Imagine living in a room, a small room within an enormous house. The room has no windows and a shut door, closed and sealed form he outside world; the walls are all purely white and beautifully glimmering like the wings of an angel. There’s a magnificent painting of sunflowers hanged on the wall that is front of you; the inflorescence of the flower gleams like a truthfully glowing sun; the ray florets shine gloriously and give you a sense of movement like they’re being kindly touched by a wind below. The green leaves grow an intense feeling of abundance, that makes you refreshed and in a beautiful and calm peace. You lived there your whole life, in this white and dull room with a beautifully yellowish sunflowers painting. You know nothing about the rest of the house; you don’t know what the color of the sky; you’re not even aware of an existence of a sky or an “outside”. You just know your sunflowers, they give you the sense of life, they’re the only colorful thing in the room; and you only know the sun, the wind and peace through the painting. It is the only thing that is true, genial and heartfelt.
This is a picture of a person who’s living in a state of a complete absence of Self-awareness. The dullness of the room represents the sense of ignorance; when you’re ignorant about yourself, you become dull, colorless and out of rhythm with life. The sunflowers painting (which is a famous painting drawn by the genius Claude Monet) represents your true inner-self, which is ever present; it’s your soul, it’s always beautiful and delightful; it’s the source and birthplace of life.
You were always looking at the painting from a distance like a shy boy gazing at a beautiful woman. You finally decide to approach this painting; you started to study it carefully, you scrutinize every inch of it; you know it more, you feel it more. When you look deeper and deeper, you find an extremely small writing in the painting, it says “open the door”. You stunningly realize that you never thought of opening that door; you were just looking at it, assuming it’s locked, but you never tried opening it. You approach the door, you turn the handle, and it opens! You see the rest of the house and god, what an astonishing beauty! You see the windows, and through them you look up into a blue heavenly sight, that’s the sky. You see the sun, but you’re already familiar with it. You breathe like it the first time ever, you live like it’s the first time ever.
This a picture of a person with a full self-awareness. Approaching the painting represents approaching your inner-self; starting to know yourself, in depth and in full attention. Within the Self lies the key which will open you to what’s outside. Knowing yourself connects you with all of what’s outside, with all the beauty in it. That’s the essence of self-awareness, and that’s what we’re going to learn in this article.
The Subtle Meaning Of Self-Awareness
Like anything that is metaphysical (i.e. Can’t be grasped in a concrete way and has no physical manifestation) it’s utterly difficult to give a satisfying definition of self-awareness, it’s so implicitly important for our well-being, but frustratingly vague that it took decades of studying to be able to properly define it. We can say that Self-awareness is the ability to see yourself clearly, de-toxicated as much as possible from the biases and false judgments on yourself; to understand who you are, how others perceive and see you and how you fit into the environment around you.
Self-awareness is a skill that you develop through time and effort, it’s not an innate trait and you’re not born with it (and this is a beautifully good news). Anatomically, there’re two parts of the brain that are responsible for self-awareness which are the medial prefrontal cortex and the insula, but they can’t be used properly unless you’re consciously willing to use the skill of self-awareness and train yourself constantly to refine it.
Now here’s an important fact about self-awareness that you properly don’t know; it has types, two significant and equally crucial types that should be mastered and practiced in synchrony: Internal self-awareness and External self-awareness.
- Internal Self-awareness:
Being able to know your whole spectrum of your emotions, the positives and the negatives and the ups and downs. Also, to know your inner actual values and more importantly, to be in connection with these emotions and values; and to represent them accurately. It’s about looking inward, into your true and exquisitely complex Self, and putting genuine effort to study it and get to know it. It’s a hard thing to do, but amusingly beautiful and freeing.
- External Self-awareness:
Being able to know and accurately estimate how your decisions and behaviors affect how people see you and think about you; how they perceive you and what this perception is. It’s about looking outward and noticing the extensions of yourself into the environment and others, and how these extensions affect them and how in return will affect you. It’s a beautiful art of attention; and genuine and objective observation of what's outside of you; and carefully link it to your inner Self.
What’ really interesting that a person who’s high in internal self-awareness is NOT necessarily high in external self-awareness, and vice vice-versa. They need to be in a balance and must be learnt both, with equal effort.
