Self-Awareness is the Key to Living a Good Life: Here’s Why
Imagine you are in a room. You’re staring at two versions of yourself, seemingly identical at first glance.
They wear the same clothes, have the same hair. Both have good posture and their chins are raised confidently. But when you recover from your initial alarm, you look closer and see that the one on the right looks a little more worn, slightly older.
In your hands are two cards, one for each version of yourself.
According to these, the version of you on the left has great relationships, strong values, is performing well at work, and has well-defined aspirations for the future.
The version of you on the right has a string of failed relationships, indulges in more instantly gratifying activities, performs well at work due to preexisting skill, not personal effort, and takes life on a day-by-day basis.
At the bottom of each card is a note in small type.
The version on the left, you read, has self-awareness. The one on the right does not have self-awareness and is consequently governed by their most basic desires.
When we practice self-awareness, we are consciously addressing our strengths and limitations which help us make good decisions and develop strategies for building habits and achieving goals.
When we don’t practice self-awareness, we accept our traits, thoughts, feelings and actions (TTFAs) by default, whether or not they are adaptive to leading a good life.
And there lies a big problem . . . and the reason why the version of you on the right from the beginning of this story (remember them?) is living an objectively inferior life to the version on the left.
TTFAs: Our traits, thoughts, feelings and actions.
Awareness & Self-Awareness
Awareness itself is the fundamental condition of life. It is the ability to acknowledge the existence of one’s life.
Our perception of life is immutably centred around our own experience, so self-awareness can be considered an extension of general awareness. It is the metacognitive ability to reflect on our TTFAs as they relate to our experiences.
Self-awareness is defined as the ability to acknowledge one’s character, feelings and thoughts as a metacognitive extension of general awareness.
Piaget, a major influencer of 20th-century childhood development theory posed that basic self-awareness emerges in early childhood, but only to the extent that a child is aware that they exist in reality. It isn’t until around adolescence that individuals begin to introspect about their own emotions and characteristics.
It is generally accepted that the ability to develop higher-level self-awareness is a characteristic unique to humans, although some non-human primates have demonstrated basic self-awareness by recognising themselves in a mirror when presented to them.
You are likely to have noticed that your understanding of self has improved with age. You may more readily be able to identify personality traits you have and have the foresight to predict your emotional response to a variety of environmental factors. We start actively adjusting our TTFAs to lead our best life.
But how does this happen?
Self-Acceptance or Dissatisfaction
Once we begin to develop self-awareness, we can categorise TTFAs into either acceptance or dissatisfaction.
Acceptance is the positive integration of our TTFAs into our overall self-awareness and is the prerequisite of self-confidence. Behaviours we are satisfied with, such as getting to all our appointments on time, can feed into acceptance, which can in turn build our self-confidence. Personality traits we consider to be strengths, such as empathy, are also likely to be categorized into acceptance.
Acceptance is the positive integration of our TTFAs into our overall self-awareness and is the prerequisite of self-confidence.
Even negative emotions and traits can be categorized into acceptance if we can acknowledge their validity for existence without exacerbating them. In fact, accepting our emotions, rather than repressing or judging ourselves for them, can be productive for good mental health outcomes[1].
Conversely, it could even be considered that negative mental health outcomes are influenced by the over-categorisation of TTFAs into the dissatisfaction category.
Dissatisfaction is how we classify certain TTFAs that are leading to negative outcomes and leads to the desire to make self-improvements to prevent additional negative outcomes.
For example, if you’re consistently late to your appointments then you are likely to be both aware of and dissatisfied with this tendency. You know that your tardy behaviour is not going to be conducive to leading a good life. This motivates you to rectify the behaviour (whether or not you actually do is another story).
But, on the extreme end, when people over categorise TTFAs into dissatisfaction, they lack the motivation and self-belief (associated with acceptance and self-confidence) required to convert dissatisfaction into self-improvement. This is a phenomenon observed in depression disorders linked to ‘negative views about oneself’ in Beck’s cognitive triad.
The objective is to strike a good balance between self-confidence and self-improvement, which in combination lead to our level of self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy is defined as the belief in our capacity to successfully attain our desired outcomes. High ratings of self-efficacy demonstrate our confidence to exert control over our motivation, behaviour and environments. Its sentiment is reflected in well-recognised maxims such as Napoleon Hill’s “whatever your mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve,” and Rene Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.”
Self-efficacy: A well documented concept developed by Bandura, an influential social cognitive theory psychologist. It defines an individual’s confidence in their own ability and motivation to execute behaviour to achieve their desired outcomes.
Unconscious Acceptance & Egoism
Remember the right version of yourself from the beginning of the article?
That’s right, the one that looked like the left version of you on the surface but whose life was in considerably worse shape?
That was the you that lacked self-awareness.
We have established that self-awareness is a conscious process, where we can think metacognitively about our TTFAs, so what about when someone doesn’t engage in self-awareness?
If we don’t engage in self-awareness, I propose we default to the automatic acceptance of our TTFAs. This means we unconsciously accept all our traits, thoughts, feelings and actions without reflecting on or revising them.
Unconscious acceptance is what leads to egoism. Or in colloquial language: arrogant people who aren’t nice to be around.
These are the people who are always right, the ones who make the same mistakes time and time again, who fall into the same bad behaviour patterns (despite our hopeful expectations that they will change), the so-called ‘narcissists.’
People who lack self-awareness consistently surrender to their hedonistic human desires, usually ones that involve instant gratification like eating, drinking alcohol and having fun (whatever that may involve). This is because they don’t reflect on how these actions affect them, or how these actions make them appear to the people around them.
With all this self-indulgence, you may think that all people who lack self-awareness will be overweight, lazy, and in poor health.
In some cases, most likely, but the theory of unconscious acceptance is that you holistically approve of and default to your innate traits. That means if you were born hardwired with a high IQ (a primarily genetic trait), high conscientiousness and a propensity to enjoy physical activity you can still lack self-awareness, be viewed as egotistic and manage to live a reasonably decent life.
Essentially, without self-awareness, you default to your predisposed traits and behaviours without acknowledging the existence of them or acting to change them. Usually to disastrous effect.
Final Remarks
While I have described the extremes of having strong self-awareness, and a complete lack of it, in most cases people would sit somewhere in the middle.
We are unlikely to be entirely self-aware just as we are unlikely to be a complete narcissist who thinks absolutely nothing about their TFFAs and how they might affect others
It’s common for us overly confident in some areas of our lives that we believe ourselves to be particularly skilled at. Egoism is still a human tendency, after all, especially as it pertains to our talents and strengths (footnote). A little bit of ego can be good for us.
And on the other hand, we can be overly critical about certain aspects of ourselves, even if no one else faults us for them (or even recognizes them).
Gaining self-awareness can be confronting, but it can give us a sense of control and enable us to live a better life if we actively work to improve the behaviours we are dissatisfied with.
While the model I have described only scratches the surface of an interesting field of study, I hope it can help you define the role of self-awareness in developing successful strategies for building habits to achieve your goals.
This week I challenge you to ask a few friends what are the top five words they would use to describe you. I imagine this could be either enlightening or a mood booster — maybe both!
Let’s Grow Together
I invite you to leave a response on this post if it resonated with you, and I would love to check out your writing. Together we can build a strong community of writers. Let’s support each other!
Footnote
[1] Ford, B. Q., Lam, P., John, O. P., & Mauss, I. B. (2018). The psychological health benefits of accepting negative emotions and thoughts: Laboratory, diary, and longitudinal evidence. Journal of personality and social psychology, 115(6), 1075–1092. Retrieved from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28703602/
