Three Key Dimensions of Self-Awareness
“Who am I, and why am I here?”
This perennial question has hounded and haunted mankind for many a millennia.
All of us have a subconscious entity within us that quietly observes the people around us. Most of us are acutely aware of what other people are doing, thinking or even feeling, and many of us spend hours analyzing why a certain person did what they did. But very few among us consciously notice these things about ourselves. Fewer still dissect our own feelings, thoughts and actions as we do for others.
Similarly, most of us identify ourselves in relation to our position in society, and to the people in our lives. We generally introduce ourselves with some combination of our work, academics, location and family. These elements make for a perfectly serviceable introduction, of course, but you’ll notice that it hardly gives any insight into who you truly are. If you strip away all of those outward-facing factors, who are you deep down? What drives you? What infuriates you? Why do you do what you do? Why did you choose those specific things? Why is Gamora?
These are really tough questions that we don’t necessarily have answers for, but that’s is where self-awareness comes to the rescue! A little bit of self-awareness can help you grasp the inner workings on your mind, and with practice, master them so that you can make better decisions, express yourself more effectively and build stronger, more meaningful connections with those around you.
What is Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is a life skill that can help you find answers to just these types of questions about yourself. In essence, self-awareness is the ability to see yourself objectively in the sense of who you are, what you want from the world, what are you willing and able to give the world, and finally, how others see you.
Once you begin to understand who you truly are, you have a real opportunity to create the life you desire by either playing to your strengths, or by learning to get better at the things you generally suck at - or a healthy mix of both.
Like any other skill, you’ll need to work hard and put conscious, continuous effort into developing and mastering the skill of self-awareness. Unlike most other skills, however, nobody can really teach you who you are. That is a journey of self-discovery that you’ll need to go on yourself.
The best anybody else can do for you is to give you some general guidance and essential tools that’ll help you along the way. In this article, I’ll help you pack your metaphorical bags with some of those tools and drive you to the airport, but it is very much your journey, and your journey alone.
Developing Your Self-Awareness
Right-o!
So how, exactly, does one go about developing self-awareness? Well, there are three key dimensions of self-awareness. Think of these as steps you need to take on your path to becoming more self aware.
1. Know your emotional triggers
The first step to being more self aware is to understand what triggers our emotions, both happy emotions as well as those nasty ones.
A good framework to understanding negative emotions is identifying our sensitive line, i.e., the point at which we begin to feel negative emotions in response to “bad news”, and as a consequence, we tend to flip out!
This includes, but is not limited to, receiving information that:
Is inconsistent with our self-image
Pressurizes us to change our behaviors or plans
Just not what we wanted to happen
Think back to when one of the above scenarios happened to you recently, and try to remember:
The point at which you felt emotionally triggered
The emotions you felt
What or who triggered those emotions
How you acted out those emotions
Don’t fret if you’re unable to recall these details for an event in your past, because you’re going to be in one of these situations pretty soon again. That’s just the reality of human existence! However, when you eventually do end up there, try to place the point at which you begin to feel emotionally overwhelmed. Also identify the emotions you feel, and what situation triggered those emotions in you.
Do this every time you feel that your emotions got the better of you. With some practice (and luck), you’ll be able to identify the nature and cause of your emotional distress before you act them out.
This is all easier said than done, of course. But then if being self aware was easy, everybody would be the Buddha!
Now, once you’ve identified your sensitive line, the natural next step is to try and push it out further by regulating your emotions when you feel them coming. In other words, you’ll be able to build a dam that stops an emotional outburst, thereby containing a potential disaster. That, however, is an entirely different subject, and we’ll talk about it in a different article.
Self-awareness is, of course, not just about understanding what triggers our nasty emotions, but also knowing what makes us happy. As with negative emotions, there’s a wide spectrum of happy emotions as well. The key is to identify those those emotions as you’re feeling them, and then figuring out who or what made you feel that way.
2. Define your locus of control
The next station on our self-awareness journey is locus of control, i.e, the extent to which we feel we control the events that influence our lives.
There are essentially two types of locus of control: internal locus and external locus.
