On Self-Awareness

I don’t remember when I first started thinking about this, but it seems like out of all the characteristics of someone’s personality, self-awareness doesn’t come up very often.

We might say that some people are smart or outgoing, but when was the last time that we’ve noticed someone be self-aware? Are these the people that have strong opinions and personalities on what they like?

The challenge with this skill/attribute is that it’s non-physical and internal.

If someone is tall, it’s visible. It’s manifested physically, and we can refer to it in the world that is outside of our heads.

What would it take for someone to be self-aware? Is there a correlation between how you see yourself and how aware you are of how others see you?

What’s the point of being self-aware? I think it would make us more passionate and compassionate, see where we’re great and at fault. See how we affect others and affect ourselves. How we hold ourselves back. We’ve tried and failed at things before, but we rarely know why unless we spend some time looking back at what we’ve experienced. Or we attribute an incident to a single cause and leave it at that. Unexplored. Unquestioned.

This source of feedback and reflection is usually outsourced. We have our parents when we’re young. We have our teachers and grades and school rankings. We have job titles, salaries, and performance reviews. We have leader boards and brand names to help us reflect on who we are. And if you’re lucky, you have mentors and coaches, and maybe some honest friends that’ll call you out on things.

Maybe we don’t recognize this when we do it to ourselves. The way we interpret and reflect on our own actions. How did things go? Maybe we think of it as a perceived form of schizophrenia. And we’re just lousy at evaluating ourselves objectively. They say 90% of drivers consider themselves to be above average.

Maybe the easiest thing to do right now is to either: have more people around you that are able to give you honest feedback about what you’re doing at work, in life, and any other specific part of life you’re working on.

Or, we set aside time to reflect, evaluate, and draw conclusions. Doesn’t that just sound crazy in this day and age of non-stop go go go?

Maybe there should be a national self-reflection holiday sponsored by Hallmark. A new day for everyone to be introspective and quiet.

I don’t know how we should do this, but as to when, it should at least be every time something major happens in your life. New work, new relationship. Changes in life. But there should also be regularly scheduled intermissions throughout the year. Every 3 months? Every 6 months? We sort of do this every year. When the new year comes around, resolutions abound on what we think we should strive for. But these are knee jerk reactions aggregated by top-ten lists of your favorite self-help blog. The most popular New Years resolutions in 2013.

A quarterly review. Weekly seems to be too frequent. I can see bi-weekly being helpful. And monthly. Quarterly might be too far to remember what you did since the last introspection.

Monthly seems right.

If monthly is it, then you can only reflect on what you remember. So maybe that’s what tracking is for. Unless you’d prefer to only reflect on those things that you remember. I think there’s a fallacy in “If I don’t remember it, then it’s probably not important.”

We also have Clay Christenssen’s how will you measure your life. Maybe we don’t do it because it’s exhausting to be so hard on yourself every four weeks. So we don’t do it, and there’s no one to remind us. And it’s easier to live our lives measuring the measurable. The danger is that these things define our quality of life. And how we might see ourselves. Worse than this might be measuring ourselves according to someone else’s yardstick, standard, and values.

The conclusion is a recurring time for self-reflection. And capturing these so we can live outside of our heads and refer back on them again at a later time. Inception reflection.

An hour a month to record a snapshot of how you perceive yourself.

(A shout-out to Diana for reading the first draft of this post.)