Self-awareness is the most important life skill of all.
It lets you uncover and address your blind spots so you can transform the personality traits and behaviors you’ve carried for a long time—by doing so, you can improve the quality of your life and reach incredible heights.
But you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. And without self-awareness, you’ll remain oblivious to your problematic beliefs, habits, and traits—you’ll let these issues control you and never realize why you struggle to get the results you want in life.
“To be aware of a single shortcoming in oneself is more useful than to be aware of a thousand in someone else.”
— DALAI LAMA
It took me years of dedicated effort to find and accept many of my faults, traumas, and flawed beliefs, but it was worth the sacrifice.
To boost your self-awareness, I want to share three powerful skills to massively support your journey and save a ton of time. Without them, your progress might suffer; but with them, you’ll be able to make huge leaps with your self-analysis and reap the rewards for the rest of your life.
1. Know the Patterns
When improving your self-awareness, you often see advice to do mindfulness exercises like journaling and meditation. And sure, they’re very valuable—by listening to yourself, you can uncover thoughts, patterns, and behaviors that are controlling you or holding you back.
But that leads to a very important follow-up question:
Just what are you looking for?
When you’re listening to your thoughts, what are you trying to find? If you don’t know what a problem looks like, you won’t be able to see it even if you’re looking at it. As a result, you won’t get as much benefit from your cogitation and you’ll probably continue making the same mistakes over and over again.
“What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.”
— Abraham Maslow
Instead, educate yourself on the common patterns and flaws that we all have. Learn about defense mechanisms. Learn how self-esteem issues work. Learn what projection is. Learn the most common logical fallacies.
There is no shortage of resources on this subject. One great book is Games People Play by psychiatrist Dr. Eric Berne, which breaks down many of the mind games we unconsciously play with other people during social interactions.
“It is not difficult to deduce from an individual’s position the kind of childhood he must have had. Unless something or somebody intervenes, he spends the rest of his life stabilizing his position and dealing with situations that threaten it: by avoiding them, warding off certain elements or manipulating them provocatively so that they are transformed from threats into justifications.”
— Dr. Eric Berne
By knowing the mechanics of these patterns, how they manifest themselves, and how they feel, you’ll be able to spot them in your life and correct them.
2. Look for Red Flags
One way to boost your self-awareness is to recognize common red flags in your life. If you can continually spot warning signs before they get worse, you can intervene and fix them so you’re no longer controlled by those problems.
Here’s a pretty damn good—and common—red flag that there’s a deeper issue going on: When you strongly want something, you work your ass off to achieve it (read books, get coaching, spend hours and hours working toward your goal, etc.), yet nothing seems to get results.
In those moments, chances are there’s something internal that’s blocking you.
Let’s use dating as an example. You’re working hard to find a partner, but nothing seems to work. Dead end after dead end; failed relationship after failed relationship. The easy way out is to start blaming everyone and everything else. It’s because of this, it’s because of that, etc.
But often, the problem lies within. After all, who’s choosing those people? You are. Who’s talking to those people? You are. Who’s choosing the dating scenes? You are.
When I struggled with dating, I attributed it to many factors outside of my control. But when I dove deeper, I realized that a lot of my struggles came from childhood traumas—I learned to feel like I wasn’t worthy of having people love or even like me. So naturally, I created situations to confirm that: I picked the wrong woman, I picked the wrong situations, and I found ways to sabotage myself.
Yet once I looked inside, confronted those issues, and made an effort to overcome them, I finally started to feel better and see better results.
What are areas of life where it seems nothing you do helps? Is it finding a better job? Building more financial security? Improving your health? Your barrier could be a great opportunity to see how you might be contributing to those issues and learn more about yourself.
Other red flags I’ve found are the heavy use of logical fallacies (which may reveal an irrational belief or mental model) or having strong emotional reactions. For example, the person who always gets “triggered” by a certain thing, argument, topic, etc. — being disproportionally upset or angry at something could be a sign of deeper problems, traumas, projections, etc. that need to be brought into awareness and addressed.
3. Learn the Humbling Truth
“The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.”
— Nathaniel Branden
Tell me if this is a familiar situation: You know someone who constantly makes the same mistakes (ex. they’re always late or they’re always forgetting things). You—and other people in their life—have called out their behavior and, each time, they reply, “I know, I know… you’re right.”
Well, brace yourself: They might say, “I know,” but they most definitely do not know. (Really.) Because if they truly knew, then why would they keep repeating the same mistake? I mean, if you knew 2+2=4, then why the hell would you keep writing that 2+2=5?
It’s like the difference between “hearing” and “listening.” They might be slightly conscious there’s something astray, but they aren’t fully aware of their problem, how it hurts themselves, how it hurts others, etc.
That, my friends, is the key to being self-aware: You have to listen to what you don’t want to hear.
True self-awareness can hurt. It’s sometimes ego-crushing. It can occasionally get really emotional with a lot of anger, sadness, or grief pouring out. Hell, when I’m fully absorbing the lessons from a self-help book, it feels like getting kicked in the balls and being hugged at the same time.
For example, when I read the Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey, I felt humbled when discovering all the games I was playing that affected my life—proving myself, proving my worth, judging myself, etc. And if you saw me reading the book, you would see me regularly putting the book over my face in a grimace, shaking my head, or swearing. (I wish I was joking.)
Another important part of humbling yourself is to make sure you only focus on yourself as you study various mental patterns, mind games, etc. For example, when you read a self-help book, it’s tempting to think, “Wow, that explains my coworker/parent/friend/boss/etc.!”
But as you study, you must direct it toward yourself and nobody else. You must look at how you are embodying those examples and needlessly limiting your own life. (It’s called “self-improvement” for a reason.)
And if you do notice other people as you read, reverse your projection and at least consider how you might be guilty of those same faults too.
Because ultimately, the only person you will ever need to change is yourself.
Do this over and over again and your self-awareness will transform.
And your life will transform too.
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