Could You Benefit from Self-Awareness?

How can you tell if you don’t have self-awareness or need more self-awareness? Here’s one clue that lets you know this is an area for you to develop:

Your results do not reflect your potential.

Pay attention to how you respond to each of these following clues. When you consider your results do you feel uncomfortable? If so, it’s a signal to you that you need more self-awareness.

Think about how you explain or justify to others why you aren’t further along in your career and developing closer personal relationships. Did you start thinking about the challenges you’ve faced in your life? That you haven’t had the advantages that others may have had, including money or connections or the right boss?

How you respond to this question of whether your results reflect your potential will give you profound insight into your level of self-awareness.

Psychologists say that when people are successful, they credit internal reasons such as “I’m smart, I work hard, and I’m persistent.”  When people fail, they blame circumstances outside of themselves, such as bad luck.  When they see other people failing, they credit internal reasons, “They’re not sharp enough, they’re lazy, they quit easily” and when others succeed, people tend to look at them and say, “That’s good luck or they had unfair advantages”. In other words, others are successful owing to outside factors.

In summary, when you think about your successes or failures, or those of others, notice how you explain how they came about. This is your first step to becoming self-aware.