Self-awareness is the ability to consider and understand your own emotions, thoughts, values and experiences, and how these can influence your actions. Improving your self-awareness can allow you to more effectively identify your individual strengths and weaknesses in a range of areas, and therefore potentially improve your decision making and self-management.
Recognizing how your thoughts and feelings impact your behaviour can encourage you to make positive changes in your life, and take the perspective that will provide new insight into your own decisions, interests and actions. Self-awareness is essential as it not only fosters optimism and responsible decision making, but it also provides a foundation to maintain healthy relationships with others. Understanding others and building a positive relationship starts with understanding the self.
Self-awareness can be developed at various stages in life. Right from when a child is born to when he/she begins to walk till when he/she is an adult, he she begins to be aware of his/her environment. Of course, the milestones reached and the growth achieved at each stage will be different, but we of all ages have learned from our everyday growth, families, other people, and our surroundings. The process of developing self-awareness involves the development of other key abilities, such as the ability to:
Identify Emotions: We must be able to recognize and identify our own emotions, as this supports our emotional wellbeing and mental health.
Cultivate an accurate self-perception: Our self-perception should match reality.
Recognize strengths: We all have our own unique strengths, recognizing and building on them is vital to our development.
Possess self-confidence: when we can recognise their strengths, their self-confidence grows. Self-confidence is an integral piece of healthy emotional development.
Demonstrate Self Efficacy: Theodore Roosevelt famously said, ‘’believe you can, and you’re halfway there,’’ which is the premise that underlies self-efficacy - we believe in our own ability to achieve our goals.
