Why (I think) self-awareness is the most important trait a person can have
And what I learned about it while making this claim
If you’d asked me five years ago—maybe less than that, even—to define the character traits that felt most important to me when seeking out friendships or in terms of working on myself, my list would probably have looked something like this:
Loyalty
Integrity
Sense of humor
Sincerity
Reliability
Don’t get me wrong. These qualities are still at the top of the list in my book. It’s hard for me to be around anyone who can’t laugh with me, and I think the importance of integrity and sincerity, in particular, are pretty self-explanatory.
In recent years, though, these traits have been unseated by something that I’ve grown to prioritize above all else. That something is self-awareness.
The (sometimes sad) truth of the matter is that I/we can’t control the way others behave. You can’t make a friend more self-aware, and it’s equally challenging to encourage self-aware behavior in a family member. I have more to say on this later, but people can be (understandably) extra sensitive to commentary about their behavior when it relates to their self-awareness—or lack thereof. The higher value that I place on this quality these days is therefore much more relevant to my own behavior and the way I show up in relationships with other people.
Before I go any further, let’s do the thing where we consider some definitions.
According to our pals over at Merriam-Webster, self-awareness is an awareness of one’s own personality or individuality. Oxford’s definition is “conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives, and desires.”
Okay, duh.
Other people are talking about this and speaking about it differently—and they have a little more expertise than the dictionary (sorry, dictionary).
Here are a couple of nuggets I found to help further direct my thoughts on this matter:
According to Verywell, we are not born self-aware, but self-awareness is one of the earliest components of our identity to emerge. As a new mom, I find this especially interesting. Our self-awareness evolves through a number of stages over time, so that while we initially are only aware of ourselves as different from others, we ultimately (hopefully!) develop a sense of how others might perceive us.
Positive Psychology notes several benefits to self-awareness. Increased proactivity, the ability to see things from another’s perspective, better decision-making, and improved communication are among those benefits.
Even the Harvard Business Review has chimed in! The very smart folks there call out the difference between internal and external self-awareness. This chart is kind of cool:
Learning more about self-awareness has pushed me to refine my initial
demandhypothesis. Calling on people to be self-aware feels a little off the mark since it seems to me now that we all possess some level of self-awareness. It’s part of being human! Maybe what I find so critical to healthy relationships is a very specific kind of self-awareness. This feels like a big ask, but what if we all could live in that top-right quadrant? What if we could all place high on the scales of both internal and external self-awareness? What if we could just be, like, AWARE?
Currently Reading: By the Book by Jasmine Guillory
I finished this one up last night! It was tons of fun and made me want to read more books in the Meant to Be series from Hyperion. I think they’d be perfect summer reading.
I guess it might seem fairly obvious that I would put the goalpost in what is so obviously the ideal part of the chart (at least as defined by Harvard Business Review). But when we remove the concept of self-awareness from the leadership realm and make it more personal, that’s where things get interesting. Remember what I said earlier about how sensitive people can get about their own level of self-awareness? I think these quadrants might explain it!
Before digging into ~the research,~ I thought self-awareness was something you worked hard to earn—possibly in therapy—and that you either have or you don’t. What I’m seeing now is that we all have it to different degrees… and that we might land on different parts of that handy HBR graphic. By the same token, we come to the table with different understandings of what self-awareness can or should look like—but that whatever it is, it’s a good thing to have or be. When we don’t share an exact reference point for a thing with another person, it’s easy to accuse that person of not being that thing. (I know I’m explaining this just as beautifully as Harvard.) And when there’s a general understanding that a thing is good, we’re sensitive to any suggestion that we are not it.
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