OVERVIEW OF SELF-AWARENESS
A major mechanism of self-control, self-awareness – the capacity to be the object of your own attention and recognize your own feelings, actions, thoughts, and characteristics – allows you to change because you know what you can change (Duval & Wicklund, 1972).
When self-aware, you actively identify, process, and store information about yourself and can compare yourself with how you think you should be thinking, feeling, or behaving.
Increasing self-awareness increases meaning in experiences, the likelihood of post-secondary employment or education, the ability to set quality goals, and motivation (Benz, Yovanoff & Doren, 1997).
These benefits are possible because students can assess the gap between their current situation and desired future situation and know what to improve. They also know what works best for them and what doesn’t and what behaviors to change. An additional benefit is that when students know why they are behaving in a certain way they have insight into why others behave the same way.
Educators implementing activities that promote increased self-awareness need to go beyond simply administering career interest or aptitude assessments. Students have to process and use the information they learn from assessments to understand their own strengths, limitations, preferences, and interests (Duval & Wicklund, 1972).
The following video (5:27 minutes) defines self-awareness, its components, and strategies to use in a variety of contexts. What activities would have helped the student before enrolling in the culinary class? Field trips? Job shadowing? Research? Discussion? Volunteering?
Key Points
- Self-awareness is the capability to be the object of your own attention.
- Students employing self-awareness can assess what they want to improve in their lives.
UNPACKING SELF-AWARENESS
Self-awareness allows and motivates people to adjust or regulate their behavior (Duval & Wicklund, 1972). The self-judging of self-awareness is also a first step for goal setting. Because once you know your areas of strength and weaknesses, you have identified areas for improvements and then can act on this assessment.
Being self-aware entails actively gathering and processing information from your environment, being honest with yourself, and asking yourself questions. For example, how would others describe you? Do you see yourself as others see you? Viewing yourself in a different perspective is another way to become more self-aware. Looking for patterns in your life, for example, frustrations, is a way, too.
“Self-awareness provides the information essential for conscious self-monitoring (metacognition). Metacognition is a tool for consciously controlling behavior and adjusting our experiences of the world.”
Loua, Changeuxb & Rosenstandc, 2016
Self-awareness levels may vary in different areas of one’s life. When students begin thinking about self-awareness, they may find they have examined one area of their life more than another and be ready to explore other areas. To be self-aware, students need to:
Engage in self-assessment and reflection.
Any type of self-assessment has to be processed by students to be of value. Once students take an aptitude inventory, for example, teachers can ask them how they view the results to encourage student processing of the assessment results. The same is true for basic questions such as “Who am I?” or “What do I want in life, now and in the future?” Tracking information about yourself, meditation, thinking prompt responses, journaling, and small group dialogue each can enhance ongoing personal thinking, thus making self-awareness a naturally occurring behavior (Gaumer Erickson, Soukup, Noonan & McGurn, 2015).
Be open to new experiences.
Students invest in themselves when they try new experiences. Through jobs and volunteering they can learn what they like and what they don’t. By traveling, they can view their lives from different perspectives. When observing others, students can see what they might like to copy or discard. Being around new people also gives them opportunities to learn how others view and react to them.