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: “Getting out of ourselves” by focusing on another person is a good antidote to stop downward spirals of self-destructive thinking. By being open to someone else, we can learn to listen objectively, even lovingly, to what that person wants or needs to share. This, in turn, helps teach us how to listen to our own inner dialogues and opinions objectively and lovingly as well. 4. Becoming more self-aware can be quite enlightening. 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.