The Delusion We All Live
The surprising thing about self-awareness, despite the fact that it’s utterly important, it’s also extremely rare. We confuse self-delusion with self-awareness. We think we know who we are, but actually, there’s an increasingly growing gap between who we think we are and who we actually are! There’re many reasons for that; but the most noticeable one is the obsession of our generation in the so called “self-esteem” (which has no scientific evidence of its existence by the way). We’re continuously reminded and reinforced to focus on our special and beautiful qualities; and it’s easier and tempting for us to judge ourselves through these happy and pinky lenses than to objectively examine ourselves, and be able to see the whole truth no matter how cold and unsettling it could be. It’s better to have the courage to face any disturbing or hard truth while you're discovering yourself than to despicably lie to it, and live an ignorant and self-enhanced illusion of yourself. Low self-awareness can also manifest itself negatively; for example, the amazing singer Christina Aguilera, who was always saying in many interviews that her voice isn’t that good and she’s perplexed why people love it, she even described it as a voice of a frog! I’m sure you personally know people like that; they can’t see what’s good about them or about the life they’re living.
You might be pretty good at spotting someone who’s totally unaware of himself and living an illusion; like that friend of yours that thinks he could sing but he has a really bad voice, or that one that thinks he’s the “life of the party” but actually he’s the most awkward of them all, or the boss at work that thinks he’s brilliant but most of his ideas are repetitive and boring. But, have you ever asked yourself like ever, if you have the same problem? That you also are living in self-illusion. The answer would be most likely that you’re indeed, highly unaware of yourself. As I said it’s rare, it needs serious and effortful practice; and a change of mentality.
The Ample Privilege Of Being Self-Aware
Self-awareness is the meta-skill (i.e. The mother of all skills) of the 21st century; without it, it’s not possible to master or obtain successfully any kind of a skill! Including soft skills such as influence, decision making, communication, leadership; and traits such as empathy, decisiveness, self-confidence, self-control, self-reliance and creativity are all stem from self-awareness. Even any kind of hard skills such as learning to play piano, swimming, boxing, ballet and any clinical or technical skills of your profession requires a sufficient self-awareness, so you could be able to know and take advantage of the potential of your brain and body; and also, to able to detect error and fix it while learning the specific skill.
The Journey Of Self-Awareness
the foundation of self-awareness can be firstly established by learning how to live in the present, then it can be built and perfected by mastering the seven pillars of the self. Let’s go through thos journey step by step.
- Living the present:
By embedding yourself in the present moment you will be able to experience an astonishing and glorious event, and I would even dare to say it’s the most glorious phenomena that you would ever experience in your whole life! It’s the connection with your true and inner Self.
Living in the present and realizing the true nature of your deepest self might sound an easy task, but why most of people fail at it? It’s because we try to identify ourselves with our mind, we try to grasp our inner selves with it; we try to categorize, compare, judge, react and intellectualize everything we notice when we sit with ourselves, including feelings, desires, emotions, etc. This compulsive thinking creates a noise that’s unpleasant and distracts you from your actual self. More crucially, identifying yourself with your mind (you = your mind) is really wrong and dangerous for three reasons:
1. The mind is only an instrument of navigating through life, and its main utility is “survival”.
2. Since the mind is meant for survival, its highly inclined to think negatively about events and about yourself too, which is known in the psychological literature as the “negativity bias”; this bias will create a false identity of yourself and the mind won’t represent who you actually are.
3. The mind is imperfect and could give false ideas and wrongly interpret situations, if you took a moment to reflect on your life I’m sure you can vividly remember times like that when you misunderstood people or situations.
The mind a beautifully magnificent and superb tool that shaped us and all what surrounds us, but it’s not actually “us”. Thinking could be our greatest power, but misusing it or even overusing it is utterly dangerous, because it separates us from us, from other people and reality. The mind needs to be in balance, calm when it must be and alert when it must be. Control your mind; use it, don’t let it uses you; don’t let it enslaves and possesses you, because that’s the case of most of us.
The No-Mind Gap
To separate yourself from your mind and to experience and know your true Self, you can practice what is called the “no-mind gap”. This gap is mainly a state of separation in your mental stream, your mind stops thinking and subsides. This can be attained by the following steps:
1. Realizing the existence of “the thinker”: be calm, take a deep breath and let the idea of misidentification with the mind sink in: you’re not your mind it’s a tool, you’re beyond your mind and much deeper and truer. Once this idea is established, you will notice that someone else is doing the thinking. You free yourself from the enslavement; and you start to ‘observe’ the thinker. You observe the thoughts without identifying and reacting to them, gradually your grounding yourself to the present and the fog that’s blinding from your inner self is a bit by bit disappearing. A higher level of consciousness is unlocked; and (that essentially what Meditation is by the way).
