The thing about Self Awareness
‘Self awareness’, a term that kept popping up throughout this pandemic, easy to understand, but one hell of a shit when it comes to practice. I kept hearing, or reading, I’m sure you must’ve too, ‘the key to happiness is to know yourself’, ‘You should know who you are’, ‘find out yourself’. But how?
With the start of this pandemic in 2020, we were now in a position where we had no option rather than confronting ourselves. ‘Self awareness’ does have two aspects that are- ‘social awareness’ and ‘personal awareness’, and the way I understand it, the whole picture of self awareness is incomplete without any one. With this, we can come to the conclusion that self awareness is the understanding and knowledge of your strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislike, emotions, patterns of emotional responses and your social position, the way others see you, how your emotions and ideas are relative to those around you and vice versa. We might have a good knowledge of our social standing but rather weak in personal awareness. In this phase of social isolation, tell me your mind didn’t wander towards this question of ‘who am I’ even once.
Carl Jung once said “People will do anything, no matter how absurd to avoid facing their own souls”, and he was right. Coming to terms with your own self, meeting your own self, requires not only acknowledging the positive aspects, but also the darker ones, and that is why lesser people are self aware. In addition to this, we tend to hold certain biases, and as humans, it’s natural, we can be objective when understanding others, but we are never objective towards ourselves. We can keep sliding down the spiral of ‘whys’ and still never arrive at the answers. ‘Why does that affect me to that extent’. ‘Why do I feel this way’, ‘Why did I react poorly to what she said’, ‘Why do I not like this’ and so forth.
So what makes it finding your ‘whys’ that punishing? We’ll come to that, but first, I want you to have a look at some astonishing statistics regarding people and self awareness. Tasha Eurich, in her book: Insight, refers to a survey her team conducted, which revealed that although 95% of individuals feel they are self-aware, the true figure is 12 to 15%. What does this mean for us? It means there’s a good chance we tend to lie about ourselves, to ourselves. There can be a possibility we are self aware, but more chances of not being so. What creates this gap? One is obviously our inability to objectively evaluate when it comes us. Second, as per her book (Insight, Tasha Eurich), and the answer to ‘what makes it finding your whys difficult’ is that we never have the access to our unconscious. Now, for ones who don’t understand what I’m referring to here, Sigmund Freud (Psychoanalyst) formulated a theory, which demonstrated the three levels our mind interacted upon. According to it, our mind can be segmented into three levels, conscious (what we are aware of), Sub-conscious (anything we can potentially be aware of), and Unconscious (thoughts, feelings, memories we can never have the access to). Our unconscious carries the most of the information, imagine it as a glacier, we can see the top, that’s conscious, the part that momentarily and routinely reveals itself, one in touch with water, is sub-conscious and what lies underneath is all your unconscious.
If we can never be aware of what lies in our unconscious, how are we ever going to attain an optimal level of awareness about ourselves? And if we made most of the inferences about ourselves on this limited amount of data, it is possible our mind just invented this only to reach at a ‘false why’. But what about the small percentage of actually self aware people, what are they doing differently?
The answer lies in the questions we ask ourselves, and the pattern we evaluate ourselves in. This distinct pattern was observed when interviewing that small percentage of people. While we can keep digging out the ‘whys’ and still arrive at our self invented answers, it certainly will help to alter the questions. The answer lies in the whats. ‘What are the situations that make me feel stuck’, ‘what can I do about this’, ‘what is important to me’. It is not to say stop chasing your whys, but to focus more on solution oriented questions. Building upon and working on yourself can be hard, it requires patience, courage and real efforts, but it’s all worth it. It can feel uncomfortable to come across something you might not like about yourself, the key is to acknowledge it, give yourself the time and let it all settle.
According to an article on Harvard Business Review, researchers found that when we view ourselves clearly, we are more confident and creative. We make better judgments, form stronger bonds, and communicate more effectively. We are less prone to deceive, cheat, or steal. We are better workers who get promoted more frequently. And we’re more successful leaders, with happier workers and more lucrative businesses. The path to self awareness can sure be exciting, there’s always to learn, there’s always something lingering on for you to comprehend. Your experiences, actions, reactions, the way you take on information, there is always something transformative happening inside you, hence, the knowledge of self carries no end.
