So What is Self-Awareness Anyway?
Or put another way, “how do I find myself?”.
Self-awareness is defined as the conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives, and desires.
Becoming self-aware requires that you pay attention to the way you think, feel and act.
It means looking for patterns in the way you make sense of the world around you, how you think about and perceive your experiences and how you explain things to yourself.
It means observing and understanding your own emotions, feelings and moods.
It means paying attention to how you act and respond in situations.
It means paying attention to and seeking to understand your habits and tendencies.
And it means asking yourself “why?”.
On a scale from 1 to 10, how self-aware do you think you are?
Click here to download the fillable self-reflection PDF before continuing on.
Did You Know? Research says that 95% of people think they are self-aware. Studies show that only about 15% actually are!
Now there are two types of self-awareness – Internal Self-Awareness and External Self-Awareness.
As we mentioned above, internal self-awareness is the conscious knowledge of your own character, feelings, motivation, desires and behavior.
External self-awareness is clearly seeing how others see us. How we present ourselves and how we show up in the world.
Self-awareness is key to success in life – having it improves absolutely everything you think, say and do and every interaction you have – including making (or not making) meaningful connections with other people.
Having one doesn’t necessarily mean that we have the other and, in general, external self-awareness is even rarer.
Dr. Tasha Eurich has studied self-awareness extensively and she has found that there are seven pillars of self-awareness. These pillars cover both internal and external self-awareness and they are:
Values – the principles that guide us
Interests – what we love to do
Aspirations – what we want to experience and achieve
Fit with other people and environment – the environment we need to be happy and engaged
Patterns – our consistent way of thinking, feeling and behaving
Reactions – how we react to situations, circumstances and other people
Impact – perspective taking, the effect we have on others
Click here to download the fillable self-reflection PDF before moving on.
In the next lesson, we’re going to focus on internal self-awareness. Of Dr. Eurich’s seven pillars, the first five relate to internal self-awareness. These are values, interests, aspirations, fit and patterns.
