Self-Awareness

Key topic

Self-awareness boils down to understanding yourself, how you think and act, your strengths and weaknesses. In this lesson you will receive valuable information about the concept and importance of self-awareness. You will familiarize yourself with ways to cultivate self-awareness and also help others do the same while being able to evaluate the process too.

Learning objectives

• Understand the concept and importance of self-awareness
• Discover the process of cultivating it for yourself and others
• Create conditions that will help you evaluate and control the process
• Realize that knowing your strengths and weaknesses will help your personal development

What is self-awareness and why it’s important to you

Self – awareness is simply the understanding of yourself, of who you are. This includes your personality and character, your strengths and weaknesses, as well as your emotions, beliefs, values and motivation. Having self-awareness transforms the way you think and feel, but also boosts your emotional intelligence. Additionally, it helps you understand other people and detect how they perceive you in return. These capabilities allow you to better understand your passions and define your goals and actions, encouraging your actions for self-development and betterment.

Research suggests that when we have a clear vision and perception of ourselves, we tend to be more creative and confident; we make better decisions, we communicate more effectively, and create stronger relationship. Moreover, we’re less likely to lie and cheat; we are better workers, better teammates and we are more likely to be praised and rewarded. Also, it is more likely that we will go on to become effective leaders who enjoy team success.

Most of us think that we have an accurate sense of self-awareness, however, in order to make an accurate assessment it is better to look at it in a comparative manner; how do we fair at a relative scale?  Being aware creates an opportunity to make changes in your behavior and beliefs. While you develop self-awareness, your own thoughts and perceptions will begin to change. This change in your mental state will also have an impact on your emotions, as well as increase your emotional intelligence, which is an important ingredient of the success formula.

Becoming self-aware is probably one of the earliest steps you have to take in order to start constructing the life that you want as it helps you recognize and comprehend your passions and emotions, and how your personality can be of assistance in your life. It will also enable you to see where your emotions and thoughts are taking you and thus make the necessary changes. Once you become aware of your own thoughts, behavior and emotions, you will be able to redirect your future where you want.

Self-awareness is a vital step in taking control of your life, and mastering your future while creating the life that you want along the way; where and how you choose to funnel your emotions, reactions, energy and personality will determine where you end up in life. Being self-aware allows you to take control of your actions so you can make the necessary moves to get the outcomes you seek. These may include changes to your behavior or emotions. Nonetheless, until you reach the necessary levels of self-awareness, you will not be able to reach the destination you want.

Self-awareness is important because it provides the necessary base for having a strong character, trust, being open and authentic. These are important traits if you wish to become the leader of your team, or a leader in life in general. Self-awareness underlines our successes and failures, while providing us with a clear portrait of who we are and what we need most from other people, as well as helping us in motivating others and making good decisions. All these are elements required to be successful both in sports and in life.

Moreover, self-awareness plays a big role in your education, as it can help you focus on what you need to learn. The ability of students to think about their learning and thinking process, increases with age. When teachers work with you to teach you how to reflect, monitor, and evaluate yourselves, you will be able to become more self-reliant, more productive and flexible. In addition, you will improve on weighing your choices, and thinking about your choices, especially when the correct answer is not always obvious. When you have a hard time understanding a concept or idea, you will be able to use reflective strategies to acknowledge these difficulties and try to fix them. This also gives you tools to self-reflect and grow in your emotional and social lives.

Watch this video about the importance of self awareness for athletes:

Increasing self-awareness for peak performance

Action Steps – Exercise 1 (5 minutes)

• Do the traffic light exercise we saw in the video and identify two of your greens, yellows and reds.  Discuss them with the class.

How to cultivate self-awareness

Let’s say you are part of a team and you are tasked with preparing a presentation for your teammates on a team issue and present it in a week. However, instead of starting right away, you procrastinate and delay until the very last minute and you are then forced to rush the entire thing. The result is mediocre and could have clearly gone much better and helpful to the team, had you been more punctual. If you’re self-aware, you will acknowledge that you messed up and will make an effort to work on this flaw.

