Self-Awareness & Introspection

 Self-awareness allows you to self-correct.

How do we build self-awareness? There are many ways — but I’d like to mention a few that have stuck with me.

If you’ve just had a bad day, the default behavior is to want to forget about it as soon as you can, to avoid any detail that might remind you of the experience, to either close yourself in your private space and distract yourself away or get out to seek outside distraction, bad or good for you, to do whatever you can to forget.

But, that isn’t how we build self-awareness. Quite the contrary, self-awareness requires you to precisely go against your default or conditioned behavior. Your conditioned response, firstly, is to avoid pain. Secondly, to protect your ego from being attacked, and thirdly, to avoid challenge. But, without self-awareness we tend to repeat mistakes and bad days. 

Self-awareness, that humble, curious, and persistent attitude within every person is actually there to support and guide us away from avoidable mistakes — it is there to ask the confronting, painful questions very few are ready to face:

Self-awareness will ask you:

• Apart from what he or she did to you, what did YOU do that led to this mistake or bad day?
• Apart from what you were not given, what did YOU do or not do to make things better for yourself?
• Yes, people are selfish, but why did you trust another person more than you trusted yourself?
• Yes, money and jobs are scarce, but what skills have you developed to make yourself better than you were last month?

You get the point. And the point is that a humble and curious attitude allows you self-correct and therefore improve yourself, regardless of how bad or hopeless the situation has become.

A humble and curious attitude enables you to examine, persistently, the bad days as they come.

A humble and curious attitude encourages you to turn pain into strength, loss into opportunity, defeat into progress.

Self-awareness allows you to self-correct.

Cancelo Alvarez