The importance of self-awareness in learning

At least until we graduate from school, we are on a path of continuous learning — everyday we get out of bed explicitly to learn.

But, when school finishes, the pace of how much we learn decreases considerably.

Ideally, the opposite should happen — we should position ourselves in a way that make ourselves learn more, or at least as much, everyday.

Learning is not only crucial for our lives as professionals and as non-ignorant human beings, but also incredibly influential to our motivation and happiness.

That’s because continuous learning fits the self-actualization layer on the Maslow pyramid:

The Maslow pyramid says that, when all our basic needs are secured, — when we have the necessary food on the table, when we don’t feel that our lives are at risk, when we have money to to spend on basic needs, — the most important aspect for our motivation and happiness is self-actualization.

Self-actualization refers to the need for personal growth and discovery that is present throughout our lives. Self-actualization is in part related with learning and pursue of our life’s purpose, which is itself a never ending process — a person is always ‘becoming’ more self-actualized and never remains static in these terms.

Why did we stopped learning as much?

In school we learned every day, by doing mostly three things:

• Information gathering, which was done mostly through books and lessons from our teachers.
• Practicing, when performing exercices and projects our teachers’ asked for.
• Awareness of our current performance, progress, and how we should improve. In school, this was done by our teachers, through in person guidance and feedback, and by evaluation of our performance through exercises, tests, and projects. Teachers not only told us how good/bad we were, but also guided us towards growth.

Most people know that to keep learning they should throughout their life continue reading books, watch movies, documentaries, travel, etc. This is information gathering.

Some of us also do practice to improve a skill, depending on what our daily activities (job, house activities, etc) are about.

But, what happens after school, is that a good part of us don’t have anyone giving us feedback about performance, progress and what and how we should improve. We stop being aware.

Increasing self-awareness

There are some methods to achieve what our teachers and parents once did, being the most obvious one to ask your friends, family and peers for honest feedback about a topic or situation. Other method, and which I recommend as well, is to meditate — if you’re a beginner, there are some good apps to help you, as Headspace and Calm.

What I found to be surprisingly useful to increase my self awareness though, was journaling.

Write a journal
I started journaling around 9 years ago, just to have a place to write my thoughts. I then started to realize that journaling improved the way I thought — I was able to reflect deeper about my life events, and become more aware of my behaviours, my surroundings, and lessons learned.

All I have to do is to sit down and write about my previous days. Write about my life events, my worries, my achievements. About the unforeseens, about the good and the bad. And, very importantly, write about how things could be done better next time.

Quality of writing doesn’t matter in journaling. You just need to write your thoughts as you were talking to yourself. Just write.

Do it anually, semi-annually, monthly, weekly, or daily. The more frequent the better. But the most important thing is really to just do it.

Interestingly, I found that besides the increase of self-awareness, journaling provided me other benefits as:

• Deal better with concerns. For some reason, when we jot down what worries us, the anxiety caused by them decreases. It feels like we’re freeing up space in our heads.
• Solidify memories. I notice that when I read entries from 6, 7, 8 years ago, I am able to remember them in much more detail than I expected — both the significant and, to be honest, less significant memories as well.
• Goal achievement. There’s an interesting and studied psychological phenomenon showing that, when we write our actions on paper, with as much detail as possible, we increase the chances of executing them, sometimes even if we forget them (hint: subconscious brain working).

When we journal on a frequent basis, we start becoming more aware of our behaviours, our surroundings, and lessons learned.

Not only we start having a better idea of our performance, but also become more aware of many other aspects of our lives as well — how we treat others, how others treat us, if our actions are aligned with your values, what opportunities we missed or not, and so on.

In other words, if we aren’t aware of ourselves and how the world influences us, it’s much harder to know what and how to improve. Journaling is a great strategy to get better at this skill, important for both to our performance and happiness.

—

If you enjoyed the read, please click the ❤ below to recommend it to other interested readers!