For some years now I’ve been trying to improve myself as a human being by learning about how we work through science. This brought me to learn some things about psychology, neuroscience, and physics, even though my specialty resides in an entirely different area. So today I would like to share my thoughts on an insight that is helping me tremendously on my self-development, called self-awareness.

What is self-awareness?

The best way I've found to define self-awareness is through this quote by Robert Wicklund & Shelley Duval, which sums up things pretty well.

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.

How did this insight help me?

Have you ever did something that you’ve regretted afterward? I did for sure, and I must say, this was quite frequent. Experiencing this feeling over and over made me realize that, most of the times, I was too emotional when I acted and rationalized over it only after the “cookie crumbled”. You know, thinking and acting are two very different things, and the reality is that acting is more impactful than thinking only.

Through self-awareness, I was able to change this paradigm of do-first-think-later to a more reason-based one, where I would be aware of things while they happened. Let me give you an example: imagine that you get angry when people yell at you for whatever reason. On the first paradigm, you would feel the anger and yell back and maybe say something you’d regret later. By being self-aware, this probably wouldn’t happen because the first thing you'd do would be asking yourself why you were so angry. By knowing the cause of your anger, it would probably fade away, and you’d deal much better with the situation.

That’s the thing, by being your own observer you will start having a more honest relationship with yourself, which leads to understanding yourself better. Believe me; I found a lot of subconscious habits that didn’t make much sense. Besides, I felt that my emotional intelligence grew a lot regarding myself and others around me.

Today I feel like I can pinpoint my emotions when they come up and why they come up, as well as understand others better. This reflected mainly on my social interactions, since before I couldn’t even express myself correctly, but now I don’t have any problems in those regards. I even feel like my interactions with other people are much more pure and sincere, since now I know where my motivations come from, and so I can say whatever I want without any layers of excuse. People value honesty, so the best way to be honest with others is to be honest with yourself first.

How to train self-awareness?

The process was not that easy, but the short answer is through practicing mindfulness. This is our basic ability to be aware of what we are doing and thinking in a non-judgemental way as if we are observers of ourselves. When I found out this concept, I thought to myself “Wait! But isn’t this the same as self-awareness?”. Not quite, but let me explain the way I see it. Self-awareness is a process where you compare your behavior with your “internal standards and values”, but you need to be able to identify your actions to begin with, and that’s where mindfulness comes into play.

To be honest, anyone can achieve this, but it’s up to you to know what works best for yourself. In my case, talking with other people while trying to be mindful helped me a lot, due to my difficulty in expressing myself. Another practice that helped me quite a bit was doing some mindful meditation. There are loads of youtube videos around regarding this practice, so I bet you won't have any problems finding those. Keep in mind that there are many other ways to practice mindfulness, and you can easily find more information on the internet. So, if you are interested in these insights, I recommend for you to do your own research and see what works best for you.

Thank you for reading this far!

I hope this insight can be as helpful to you as it was for me.

What about you? Are you self-aware?

If you have any questions or feedback, you know what to do!
Would you like to know more about me and my work? Then check my blog page!

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See you soon,
Shaden