Understanding and Enhancing Your Self-Awareness
Estimated Time: 1 hour
Self-awareness is the foundation of being an emotionally intelligent learner. Without self-awareness, you will not understand your own emotions, inclinations, and preferences when learning. However, with self-awareness, you know better about how you learn, why you learn, and the emotions that enhance or restrict your ability to learn effectively.
What is Self-Awareness?
Here are the benefits of self-awareness as summarized in the video:
- Helps us understand who we are and what we need and expect from other people
- Helps us understand our strengths and weaknesses
- Informs how we present ourselves to others
- Shapes our decision-making
- Helps us stay grounded
- Helps us to set boundaries
- Helps us to be more empathetic
Self-Awareness vs. Self-Consciousness
Let’s be clear that self-awareness is different from self-consciousness. As described above, when you are self-aware, you know more and understand more about yourself, your qualities, and your emotions. Whereas with self-consciousness, you have a heightened sense of self-awareness that results in continued strong perceptions of yourself and sometimes undue estimation of how others perceive you. Self-consciousness can become extreme especially when there is a fixation on your flaws and inabilities. Your goal should be to increase your self-awareness, without increasing your self-consciousness.
Self-Awareness and Learning
As mentioned earlier, self-awareness can help you become a better self-directed learner. Here are a number of areas in which you need to be more self-aware in other to accomplish more effective learning:
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Emotions
As we have already demonstrated, being aware of your emotions is important to how you understand, interpret, and act in situations. Learning happens in a variety of contexts, so the ability to understand your emotions in different situations can determine if you are able to learn in those situations or not.
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Strengths and Weaknesses
Our strengths are the things that we do well, while our weaknesses are the things we are not so good at. Having an understanding of your strengths and weaknesses during learning and at work will help you prioritize and concentrate on more effective methods for achieving your goals.
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Learning preferences, needs, and priorities
Similar to the point above and in line with our discussion last week on learning preferences, being aware of your learning preferences and approaches can help you to be a more effective learner, regardless of the subject matter.
How to Improve Your Self-Awareness
Here are activities you can practice to improve your self-awareness:
- Look at yourself objectively
- Keep a Journal (Reflection by writing)
- Practice meditation and other mindfulness habits
- Take personality and psychometric tests
- Ask for feedback