2. Focus on your body and the environment: Focus on the present moment; sense and embrace every single sensation that manifests itself at the present moment. Practice it while you’re doing a mundane routine or a normal task; like for example, while I’m writing this sentence I’m utterly focusing on the sense of pressure on the top of my fingers when pressing the buttons of the keyboard; I’m sensing the heat on the palms of my hands, the path of my breath from the tip of my nose to the bottom of my chest, the pressure of the chair against my back, the tension in my neck, the singing of the birds outside and the light of the laptop screen the glitters in my eyes. By doing this I’m calm, grounded and more alert; and focused on my task; paradoxically, although I’m in a brief ‘no-mind’ state but my mind abilities while doing the task are sharper. Do that in anything you do. No matter how mundane and significant it is; like washing your hands, climbing the stairs or getting into your car, treat it as an end in itself, not as a mean to an end; just take a moment, pause and focus on it. You will be joyed.
Once you’re in connection with your inner Self, you will become aware of it; and from there, we should start to scrutinize, study it and know its pillars.
The Seven Knights of The Self
Completely and beautifully well resonated self-awareness must encapsulate seven crucially important aspects and of the psyche that direct, motivate, shape and conduct us in every single way, those are:
1. Values: The principles that guide you.
They’re how you differentiate between “good” and “bad” in your community, culture, or society. And what you view as the ideal standards of behavior like honesty and patience. A self-aware person must be knowing his values, the quality of them and what should be added, changed or emphasized. The importance of values can be summarized by a quote by the philosopher Ayan Rand: “Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values”
2. Passions: What you love to do.
Passion pushes you through difficult times because you don’t care what it takes to become better. We all have the ability to create whatever kind of life we want. The secret to living the dream is hidden in our passions and what we do because of them. It’s important to state that passion is just an emotion to be acted upon. Without action, passion yields no worthwhile results. When you have a passion for something, you love it even when you hate it. Finding what you are passionate about is a journey in itself. Don’t be frustrated if you don’t feel like you know yet. Keep trying new things, and they will come even if you have to build them.
3. Aspirations: What you want to experience and achieve.
An aspiration is a strong hope, dream, or goal. The idea of aspiration has a positive, upward connotation. We aspire to be or to become something that we perceive is better than what or where we currently are. There are many different types of aspirations, such as career, social, and personal. One way to think about the meaning of aspiration is the idea of reaching for the stars. We may never quite make it, but the act of looking and moving upwards can enrich our daily lives. In the process of reaching for the stars, we make progress forward. The question “what is aspiration?” has another definition. This second definition looks, at first glance, to be entirely unrelated to what we have been discussing. “Aspiration” also means to breathe something in. We aspire air (and things that we shouldn’t, like food or liquids). On further inspection, however, the two definitions of aspiration have more in common than we might think. Aspiration, in the sense of breathing, is a physical necessity. Aspiration, in the sense of aiming at a higher goal, is a mental and emotional necessity. Our aspirations keep us going.
4. Fit: The environment you require to be happy and engaged.
An individual's characteristics and values must match the environment in which they operate. People innately tend to either fit into their environment or seek environments that are a better fit for them in terms of interests, values, and personality. In essence, an optimal fit facilitates an individual's functioning, like improved attitude and performance, while an unsuitable fit may worsen the individual's functioning, that’s why it’s important to prepare yourself by asking yourself “what are the environmental conditions that suits me, my values and my ambitions?”. After knowing these conditions you’ll have a clear “environment” target to look for and seek. It could be impossible to find the ideal environment, therefore, start with the bare minimum, the most minimum conditions that would at least give you a push to obtain your top 3 values, goals and ambitions, then start from their slowly and gradually. It’s highly important to know a central concept in Psychology which is “reciprocal determinism”, in a nutshell, it says that as much as an environment influences you, you also highly influence it. Therefore, if you can’t find a better new environment, you can certainly change the environment you’re already in to your own favor; it could be a very slow progress, but it’s certain.
