Benefits of Knowing Ourselves Better

Why Self-Awareness is Important?

By Joanna McCormick, Counsellor at Tranquillo Place

The better we know ourselves the more meaningful and fulfilling life becomes.

Or as Socrates famously said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” 

Self-awareness is the ability to recognise our emotional state and the reaction we experience as a result. Even just having an awareness that there’s a distinction between the two can be highly beneficial. Being able to identify and name our emotions is a great starting point for processing them in a healthy way. 

These days most of us have a level of understanding that suppressing emotions will most likely have negative short and long term consequences. When we are able to process our emotions effectively, especially those big and hairy ones, like anger, rage, sadness or fear, we limit their control over us whilst gaining a greater sense of agency over our life. 

Self-awareness allows us to learn and reflect on our responses to different emotions. When we experience an emotion and we have a reaction to that emotion.  This happens so fast, like we are on autopilot. Unless we slow down and look more closely, we may not realise that these are two separate processes. 

Trigger  ➡️ ➡️  Emotion  ➡️ ➡️Reaction

Whilst we cannot control an emotion that we experience, we can have a degree of control over our reaction to, and our outward expression of the emotion. The process of managing this subtle dynamic often becomes a part of our growth, self-development or healing journey. 

As we get better at recognising our emotional states, we can progress to more permanent features, such as personality traits and other individual characteristics. Having self-awareness in relation to personal qualities, can help us make wiser choices and decisions. 

As we reflect on our own behaviours, motivations and belief system, we may start to examine the big picture of our life. Thereby seeking to understand what contributed to who we are today. 

The environment that we were born and raised in, our cultural heritage, religious background, the history of our country and our own family all had a role to play in shaping who we have become. As we look at our life from this bird’s-eye view perspective we may for example become more aware of shared commonalities with people of similar background, observing that certain views or behaviours have been passed on to us. 

If we tend to be hard on ourselves, this realisation can be a huge relief, helping us to look at ourselves and our patterns with greater understanding and maybe even self-compassion. While it’s important to have a healthy sense of personal responsibility, too often we blame ourselves for all our shortcomings and mistakes. We may be forgetting about all those external factors that contributed to the way we think or behave. 

As our self understanding grows, we may acknowledge that others too have their reasons for acting the way they do or saying what they say, as if running on a pre-downloaded program. Reflection and appreciation of the shared human condition helps us enjoy a deeper sense of connection with fellow humans.

In this short exploration of self-awareness we touched on our emotions, our psychological traits, as well as our behaviours, three different layers of self exploration that we can delve into. 

So as you’re reading these words, pause for a moment and ask yourself a few questions: 

• What is your level of self-awareness? 
• Have you done much work in this area or none at all? 
• What could be the benefits of greater self-awareness in your own life?
• What are some ways to become more self-aware? 

This reflection process can be done alone but it can also be helpful to step through this process with a counsellor. Get in touch if you’d like to make an appointment.

Photo by Catherine Kay Greenup on Unsplash