To find the meaning of life, we explore the world, looking everywhere to find it, but often we forget to look within ourselves. As we search, there are good encounters and traumatic ones, with each person having a unique response to the combination of things that come their way.
Celebrating the joy of a new baby can get coloured by the overwhelming consequences of parenthood. The joy of finding a new job is often short-lived when facing office politics that destroy. These are both examples of things people find meaningful despite the negative parts, cornerstones of who we are and what we mean to the world.
Yet we often feel empty, and unfulfilled when we look inside ourselves. Struggling to align our actions, thoughts, or emotions with our values, we are constantly evaluating ourselves, measuring how we see ourselves and how we are perceived by others. And sometimes we don’t exactly get great scorecards, especially from ourselves. This conflict often emerges from a lack of understanding of ourselves and our meaning to and in the world. That takes self-awareness.
What Is Self-Awareness?
Self-awareness is the ability to recognize yourself as separate from others. To be self-aware, we must recognize and label our own mental state or thoughts (cognitive), physical state or behaviours (physical), and feelings or characteristics (emotional). We must know who we are.
Psychologists Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund say that "Self-awareness is the ability to focus on yourself and how your actions, thoughts, or emotions do or don't align with your internal standards.”
The 2 kinds of self-awareness are:
Private self-awareness: A personal moment that only involves you, this could be when you find peace in watching your baby sleeping, or realizing you’re falling in love.
Public self-awareness: Looking at how others see you in the context of social norms, you may prepare for a job interview with a panel, or write a blog to share with the world.
By understanding there are various parts of our internal personality that allow us to interact with the external world, a self-aware person can assess their own physical, mental, and emotional states and take better care of themselves. By looking inward, it's possible to connect to others in deeper relationships and live a more fulfilling life.
Who am I?
Self-awareness helps us understand we are the sum of our many parts, some functioning, some completely broken. It's a lifelong learning process as we grow and extend our personal development through understanding ourselves better, and making whatever adjustments we are to be 'more me.'
Where we often go wrong is when we define who 'me' is by other people's standards and values. It's fine to recognize admirable things about other people- and absorb these qualities for ourselves, but only if they feel right, and resonate with 'the real me.' Every person on earth has a gift to offer the world, a particular identity that has meaning to those around them and the world in general.
We can't all be Mother Theresa, but we can all empathize with a suffering neighbour, and help them in their plight. That is, IF (!) kindness is one part of the whole sum of 'me.' If however kindness and empathy are not on your radar, it may also be a good opportunity to explore why, and whether pain caused by others has influenced how you interact with the world. Either way, digging into an awareness of self does lead to progress, and often, the emergence of the 'real me.'
Similarly, we are often defined- even in our own minds, by our culture, our family, or even the place we work. Learning how to fit in by taking on group values and thinking, happiness usually ensues when those align with yours. Yet it's easier to stay in a comfort zone, tolerating things in silence, instead of defining what it is that makes you uncomfortable, and what to do about it. You can't exchange your family for another, and often it's difficult to find work to support yourself and your family that is a perfect fit, but boundaries can be drawn to maintain 'the real me' while searching for solutions.
Those solutions are usually within you if you take the trouble to look inside. And that's a big benefit to having self-awareness. The realization you can't change others, but you can change the way you respond, is a game-changer.
Despite self-awareness, trauma happens. We don’t live in a perfect world, sometimes in one fell swoop that can lead to PTSD, or sometimes repeated over a long period, as in the case of abuse, that very often only comes bubbling to the surface when we experience debilitating symptoms such as those associated with C-PTSD.
It takes a lot of courage to face the possibility that you have a mental disorder, because- despite that the world has come to recognize that mental illness is just another human ailment, we often feel that it has negative connotations. It has extremely negative effects, and with self-awareness, it becomes easier to recognize that what the world thinks doesn't matter. What you think matters.
Putting a label on how you feel is the first step to healing things that don't feel right, enabling you to return to the world as a happy, whole person. And one who has the self-awareness to trust in what you think and feel.
To find the meaning of life, look within.
Comments