Self-awareness is a critical tool to help you reach higher levels of job satisfaction, become a better leader, improve relationships with colleagues, and manage your emotions better. However, only 10-15% of people are truly self-aware. Luckily, self-awareness can be practiced and cultivated — it’s not a fixed trait
Benefits of self-awareness
Improve skills by recognizing what you do well and what you need to improve
- Raise happiness levels by aligning your ideals with your actions
- Become a better leader by understanding how employees perceive your behavior
- Strengthen work and personal relationships by managing emotions
- Increase work motivation by seeking out your true passions
- Decrease stress by identifying emotions and lessening tasks you don’t enjoy
Self-Awareness Test
The iNLP Center self awareness test is a free online test that provides you with a score and interpretation of your level of self-awareness, and which areas you should focus on improving.
- Other non-standardized ways to measure self-awareness
- Apply feedback analysis to your own life
- Write down a list of your strengths and weaknesses
- Check with someone you trust to give honest feedback
How to become more self-aware
Ask “What?” instead of “Why?”
- Spend time with yourself
- Practice mindfulness
- Become a better listener and ask for feedback
- Be present with yourself and observe your thoughts in a non-judgmental way
What is self-awareness?
Self-awareness was first defined by Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund (1972)
- When we focus our attention on ourselves, we evaluate and compare our current behavior to our internal standards and values, and become self-conscious as objective evaluators of ourselves
- It is a fundamental tool for self-control
- Tasha Eurich, a researcher and organizational psychologist, and her team of researchers came up with two categories of self-aplications
- Internal Self-Aptitude: how clearly you see your values, passions, and aspirations, and how well those standards fit with your environment and your reactions
- External Self-Autonomy: the ability to clearly see how other people view you, and therefore be empathetic
Definition of Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is the ability to focus on yourself and how your actions, thoughts, or emotions do or don’t align with your internal standards
