Self Awareness

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Self-awareness is the ability to focus on yourself and how your actions, thoughts, or emotions do or don’t align with your internal standards. If you’re highly self-aware, you can objectively evaluate yourself, manage your emotions, align your behavior with your values, and understand correctly how others perceive you.

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Self-Awareness - Knowing one's internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions

• Emotional self-awareness: Recognizing one's emotions and their effects

• Accurate self-assessment: Knowing one's strengths and limits

• Personal power: A strong sense of one's self-worth and capabilities; self confidence

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Self-awareness is a critical tool to help you reach higher levels of job satisfaction, become a better leader, improve relationships with colleagues, and manage your emotions better. It’s also positively correlated with higher levels of overall happiness.

And yet, as one study estimates, only 10-15% of people are truly self-aware.

Luckily, self-awareness can be practiced and cultivated -- it’s not a fixed trait.

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When you begin to consciously practice self-awareness, you can evaluate how your values, passions, and goals fit into your current environment and emotions -- and how to align them better. You can also understand how other people view you, creating stronger, more authentic relationships with colleagues.

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Self-awareness will help you become a happier and more productive employee and leader, and can help you align your current life with your passions.

 

Here, we’ll explore what self-awareness truly means, how to tell if you’re self-aware, and, best of all, how to improve your own self-awareness, right now.

 

If you’re still unconvinced that self-awareness is a valuable trait to cultivate, here’s a list of general benefits of being self-aware.

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Benefits of self-awareness

1. Improve skills by recognizing what you do well and what you need to improve

2. Raise happiness levels by aligning your ideals with your actions

3. Become a better leader by understanding how employees perceive your behavior

4. Strengthen work and personal relationships by managing emotions

5. Increase work motivation by seeking out your true passions

6. Decrease stress by identifying emotions and lessening tasks you don’t enjoy

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What is self-awareness?

Self-awareness was first defined by Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund (1972), who proposed that, at a given moment, people can focus attention on the self or on the external environment.

Duval and Wicklund noted, "When we focus our attention on ourselves, we evaluate and compare our current behavior to our internal standards and values. We become self-conscious as objective evaluators of ourselves."

In other words, when you focus on yourself, rather than your environment, you compare yourself with your standards of correctness. These standards of correctness specify how you ought to think, feel, and behave. They are, essentially, your values and beliefs, otherwise known as your ideals.

 

You feel pride or dissatisfaction depending on how well your behavior matches up with your standards of correctness. If you’re dissatisfied, you might make changes to your behavior to better align with your standards. For instance, you might note feelings of discontent in your current role, and recognize you value creativity but don’t have the opportunity to exercise that passion. That dissatisfaction could lead you to pursue other creative outlets, changing your behavior to fit your standards.

Self-awareness, then, is a fundamental tool for self-control.

Make sense? One more thing.

Tasha Eurich, a researcher and organizational psychologist, and her team of researchers came up with two categories of self-awareness, which I think are important to note: internal self-awareness, and external self-awareness.

Internal self-awareness is something I’ve already mentioned -- it is how clearly you see your values, passions, and aspirations, and how well those standards fit with your environment and your reactions (which include thoughts, feelings, behaviors, strengths, and weaknesses).

 

Essentially, internal self-awareness is recognizing your current job doesn’t match your true passion for marketing, or feeling dissatisfied with a heated conversation you had with your colleague, which conflicts with your belief that kindness is important.

External self-awareness, on the other hand, is the ability to clearly see how other people view you. People who know how others see them are typically more empathetic.

 

Leaders who can see how their employees view them are usually more effective, and have stronger relationships with their employees.

External self-awareness is recognizing your employee took your feedback personally because of your tone, or realizing your employees are disheartened by the data provided in your last email.

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