If you are willing to take an extra step, you may even analyze the causes behind your procrastination and try to avoid or fix them. Then again, a lack of self-awareness will push you to avoid responsibility for your actions and make excuses avoiding to recognize the problem that got you in this situation. A big part of self-awareness relates to honesty; primarily honesty with yourself. If you keep trying to come up with excuses, you’re clearly not willing to be honest with yourself, which consequently means that you are not self-aware. Cultivating self-awareness is vital if you want to achieve self-improvement. Once you know where your flaws lie, you can muster all your self-discipline towards tackling them or mitigating them.

Let’s watch a short video and then we will go over a list of actions that you are encouraged to utilize in order to cultivate and improve your self – awareness:

How to Increase your self-awareness

Now, let’s go over a few things we can do to cultivate and improve our self-awareness:

1) Look at yourself objectively & practice self -reflection

Trying to see yourself as you are, can be very difficult and perhaps painful. However, making the effort to really understand your self can also be rewarding. When you manage to see yourself critically and objectively, you can then learn to accept yourself and even find ways to make improvements. A vital tool in developing yourself: you must do self-reflection. This requires setting aside some time, no more than 10-20 minutes every day, to honestly reflect on yourself as a person and on your thoughts, feelings and actions during the previous day.  Are you happy and content with how you felt, how you acted?  If not, why?  What can you do to feel better about yourself?  Committing to this practice can help you improve.

2) Keep a journal with thoughts and feelings

Journals can be development tools and can help you log your state of mind. Tracking your thoughts and feelings will give you a better picture of who you are. Write down any significant events in your life and the way you felt about them. Write about your reactions in difficult situations, about conflicts with others and how you handled them. Once you start writing, make an effort to go through the last few days regularly every week as a recap, to get a good idea of how you’re doing and how you can improve.

3) Write down your goals and plans

As discussed, setting goals is very important. Keeping score of your goals can also help you understand whether your priorities change over time. Since the person you are now is different from the person you were one year ago, this will help you cultivate self-awareness; by “tracking” this change. Use the S.M.A.R.T. and S.M.A.R.T.E.R. system to track and evaluate your goals and don’t be afraid to make changes.

4) Ask trusted friends, team members and family to describe you

It is only normal for you to have some negative personality aspects that only become apparent if they’re pointed out to you. One of the best things you can do is ask the people surrounding you for their honest opinions regarding your character and skills. Often, you’ll get responses you weren’t expecting, which is a good thing because it can help you take a closer look at yourself. However, people will often want to avoid offending you, so choose specific questions, choose who you ask wisely, and don’t force the issue if someone is uncomfortable. For this process to have meaning, you must be open to feedback of any kind, even if you do not agree with it.

5) Practice your listening skills

Listening and hearing are not the same thing. Hearing is about recognizing all the sounds and movements, but it involves little or no thinking. Listening is about being present and observing other people’s emotions, movements, and utterances while trying to understand them and interpret them by answering such questions as: “What is this person doing/ saying and why are they doing/saying this?”. It is about manifesting empathy and comprehending while constantly evaluating what you hear and see. When you achieve higher levels of listening skills, you will also become better at listening and hence understanding your own thoughts.

Action Steps – Exercise 2 (5 minutes):

• Why was I successful? –  Think of a recent success and tell us why do you believe you were successful.
• What could I have done better?  Think of something that you did recently that you could have done better and what you could do differently to have a better outcome.

How to evaluate self – awareness

You can find standardized tests to assess the level of your self-awareness or the evaluation of your overall character, but instead we propose that you engage into simpler, yet more meaningful exercises of evaluation.

• Start by tracking down your thoughts and emotions in a daily journal. Compare your notes from previous weeks and see how many thoughts became actions, what emotions have changed, and if for the better, and whether you are actually doing things or just thinking.
• Repeat the same process for your goals and plans and observe whether you are making progress or not, if your goals have changed and if so, how often, and look for tendencies in your short term and long- term goals. If you can find them, it means you are growing as a person and aligning everything to fit the bigger picture; you have begun to understand your needs, your strengths and what you need to change to be successful.
• Then do the same with the feedback from others. You would expect feedback to improve, thus helping you develop.
• Make sure to repeat this process every now and then to maintain control of the overall process and its direction.

