Know Thyself – The Power of Self-Awareness and 3 ways to cultivate it

Imagine being able to develop your own superpower.  A secret weapon that has transformative powers for the quality of your relationships, your work performance, creating better habits, lowering your anxiety levels and increasing overall life satisfaction and happiness.  

Sound worthwhile?

Welcome to the stage… the power of Self-Awareness!

Let us start by developing a better understanding what Self-Awareness actually is…

Self-Awareness involves the application of introspective capabilities and external feedback to develop a better understanding of who you are, how you see the world, your values, and your strengths.  Self-Awareness enables an increased understanding of why we experience the feelings that we do, why we say certain things and take certain actions.  

Having heightened Self-Awareness allows you to gain perspective of how others may be receiving and perceiving you and the affect you may have on others.  Indeed, it forms the key cornerstone of Emotional Intelligence (EQ), as it serves as the launchpad for improving the other EQ elements of social-awareness, self and social regulation.

If Self-Awareness holds such power, why are we not masters of this already?  This is an interesting conundrum.  Firstly, those most in need of a better understanding of how and why they show up in the world are often not disposed to see the need for improvement in this area.  They may be dismissive about the benefits of introspection or not see the value of others feedback.  Secondly, even for those whom are more reflective by nature, deep levels of Self-Awareness do not always come naturally.  Indeed, research shows that just as most people think their driving skills are above average, a similar bias shows up in studies of attitudes towards Self-Awareness.  75-80% of people believe they are self-aware, yet only 10-15% actually are.  

Fortunately, there are a number of things that we can do to improve our Self-Awareness. 

1.     Create space every day to think and reflect

It is too easy to go through life on autopilot.  Modern life is busy and we all have commitments to the world around us. 

It may seem difficult to find the time, but take a walk, have a bath, go for a run, meditate, pray, journal.  Do what works for you to free your brain to take stock of things.  Think about what’s happening around you, the choices you are making, the choices you want to make, how you feel, how you want to feel.

Having space to think enables us to make more conscious decisions, to be more aware of what we are doing, what we are thinking and how we are choosing to spend our time.

If you are busy, start with 5 minutes and it will grow from there.  It is a powerful habit that will change your brain.

2.     Seek Feedback

In addition to looking inside and developing inner Self-Awareness, getting external perspective is also necessary to increase external Self-Awareness.

This can be a source of discomfort or even fear for many of us.  There are things that we may not want to hear, we may feel that the feedback is biased or dishonest.  However, the reality is that we all have blind spots.  We can’t fix what we can’t see and we can’t grow by staying comfortable.

There are many ways to get feedback.  Many workplaces offer 360-degree feedback, if so then grab this opportunity.  If not, start to ask people around you.  Select people that you trust and respect, but don’t limit yourself to the people you believe will offer ‘safe’ feedback.  Always, thank people for the feedback, never try to explain or justify yourself.  Just smile and take it away for reflection.

3.     Listen Better

Practise the art of listening.  Listening and hearing are not the same thing.  Be present, ask open questions and pay attention to the answers, body language, emotions of others.  As you get better at truly listening to others, you can get better at listening to yourself, both your inner and outer dialogues.

It takes practice to hold ourselves from judging, from planning what we are going to say or from wanting to turn the conversation back to us.  One small step can be to memorize a few key questions to keep in mind to help us stay focused on the other person.

Self-awareness is not a destination that we can tick off the checklist when we arrive.  It is a journey.  It takes years of reflection, perspective taking, listening, observing and introspection.  As you follow these practices, you will start to see changes in the way you think and behave.  You may see yourself becoming calmer, more empathetic, more appreciating of our differences and strengths.  As you cultivate self-awareness, you will become a better leader and see improvements in your personal and business relationships.

Lastly, many factors make us who we are.  From our core personality type, values and strengths to our current context, stage in life and cultural heritage.  Additionally, we are all human beings, flowing with emotions, motivations and complex brain wiring!  

There are many tools and practices for gaining deeper insight into all of these factors. Indeed our friends over at iNLP Center agree that self-awareness is the path to inner peace and have developed a free self-awareness test to aid in your exploration.