Time to read: 4 minutes

Article at a glance:

• Self-awareness helps you understand your strengths, weaknesses, and patterns so you can grow.
• Feedback and Reflection reveal how others experience you and where you can improve.
• Self-awareness is different from self-consciousness, which focuses on approval over contribution.
• The more self-aware you are, the better you can collaborate and make a meaningful impact.

Redmond’s vision statement starts like this:

“We want to live in a world with people who are self-aware.”

If it’s the first line of our vision statement, it must be pretty important.

But why?

Why does this matter?

If you aren’t aware of your tendencies, you won’t be able to identify which ones help and which ones get in the way. You won’t be able to change and grow as effectively.

If you can’t change and grow, if you don’t know yourself, you won’t collaborate as well.

And if you can’t collaborate, your impact will always be limited.

So, when it comes to elevating the human experience, self-awareness is a great place to start.

What does it mean to be self-aware?

There are a few parts to being self-aware.

One of them is knowing yourself and being curious about why you are the way you are. This can get uncomfortable, but self-aware people are able to see their strengths and weaknesses clearly because they want to grow and make a contribution to the world.

Another part of self-awareness is striving to understand how you come across to others.

Sometimes we think of self-awareness as being aware of how you’re impacting others. Think of the person hogging the entire grocery aisle with their cart while they casually browse the salad dressing section. Feels like the exact opposite of self-awareness, right?

No matter how good we are at reading cues and body language, we can’t know for sure how we’re coming across unless someone tells us, but that’s why it’s crucial to ask! When we talk to our families, teams, and people who see us clearly, we can learn so much more about ourselves than we would if we try to do it alone.

Tips to Become More Self-Aware

Start by getting to know yourself.

Notice what you pay attention to, what comes easily to you, and where people say you’re most helpful. Learn about your strengths and your weaknesses.

Engage in your Three Circles. Remember, you’re always growing here!

Redmond offers lots of resources like the Discovery Seminar and the personality tests. Remember, these aren’t meant to replace conversation or your own observation, but they’re a great place to start. They might also provide language to help you think and talk about what you’ve observed about yourself.  

Learn which signals to pay attention to.

Since we can’t know how we come off to others unless they tell us, and we might land completely differently with different people, how do we know who to listen to? How do we know which feedback to take into account?

• Watch for patterns.
• Consider their lens and where they’re coming from.
• Know who cares about you and sees you clearly. In most cases, their opinion is going to be way more helpful than someone you’ve barely spoken to.

You can’t control what other people think of you because they see you through their own lens. But you can work on weaknesses that get in the way of interacting with others. You can figure out who sees you clearly and whose signals and feedback are most helpful.

Reflection

Regularly reflect alone and with others on where you are, how you got there, and what to adjust. (Discovery check-ins are a great place to do this!)

Get curious. Once you start noticing your patterns, ask WHY .

Get below the tip of the iceberg and get curious about why you think, feel, and act as you do. That can go a long way in noticing your tendencies and learning how to balance them!

Self-Awareness vs Self-Consciousness

Before we wrap this up, we want to point out the difference here.

Part of being self-aware is growing out of self-consciousness.

Self-consciousness is when you constantly think of yourself and worry about what others think. It’s more about being accepted and liked than growing or contributing.

Self-awareness, on the other hand, is recognizing when paying attention to ourselves gets in the way of our contribution and when it supports our contribution.

A Constant Practice

Think of self-awareness more as a practice than a state of being.

It’s constantly being awake and aware to signals of how people experience you, to your preferences, strengths, and weaknesses, and also where you make your best contribution.,

It’s about paying attention and having intention and knowing that there’s always more growth available to you.

There will always be a gap between your intention and your impact. And that’s okay!

This is an exciting, never-ending process full of possibilities!