Self-awareness
What do you know about self-awareness? Are we self-aware or self-involved?
· Understanding the term ‘SELF-AWARENESS’
A lot of people don’t know the difference between a self-aware and self-involved person.
Self-awareness means:
1- Understanding your feelings, getting a hold of them so they don’t affect your thinking
2- Knowing the cost of your actions
3- Be conscious of what you desire.
There is no simple explanation of the words ‘self’ and ‘awareness’. The meaning of self-awareness is already in it, but yet it’s hidden. People who ponder upon it, easily unravel its meaning while others will just take it as the word of the day and move on without even knowing its true meaning.
The self-awareness theory was First developed in 1972 by Duval and Wicklund in their book “A theory of objective self-awareness”
“When we focus our attention on ourselves, we evaluate and compare our current behavior to our internal standards and values”
· What is meant by being Self-Involved?
Whereas being Self-involved means to make everything about yourself even if it’s not. They don’t try to understand how others feel and make everything about themselves. They tend to be more possessive and egoistic. They don’t like seeing others succeed. A self-involved person doesn’t care about hurting others to seek what they desire.
Self-involved can develop a narcissistic personality disorder where they think there is nothing more important than them. They don’t respect other’s opinions because everyone around them seems insignificant to them.
· Two types of Self-awareness:
According to Tasha Eurich research self-awareness is of two types:
One is internal self-awareness another is external self-awareness. Some people tend to be more appeased because they have both internal and external self-awareness whereas some people only try to please others and that would make them have low internal self-esteem which in turn causes low internal self-awareness.
· How to be Self-aware:
There is a way to cultivate self-awareness and that is by criticizing your behavior from your point of view and by how others see you.
Internal self-awareness can be achieved only by focusing on your inner thoughts while for external self-awareness you need some people to evaluate the effect you have on them.
Only 10 to 15 people are self-aware, which means the rest of the percentage 85 to 90% of people does not self-evaluate.
This estimation is made by the Tasha Eurich research, which included different people, such as CEOs and their employees.
· Subtypes:
Through this research, the phenomenon of internal and external self-awareness is created and it gave rise to 4 subtypes of awareness:
· Ask yourself WHAT instead of WHY:
There is a thin line between being self-aware and self-involved; that is the treatment you give yourself and others. Both words have the same meaning to them that is having an ‘effect on others. The effect can be kindness or hatred; it all depends on you. Rather than doing kindness and asking yourself ‘why the other person is not doing the same?’ ask yourself ‘what can I do more for the other person?’. A chief quality of self-awareness is being the bigger person. A self-aware person does not get into the trivial matter of ‘WHY’ because he does not need the approval of others; he is enough for himself.
· Conclusion:
The meaning of self-awareness is just the tip of the iceberg; you have to dive deep into yourself to know the ‘True Sense’ of this word.
There can be a lot of ways through which you can try to be self-aware, but one easy way is to look in the mirror and ask yourself.
