Title: What Is Self-Awareness, and How Do You Get It? | Psychology Today
Headings: What Is Self-Awareness, and How Do You Get It?
Tchiki Davis, Ph.D.
What Is Self-Awareness, and How Do You Get It?
11 ways to achieve greater self-awareness.

Content: There is so much we don’t know about our inner thoughts and processes that the inward journey at times can be surprising (check out these self-help books to help build awareness). Sometimes certain phrases come out automatically to reveal attitudes or opinions that we don’t even realize we subscribe to, or even know where they came from. Over the years of being submerged in a family, a school, various jobs, and a social milieu, we absorb prevailing ideas from our environment, and some of these get buried in our subconscious, where they often don’t get examined until we inadvertently blurt them out, at times to our own embarrassment. This is one good reason why it behooves us to become more self-aware . . . to learn how to be ourselves, and to feel more confident that the ideas we are expressing are really our own. 5. Self-awareness can open your mind to new perspectives. We each tend to have different perspectives on a variety of topics, but as we develop these perspectives, we develop our self-concept, get comfortable with ourselves, and have a preference for our own opinions. However, limited perspectives lead to limited thinking, so by being open to the views of others, we can expand our perspectives to be more universally inclusive. New ideas are refreshing and stimulating, opening our thinking in new and possibly promising directions, perhaps helping us to self-actualize.