A simplistic explanation of these two types of locus of control is that:
People with a strong internal locus of control believe that they control everything that happens in their lives
They believe that their actions and consequences are informed by their own personal decisions and efforts
People with a strong external locus of control generally tend to either blame or praise external factors for everything that happens in their lives
They believe their their actions and consequences are guided by external circumstances beyond their control
While this explanation makes the concept easy to understand, it is not very practical because people’s locus of control is rarely fully internal or fully external. A more useful heuristic, then, is to think of locus of control as a spectrum, with internal locus on one end and external locus on the other. As with most things in life, the precise level of control we feel at any given moment in life is situationally dependent. In other words, we tend to slide freely across the spectrum - from mostly internal, to somewhat internal, to somewhat external, to mostly external - based on context.
Having said that, most of us show a strong preference for one side of the spectrum. Any given situation will add some variance to how much control we feel, but most of our experiences will end up on one half of the spectrum.
So in order to gain more self-awareness, give some thought to how much control you believe you have over the most important aspects of your life:
How much control do you feel at work?
When you’re up against a deadline?
At home with your loved ones?
Out having a gala time with friends?
For each of these scenarios, think about how much control you feel:
Over the events that transpire
Over your own actions
Over the consequences of your actions
Now, it is generally believed that having the feeling of at least some degree of control over one’s life, actions and consequences is psychologically healthy and therefore, desirable.
However, understand that we’re not talking about changing your locus of control just yet. As we did with emotional triggers, we’re simply putting a marker on the map to identify where we are. We will most certainly talk about how to get to a more desirable locus of control, but that is for another time. For now, just focus on identifying your current locus of control in key aspects of your life.
3. Understand how others see you
Identifying your emotional triggers and defining your locus of control will go a long way in understanding how you see yourself. But in order to gain a more robust, fully rounded understanding of yourself, you’ll also need an external factor. You’ll need to figure out how others see you.
This understanding is sometimes also referred to as external self-awareness, which sounds like a bit of an oxymoron, but it really does make sense when you think about it. It is simply another level of self-awareness where you’re trying to get a handle on how you’re perceived by the outer world. Think of this level as a reality check for the previous two levels: getting a sense of how others perceive you is a fantastic way to verify your own assumptions about your emotional triggers and locus of control.
After all, if a person believes that they’re an emotionally stable genius but the most important people in that person’s life don’t feel that way, you would hardly call that person self-aware. When it comes to external relationships, perception is often reality.
Now, getting a sense of how you’re perceived by others is an extremely tricky proposition because it involves other people. However, you can use to get a reliable picture of how you’re perceived by using a couple of simple frameworks.
The first and most obvious one is to seek feedback from the people you trust, both in your personal and professional life. In order to get the most effective feedback:
Focus on getting feedback on specific behaviors rather than general feedback
Make a note of your own assumptions about those behaviors beforehand
Look for both explicit and implicit feedback
Be open and receptive to feedback when you do receive it; don’t get defensive
The second framework to understanding how you’re viewed by others is to try and see things from another person’s perspective by placing yourself in their shoes, especially after you’ve had a non-trivial interaction with them. Our brains aren’t naturally wired to do this, so you’ll need a lot of practice to be able to switch off your assumptions and justifications, and judge your actions dispassionately from the other person’s point of view.
Bringing It All Together
So those are the three primary dimensions to becoming more self aware. We will dive into much deeper detail and cover the nuances of each of these dimension in separate articles, but the information shared here is enough to get you thinking in the right direction.
The key work in that last phrase is “thinking”. In order to be more self-aware, you’ll need to do a whole lot of thinking and reflecting. As you reflect upon your behavior, remember that asking “what” is often a more effective question than asking “why”.
For instance, if you’re trying to analyze that time when you lost your cool and burst up on someone in an unreasonable fashion, asking “why did I do that” may lead you to a dead-end answer, like “because I’m a terrible person”. Instead, if you ask “what made you lose your cool”, you’ll be better able to narrow down the specific things that got the better of your emotions in that particular instance.
You’ll also need to get used to the idea of enjoying the company of your thoughts, possibly with the ability of taking down some notes if you feel like it. But you’ll most definitely need to get rid of external stimuli while you’re reflecting so that you can follow through your line of thought without being interrupted. Actively plan for some “me” time where you’re away from both physical and digital interruptions.