Help cultivate self-awareness for others

Self-awareness is a top-quality essential of good leaders. One thing you can do, as a leader for your team, or your class, is to promote the principle and practice of self-awareness for everyone around you. Overall, self-awareness increases the probability of identifying required behavior changes and implementing them. People who are successful in this task, increase the long- term chances for success.  In order to do that, you should reflect on the following:

1. Identify a behavior in your team that doesn’t work and needs to be refined and improved. It could be your behavior, to start with, because it will be easier to identify, assess and fix and will also show that you lead by example.

You catch yourself, during games, to constantly complain to the referee and challenge the calls and decisions made on the pitch.

2.Understand how this behavior affects the team and other teammates. Make a note of the times this behavior is demonstrated and how you or others have dealt with it in the past. This is, basically, being self-aware of a certain behavior.

You are causing disruption to team-play, team focus and discipline. The more you get carried away, the more your teammates tend to complain too, not paying attention to the game itself. The coach is having a hard time controlling the bench who are also complaining. You have caused unrest and all of a sudden, the team is not following the game plan on both ends of the field. You remember that last year, the coach made the entire team run sprints at practice for talking to refs and not being focused on your own play and the game plan.

3. Find approaches to manage the trigger of this behavior and see if you can reduce the frequency or intensity of the trigger. This is known as self-management.

On the days leading up to the game, think about what you have to do on the field to help your team. Go over the game plan and focus on doing what the coach asks of you. Make a point to study other players’ roles too and remind yourself that a leader makes others better and shows the way. Choose to focus on the things you can control and practice accepting the things you cannot control. Visualize the game and put yourself in a situation where there is a bad call, but that doesn’t affect you, because you stick to playing hard and smart, keeping quiet and focused. Devise a key word or phrase that you should use every time you catch yourself talking to refs. Use that phrase to remind yourself what your role is on the pitch. Set a limit for yourself, as to how many times you allow yourself to say the key word during the game. Plan to reduce the times you use the key word until you no longer have to use it.

4. Identify possible alternate behaviors when you are triggered. Avoid these triggers by learning how you’ll self-manage when they occur.

Besides using the key word to refrain from talking to the refs, set a goal to clap twice and encourage your teammates. Every time you think you have been unfairly judged by the ref, shout out “let’s go team; let’s work harder”. So, every time there is a trigger on the field, if you have spoken out to the refs just use the key word. Plan to do more clapping and team encouragement and less talking of the key word, every time you play a game.

5. Pay attention to your triggers and new behaviors. Track your progress on both. Getting feedback from your team is another good way to give you a better picture of your progress.

Discuss your plan with teammates. Let them know that you have identified your mistake and that you are working to correct it. Explain that you have come up with a key word to remind you of what not to do and track down the number of times you have done it. Inform them that your new approach is to avoid talking to the refs and encouraging the team instead. Ask them what they think and how they feel about your approach. Be open to constructive criticism and suggestions from teammates and coaches. Perhaps, all of you together, can come up with a catch phrase that signals to everyone that it’s best to avoid talking to refs and focusing energy and play on team performance.

6. Modify your approach in order to generate sustainable results.

Test the above during a game. You could see that this helps you improve and also helps the team. On the contrary, you may discover that these phrases cause more disruption to the team because they are subconsciously linked to bad referee decisions. It’s a trial-and-error thing, where you have to find the right response that will not only help you, but will also help the team. In such a case, go back to step 4 of this process and repeat by making changes.

Be realistic with your progress. Record your behavior during the course of the day to see if you met your standards. Jot down a sentence about what you will do differently tomorrow.
8. Repeat the process for someone else’s behavior.

You will find that many behaviors in a team could use altering and improvement. For example:

• A teammate is always late for practice
• Players talk and joke, while coaches are making a teaching point or whilst the team is practicing
• When you run drills, or do conditioning, there is always one player who tries to cheat an inch or two, thinking they will run less or get tired less
• Bad behavior from an older player to a younger one in the team locker room

Lesson wrap-up

Today we discussed the concept of self-awareness, what it means, how it works and how to develop it. Specifically, we pointed out small steps that can help you understand yourself, your thoughts and feelings and actions as well as why it is important to have this attribute and how it plays into your everyday life and long-term plans.

At this point we will wrap up today’s lesson.  First, we will go over the learning objectives of this lesson and we want your feedback as to whether they have been achieved and then we will address any questions you may have.  Please feel free to ask anything you’d like in relation to today’s lesson and we would love to hear how the concepts we discussed today relate to you and your life!