Self Awareness

The hardest thing to build. The most valuable thing you can have.

What Is Self Awareness?

Self awareness is the ability to observe your own patterns, your thoughts, emotions, behaviours, and their effects on others, with some degree of accuracy and honesty. It is not the same as self-consciousness, which is an anxious preoccupation with how you appear. True self awareness is observational rather than evaluative.

Research by organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich found that while 95 percent of people believe they are self-aware, only 10 to 15 percent actually meet the criteria when assessed externally. The gap between how we see ourselves and how others experience us is one of the most consistent findings in psychology. Closing that gap is what this site is built to help with.

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Why Self Awareness Is So Hard to Build

We cannot see our own blind spots

A blind spot is, by definition, invisible. The patterns most shaping our lives are often the ones we have the least access to, because they are so familiar, so normalised, and so embedded in how we see the world that they do not register as patterns at all.

We confuse self-knowledge with self-image

Most people have a detailed self-image, a story about who they are, what they value, and how they behave. Self-awareness requires testing that story against external reality. The two are often significantly different.

Emotion clouds observation

When we are emotionally activated, angry, ashamed, anxious, or in love, our capacity to observe our own behaviour accurately drops significantly. The moments we most need self-awareness are often the moments it is least available.

Tests That Build Self Awareness

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Common Questions About Self Awareness