What are you doing to become more self-aware of what goes on inside you and its effects on your relationship?
Our Experience
I came across a definition of Healthy Self-Awareness:
Healthy self-awareness is the ability to recognize and understand what is happening inside you – your emotions, thoughts, needs, motivations, values, and habitual responses – and to understand how these inner experiences influence your behavior and relationships.
I was immediately struck with the word, “ability.”
Why?
Mostly, because that suggests it can be developed.
I had assumed that this kind of awareness was a ‘factory-setting’ produced in childhood, so subterranean that it required trauma to uncover.
I certainly did not see it as a choice, subject to personal vision, intent and planned growth.
Sure, I have often proved the need for better self-awareness, usually at the expense of others, especially family.
And I have heard people describe a person with these words: “They have no self-awareness.”
Definitely not a compliment.
It’s a warning or explanation for relational injury.
It took a therapist to help me discover that there were things going on inside me. It always seemed like she experienced my life more deeply than I did. And what I was blind to was immediately, even glaringly obvious to her.
“I decided to quit driving a couple of weeks ago,” I told her.
“Why?”
“I hit a bike rider on the way home,” I explained rather clinically.
Her groans and expressions of horror and sympathy stalled our session.
(Thankfully and miraculously the biker was not hurt, nor was his bike damaged.)
What about Libby? Does she have and practice healthy self-awareness?
“More than I used to,” is her response.
Her Radar only had one setting: What do those around me need and how can I serve them?
Her Other-Awareness is off the charts, and I have been the biggest beneficiary of that.
My Radar setting has always been Performance: How can I be better and better in everything I need to be?
I suspect that if I told this to my therapist , she would probably force me to be honest enough to change “better than I need to be,” to “better than everyone else.”
But, alas, I drove her into retirement and have not seen her in years. Can you tell?
This post is an intro to the conversation we will have in the weeks ahead about how to develop self-awareness.
What words stood out to you in the definition?
