Building Self-Awareness: How to better understand your processing systems and biases
Self-awareness is one of the most profound practices one can build in any self-development journey.
This skill is something that can (and should) be practiced because of its widespread benefits in personal productivity and general mental health.
In this piece, we’ll discuss self-awareness, it’s benefits surrounding emotional intelligence, as well as a few simple steps you can take toward cultivating it today.
Self-awareness generally refers to one’s ability to be conscious of their own being.
def. Self-awareness:
Consciousness of one’s own character, emotions, motives, and the ability to self-assess oneself to steer mentality and actions.
In general, we have the tendency to be very aware of other people’s doings (their tendencies, successes, and mistakes). This is partially due to the proliferation of the internet and social media, but also due to our natural tendency to judge others before ourselves.
Simply put: It’s much easier to observe what’s in front of us as opposed to taking the extra step to reflect internally.
In these challenging times, self-awareness should be practiced to reflect on how we process and react to the events we’re exposed to from our external environments. In doing so, we’ll have the ability to steer our emotions and responses instead of allowing our environments to steer us.
Self-Awareness: Controlling our internal processes
By being self-aware, we’re able to observe and critique ourselves in an objective, third-party perspective.
In doing so, we enable the ability to self-correct, steer through emotional responses, strengthen emotional intelligence, and learn from our mistakes while controlling for our own personal biases.
Through the regular practice of viewing ourselves in an objective manner, we can better align ourselves with the ‘right’ decisions to make.
In this sense, ‘decisions’ refer to a wide range of actions. In relation to self-development and productivity, this can encompass things like the food we eat, the habits we try to build, and the career moves we make. On a simpler dimension, this can represent the things we say to others, the emotions we feel on a daily basis from certain events, and so on.
Without going into specifics of moral ethics and ‘how we should live’, the following is a nearly undeniable fact: we should simply make decisions based on firm values of life which should seldom change.
What does change, however, is our personal biases, emotions, and environmental contexts to which we make our decisions. Not only do these biases and environments change over time in different settings, but they also affect the way you react to them, enabling a feedback loop of chance happenings and uncontrollable chain reactions.
The problem is that our environments and personal biases are uncontrollable, subject to so much chance. There are far too many factors involved: our upbringing, network, conversations, and experiences. Additional uncertainty is plastered onto this when you realize that every cause that has produced an effect on you was also subject to random chance itself.
There’s so much volatility in our environments that skew the decisions and judgements we make based on how we feel at certain times, how we perceive random events, and our own subconscious biases.
Viewing yourself as a system
In these circumstances, where should we steer our effort toward? What should we be trying to influence or control?
Think of yourself and your relation to your life environment as a system:
→ We receive inputs from the external environment (these could be things that people say to you, media you watch, random events that occur which affect your life, etc.)
→ With these inputs, we have internal processes and structures (some built by us, others subconscious and organic) that allow us to ingest and process the inputs from our environment to produce outputs
→ These outputs manifest in the form of memories, thoughts, emotions, subsequent actions we take, things we say to other people in response, and so on.
Instead of trying to control the external environment (and the inputs that we receive from it), we should be trying to control our internal processes to better ingest this input to better standardize our subsequent outputs; aim to control the controllable.
This is precisely what self-awareness is: the ability to internalize and understand events, process them rationally while controlling for our personal biases, and producing an output in line with a core set of values (i.e., a decision, reaction, response, judgement).
How do you get started in building self-awareness?
Conversational Reflection Questions
The simplest way to begin cultivating self-awareness is by getting into the habit of asking yourself a few ‘reflection’ questions when in the middle of conversations with others.
Conversations with friends, loved ones, coworkers, and family can be very revealing to your personal biases, and by remembering to reflect on the following list of questions, you can take the tiny (but necessary) step toward increasing self-awareness.
Let’s say, for example, a sensitive political topic comes up in conversation and someone says something that you feel a negative response toward.
Maybe you’re in disbelief over how they could ‘have the audacity’ to say such a thing, so the natural ‘knee-jerk’ reaction might be to respond with your own beliefs in direct negation to what was said by the other person.
In addition, your personal view toward that other person could also shift in a negative light (voluntarily or involuntarily).
These knee-jerk reactions can very commonly cause us to burn bridges, say hurtful things, or feel internal stress, anxiety, or burden.
To practice self-awareness, we can reflect on the following:
- Why am I feeling the emotional response that I’m currently feeling?
- From my past experiences, what could be causing me to feel/think in this manner?
- Are my past experiences manifesting themselves into personal biases that are causing me to react this way? If so, can I react in a more objective manner more conducive, productive, or enlightening to the conversation at hand?
- From the other person’s past experiences, what could have caused them to build their perspective that they’ve just shared with me? Similarly, could they be manifesting personal biases that are affecting this perspective?
- How can I react in a way that is in line with my core values (e.g., honesty, integrity, accountability)?
By taking small steps to mentally reflect on these questions, you’ll get into the habit of self-correcting, steering responses, and building emotional intelligence.
Journaling, Daily Reflection and Recall
Journaling can also be an effective way to build self-awareness. By regularly noting down your reactions, thoughts, and emotions, you force yourself to actively recall how your internal system processed and dealt with inputs from your environment.
In doing so, you become more aware of your own tendencies and will be better prepared to intervene in your thought processes in moments where your processing system runs on autopilot.
Keeping running records will also enable you to better analyze yourself as a system to notice trends and make subsequent improvements.
With these notes in mind, remember that self-awareness is not necessarily something you build and forget about once obtained; it’s a constant practice of reflection that sees no end but is all too essential for us to be better humans.
So take tiny steps, and keep practicing!
Thanks for reading! Before you go…
If you pulled even the tiniest bit of insight from this piece, do share and leave a clap! I’d also love to hear your own thoughts and tips on building self-awareness, leave a comment if you can!
See you in the next one! 👋
