While awareness is the ability of knowing what’s happening around you, self-awareness is the ability of knowing what you’re experiencing. Self-awareness is the ability to know what we are doing as we do it and understand why we are doing it. Our level of self awareness and degree of it accuracy is strongly influenced by the psychological state we are in at that time, and this in turn is determined by our context or situation. This is because such things as the task we are engaged with, our goals for the moment and our level of arousal will greatly affect the aspect of the self concept that is made salient or that has become accessible. By and large, individual can be encouraged/discouraged from an active consideration of the self by situational cues.
Therefore, viewing self awareness as traits motivates many of our practices such as family, school, and work. The assumption is that if people differ on this attributes, we might use it as a basis for choosing someone as a life partner or even an employee.
Furthermore, it operation as traits allows us to assume or predict that a person with a high levels of self awareness will exhibit this attributes in a relatively consistent basis across settings and time. Self awareness can be seen as a malleable trait. Therefore, one can invest in programs to improve its degree or accuracy in those seen as deficient. To obtain or maintain self awareness, people need more related skills such as self monitoring skill, self regulation skill, and self assessment skill all of which could be trained through programs with developmental purposes.
It is very important to improve our self awareness because when we see ourselves clearly, we are more confident and more creative; even as a student we tend to perform better in academic activities like assignments, undergraduate projects, seminar, paper, dissertation etc. We also make sounder decisions, build stronger relationships, and communicate more effectively. We’re less likely to lie, cheat, and steal. We are better workers who get more promotions. And we’re more-effective leaders with more-satisfied employees and more-profitable companies.
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. If you're highly self-aware, you can objectively evaluate yourself, manage your emotions, align your behavior with your values, and understand correctly how others perceive you.
In philosophy of self, self-awareness is the experience of one's own personality or individuality. It is not to be confused with consciousness in the sense of qualia. While consciousness is being aware of one's environment and body and lifestyle, self-awareness is the recognition of that awareness. Self-awareness is how an individual consciously knows and understands him/herself character, feelings, motives, and desires.
More so, self-awareness is the ability to see yourself clearly and objectively through reflection and introspection.
While it may not be possible to attain total objectivity about oneself there are certainly degrees of self-awareness. It exists on a spectrum.s
HOW TO IMPROVE SELF AWARENESS
A) ALWAYS LISTEN AND CONTROL YOUR EMOTIONS
One of the ways to improve self awareness is to always listen and control your emotions. You learn more when you listen and pay attention than when you talk more. Also it is imperative that you don’t let your emotions have a better part of you at every given situation and time. You should be in control of your emotion and not the other way around. That way, you can have a better understand ding of yourself as well as how you behave in any given situation.
B) TRY TO BE SELF FOCUSED
For the improvement of self awareness, it is very important to be self focused and give no room for any kind of distractions especially when it has to do with your-self growth and improvement. This is because you achieve more when focused and this will help you a great deal in improving yourself awareness.
C) AVOID TOO MUCH CROWD
Growth is more feasible in isolation. Try as much as you can to avoid too much crowd. In as much as no man is an island, it is also important to know when to withdraw from the crowd for self examination and assessment which eventually leads to self growth and improved self awareness.
CONCLUSION
Self-awareness, or understanding one’s self, is foundational for the well-being, growth, and performance of individuals in all sphere of life. Self awareness is important because when we have a better understanding of ourselves, we are able to experience ourselves as unique and separate individuals. We are then empowered to make changes and to build on our areas of strength as well as identify areas where we would like to make improvements. Self-awareness is often a first step to goal setting. Self-awareness is being conscious of what you're good at while acknowledging what you still have yet to learn. This includes admitting when you don't have the answer and owning up to mistakes.