5. Patterns: Consistent ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
In my opinion, this is the most important pillar. Any individual has a certain set of behaviors and thoughts that are unchanging, consistent and firm through time. The interesting thing, that most of these behaviors and thoughts are conducted unconsciously and we can’t find a concrete reason of why we do or think of them. In his book, Understanding Human Nature, Alfred Adler introduced a psychological mechanism called “mapping of behaviors” in which you can track any behavior and know its origin, and by knowing that, you can find a way to alter or totally change it; in his words: “We can however take many movements ( i.e. Behaviors) of an individual, compare them, and graphically represent them; in this way we arrive at an understanding of a human being by connecting two points wherein a definite attitude of the psychic life was expressed, in which the difference in time is noted by a curve. This mechanism is utilized to obtain a unified impression of a whole life. We may rediscover a childhood pattern in an adult, in all its astonishing similarity.” Alfred strongly claimed that most, if not all of our adult behaviors stem from childhood experiences, environment and events; it’s all connected and unchanging, your childhood is amazingly and perplexingly reflected in your adult life. Although Alfred made it sound like it’s impossible to change, but actually, what he really meant that change is possible, but it can only be done by consciously, carefully and in an effortful way noticing your current behaviors, and then, you courageously dive into the mysterious oceans of your childhood life to know their origin, and change from within. This journey of self-knowing and diving into the deep is utterly scary and hard; that’s why most people don’t change, And if there’s any, it’s just superficial.
To become conscious of your patterns, you need to have a mapping system to track and detect them; one of these systems could be a journal; write your daily experience and anything significant that made you do specific act or feel something specific; also, try to register your emotional spectrum through the day, all the ups and downs of your mood and how an event made you feel; use the wheel of emotions that was made by the psychologist Robert Plutchik to help you name and point out what you feel more accurately; start from the middle of the circle then go peripherally. Every two weeks do a careful review and try to detect any consistent patterns of behaviors, emotions or thoughts. Once you’re conscious of these patterns, especially the self-sabotaging ones, you’re in charge of them, instead of them being in charge of you. The journey starts from here. We will go through the rest of the journey step by step and deeply in an another article, due to its complexity and huge importance.
6. Reactions: the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that reveal your capabilities.
Reaction is the ability to detect (by sensory input e.g. vision), process (by areas in the brain e.g. Prefrontal cortex and amygdala), and then respond (by thoughts, feelings or behaviors) to a stimulus. These reactions reflect a capability; this capability could be a weakness or a strength in your personality. The reaction happens in mere seconds or less, because the brain is an amazingly fast processing machine. Thus, you naturally would be conscious of these reactions only after they have already happened. But, as I said any reaction that occurs reflects a capability in you, and you won’t know it unless you’re conscious of your reaction. Now, the million-dollar question is how can you be conscious of your reactions before they already happen? Well, you can’t! What you just can and ‘need’ is to be conscious reactions after they happen, and by knowing that, you can know the underlying cause, which in return will help you to regulate your reaction before it happens. Most people aren’t aware of their reactions even after a while from its occurrence. That’s dangerous because, and I say it again, every reaction reflects a capability within you, and this capability could be a strength or a weakness; and as person, you absolutely must know your strengths (to enhance them) and weaknesses (to fix them or at least just be aware of them, because everything that you’re not aware of, controls you); let us take some examples.
Ali is a newly hired marketing specialist in a sports company; the work is normally not stressful with an average of 40 hours per week. After a while the company had a huge product that was supposed to be launched in the next few weeks, the work became surprisingly stressful with an average of 70 hours per week; after only two weeks, Ali was fired. Why was he fired? After doing retrospection and tracking of behaviors, it turned out that Ali started to react aggressively towards his co-workers during his stressful weeks; he was rude, making wrong decisions and unable to cooperate with his team. This sabotaging reaction reflected a weakness in Ali, which is the inability to function under stress. If Ali didn’t consciously become aware of his reactions by retrospection and tracking, he wouldn’t know that, he wouldn’t even know that his reactions were aggressive. Now he has the power to work on his weakness and become aware of his reactions when he’s stressed so he doesn’t get himself fired again.
When we examine our reactions, we don’t just uncover our weaknesses; sometimes we can discover strengths we never knew we had. Sara is an engineering student at U of K. She noticed that there are a lot of conflicts between her fellow students, they disagreed a lot and were always having arguments, which they led to nothing; Sara’s first reaction was having the urge to fix that; she immediately went to her friends and decided to form a discussion club, where people can discuss, debate and exchange opinions with respect and in a systematic way; and it worked! After retrospection and tracking, Sara realized she had an amazing strength which is leadership; and now she’s following this and joining leadership worldwide programs and aspiring to be become a leading social changer. That’s the power of being aware of your reactions; simple but powerful. A reaction is most of the time triggered by an intense emotion, so, controlling your emotions is a way of controlling your reactions; I have provided a link to a website that gives beautiful and practical tools for that, it’s at the end of the article.
