self-awareness often compels people to adhere to social norms. When we are aware that we are being watched and evaluated, we often try to behave in ways that are socially acceptable and desirable. In short, we display our best behaviour, which may not be reflective of our true personality. Public self-awareness can also lead to ‘evaluation anxiety’ in which people become distressed, anxious, or worried about how they are perceived by others.
2. Private Self-Awareness: This type happens when people become aware of some aspects of themselves, but only in a private way. For example, seeing your face in the mirror is a type of private self-awareness. Feeling your stomach lurch when you realize you forgot to study for an important test or feeling your heart flutter when you see someone you are attracted to are also good examples of private self-awareness. Close family members and friends are privy to some aspects of our private self as we let our guard down in front of them. Hence, they become invaluable aides in helping us assess ourselves.

As we practice becoming more aware of ourselves and how we are perceived by others, we learn many more shades of our characteristics to a minute level. Hence, we are in a better position to overcome our personality defects and understand where our strengths lie. In the following paragraphs, we will examine some of the ways one can increase one’s self-awareness.

3 How to increase self-awareness — By observing oneself

To understand our personality, we need to understand the nature of our mind. The mind is made up of two parts — the conscious and sub-conscious mind. The sub-conscious mind is vast and the impressions that are buried deep inside are not easy to uncover and analyse. However, ever so often during the day one’s mind erupts and reacts to some events and situations negatively. As a result, one feels a certain amount of restlessness and emotions such as insecurity, fear or anger. Most of us plod on through our daily lives not taking a moment to pause and introspect as to why we experienced that emotion in the first place. In fact, through such situations in one’s day-to-day life, one’s mind, by reacting negatively to situations and events opens up a window and gives one a vignette into its nature. If one is alert and objective in one’s outlook, one can follow the pathway through the window that the mind opens up. As a result, through this process one begins to gain greater self-awareness as to how one’s mind works and how it responds to various stimuli. This is known as metacognition, which means having awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes. This particular type of self-development pertains to becoming conscious of one’s own body and mental state of being including thoughts, actions, ideas, feelings and interactions with others. It is therefore the first step in overcoming negative emotions and reactions.

Our dreams can also tell us about ourselves

Sometimes stronger impressions in our subconscious mind surface in our dreams to the extent that we are able to remember the dream and even learn about our mind.
One seeker had a dream where she was experiencing fear before going on stage to deliver a lecture. She woke up in a sweat and could not go back to sleep for over an hour. Such kinds of dreams are worth introspecting upon as they may shed some light on deeper issues in our sub-conscious mind.