The Establishment of Self-Awareness

Last week, I was having a discussion with my wife on the topic of self-awareness. Self-awareness is an important aspect for the Philosophy of Balance, because the Philosophy of Balance stresses values such as openness, honesty, and well… balance. But in order to become truly balanced, we must be able to reflect upon ourselves. Openness doesn’t merely mean that we accept what others say without getting angry, it also requires us to evaluate what they say fairly and without bias. Honesty doesn’t merely mean that we shouldn’t lie, it also means that we should be honest with ourselves and our motivations. Those qualities require self-awareness.

If I recall correctly, her position was that not enough people are really self-aware to apply such lessons. To which I posited, how can we make more people self-aware?

She was not wrong, of course. While I’d say that everyone has some capability of self-awareness, there are plenty of people that I believe are not self-aware enough. If you do things without questioning why you do them, that’s something where you can improve your self-awareness. If you want things without questioning why you want them, that is another thing where you can improve your self-awareness. And if you believe things without questioning why you believe them, well, you get the picture.

But it doesn’t really help anyone if we just go around telling people to be more self-aware. The first question we need ask is, why are these people not more self-aware? Children are born curious, they learn about the environment and they learn about their own role in it. I believe self-awareness is an innate quality of us, so why do some people seem to lose that quality? We came up with a few possible reasons.

Probably the most important reason for why people might not be more self-aware than they are is simply because they have been conditioned to not be. Imagine — or maybe you don’t have to because you recognise what I’m about to say — that you grew up in a family where your parents shut down any attempt at critical thinking. Maybe your parents thought your questions were too difficult (as parents ourselves, we know how tiring some questions can be). Or maybe they felt your questions were challenging their authority. Or worse, maybe your questions were critical enough that they felt their beliefs, or even their religion, were being challenged. Whatever the motivation, if you get rejected enough for asking questions, it makes sense that you stop asking them. Maybe you even stop asking them to yourself, because there is no one to help you answer them.

Of course that’s only one explanation. Another could be that you’ve simply come to the conclusion that asking questions about yourself doesn’t lead anywhere. If you used to ask these questions, but repeatedly found that you don’t know or cannot find out the answer, you also become discouraged from continuing to question.

And it could even be that you’ve become sufficiently disillusioned with reality that you feel it no longer matters to ask such questions in the first place.

Whichever is the case, lack of self-awareness leads to apathy, emotional bluntness, and ultimately nihilism.

If we want to counter those symptoms, we need to make people more self-aware again. So how?

Here’s some advice:

• Ask yourself the question: Am I truly self-aware? If not, why not? Be honest with yourself.
• Encourage yourself to become an independent thinker. Don’t settle for other people’s opinions just because you think they know better than you. To improve your self-awareness relies on independent thought.
• Listen to both your heart and your mind to become balanced. This is not an either-or situation, as reasoning works both at an intellectual as well as at an emotional level. Practice your self-awareness when you either feel (with your heart) or see (with your mind) that you don’t agree with something. Where does the disagreement come from? Could it be that you’re relying on assumptions that lead you to feel or think this way?
• Put your thoughts into actions. To become more self-aware, you need to learn from your own actions — yes, including your mistakes.
• Don’t be afraid of change. With self-awareness comes self-improvement. You can make things better for yourself, as well as for those around you. Change matters, but only if you make it so. So step over your fear and assert yourself.

No matter what you do though, keep in mind that self-awareness is not something you achieve once and then you have it. It’s a continuous process. Of course not your whole life needs to resolve around it, but neither should you neglect it for long periods of time. Especially when you feel something is off in your life, ask yourself what it is that you truly want, and keeping asking the Why? questions.

Self-awareness can help you lead a balanced and happy life. But to maintain such life, you need to stay aware — not just of what makes you happy, but indeed, of yourself as well.