7. Impact: the effect you have on others.
The previous pillars were concerned with internal Self-Awareness, this one is solemnly concerned with External Self-Awareness. I think one of the worst, misleading and stupid advices I’ve ever heard in my life was “Do not care about what other people think about you”. I mean, of course, people might be envious, rude and stupid; and of course, you shouldn’t try to please other people just for the sake of acceptance, but caring about what other people think about you has many important utilities; It helps you to know you’re impact on them because in order to be in harmony with your society, community and your friends; and to have a reciprocal healthy and meaningful relationships, you need to know how your behaviors affect other people; how what you do and say make them feel about themselves, about you and the specific situation. Knowing all of that would make you aware of your wrong behaviors that you’re unconscious about and harms them; it would make you better at communication and faster at building profound relationships; it would grow a sense of empathy and kindness inside of you, because the most efficient ways to know you impact on people is by seeing life through their own eyes. You imagine the situation in their own perspective, and you try to absorb and understand it. This is called in Psychology “the perspective taking” and when you do it, a sense of empathy, kindness and niceness would blossom inside of you.
Another tool that would help you to know your impact and more crucially, to make better decisions in a middle of a situation was coined by the psychologist Richard Weissbourd which is called “Zoom in, Zoom out”. To successfully take others’ perspectives in highly charged situations, Weissbourd advises, we should start by “zooming in” on our own perspective (e.g. How do you feel at the moment? Hungry, mad or excited. How the situation is affecting you?). Next, we should “zoom out” and consider the perspective of the other person (try to read his face, what is he feeling? How the situation is affecting him?). Zooming in would help you calm down and get rid of the sense of ego-centricity; zooming out would help you measure and estimate the effect of your behavior while considering the person’s circumstances, in which will help you to control it.
The Johari Window
Last but not least, here’s an immensely beautiful tool for developing self-awareness and opening up lines of communication with others (or a specific other) which is the Johari Window. Invented by Psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham, the Johari Window helps us to understand self-awareness and the human interaction that results from our personal self-awareness.
The premise behind the window is that there are certain things which we know, and things we do not know about ourselves. Similarly, there are certain things others know and do not know. Thus, at any given point of time in life, we may see our total being as we understand it and as others know about it in a true sense through the 4-paned Johari window.
1. Open self or Arena – Here the information about the person his attitudes, behavior, emotions, feelings, skills and views will be known by the person as well as by others. This is mainly the area where all the communications occur and the larger the arena becomes the more effectual and dynamic the relationship will be. ‘Feedback solicitation’ is a process which occurs by understanding and listening to the feedback from another person. Through this way the open area can be increased horizontally decreasing the blind spot. The size of the arena can also be increased downwards and thus by reducing the hidden and unknown areas through revealing one’s feelings to another person.
2. Blind self or Blind Spot – Information about yourselves that others know in a group, but you will be unaware of it. Others may interpret yourselves differently than you expect. The blind spot is reduced for an efficient communication through seeking feedback from others.
3. Hidden Self or Façade – Information that is known to you, but will be kept unknown from others. This can be any personal information which you feel reluctant to reveal. This includes feelings, past experiences, fears, secrets etc. We keep some of our feelings and information as private as it affects the relationships and thus the hidden area must be reduced by moving the information to the open areas.
4. Unknown Self – The Information which is unaware to yourselves as well as others. This includes the information, feelings, capabilities, talents etc. This can be due to traumatic past experiences or events which can be unknown for a lifetime. The person will be unaware till he discovers his hidden qualities and capabilities or through observation of others. Open communication is also an effective way to decrease the unknown area and thus to communicate effectively.
You bring up your partner or your friend and start playing. You can choose your own words to describe each other you can choose words from the panel that’s shown below.
Although what I have read is absolutely wonderful, it reveals the heavy burden on my back that I have to deal with.
I know that I have to dive deep and work everything out , but I am horrified by the horror of the whole process.
Also I like the nice gesture where you mentioned that ,”you have to be the witness “ , where you just have to sit and watch your thoughts while you are separated from them ..
There is also a beautiful TV show by Mustafa Hosny called Al Qenaa ( the mask ) and it is highly reflecte in a great way Johari Theory.