Week_3_Lecture_2(1)(1) (2).pptx

SELF-AWARENESS BU2073, WEEK 3 LECTURE 2, MISS AMANDA PAANANEN TO SHARPEN INTERPERSONAL SKILLS, YOU MUST DEVELOP… WHY BECOME SELF AWARE?  To improve performance (Church, 1997)  To develop interpersonal skills  Understand differences between you and others  Understand why others react to y...

SELF-AWARENESS BU2073, WEEK 3 LECTURE 2, MISS AMANDA PAANANEN TO SHARPEN INTERPERSONAL SKILLS, YOU MUST DEVELOP… WHY BECOME SELF AWARE?  To improve performance (Church, 1997)  To develop interpersonal skills  Understand differences between you and others  Understand why others react to you the way they do  Adapt your communication behaviors to others’ reactions WHAT IS SELF AWARENESS?  Ability to know one’s personality, behaviors, & skills accurately by  Observing one’s own thoughts, behaviors, skills  Using validated, structured questionnaires  Comparing observations to an external source (e.g., another person) Ex from Bass & Avolio, 90; Learning from Inventories, Marcic et al, 310, Wicklund, cited in Atwater & Yam SELF-AWARENESS: KNOW YOURSELF  In Ancient Greece, the philosopher Socrates famously declared that the unexamined life was not worth living.  Asked to sum up what all philosophy could be reduced to, he replied: ‘Know yourself.’ WHAT WE KNOW When we speak about self-knowledge, we’re about a particular kind of knowledge – generally of an emotional or psychological kind. There are a million things you could potentially know about yourself. Here are some options: 1. On what day of the week were you born? 2. Are you more an introvert or an extrovert? 3. How does your relationship with your father influence your career ambitions? 4. What kind of picnic person are you: morning or evening?  Most of us would recognize that WHAT IS WORTH KNOWING? questions 2 and 3 are worth knowing; the others, not so much.  In other words, not everything that we can know about ourselves is all that important to find out.  We want to focus on the areas of self-knowledge that matter most in life: the areas concerned with the inner psychological core of the self. QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF  What kind of person are you attracted to in love?  What difficult patterns of behaviour do you follow in relationships?  What are your talents at work?  What problems do you have around success/failure?  How are you with feedback?  What do you do when you have been frustrated by life?  What kind of taste do you have?  Can you tell the difference between your immediate emotions and your more rational thoughts? If you have solid answers to these questions, you’ll be able to speak of yourself as someone with a good amount of self-knowledge. WHY DOES SELF-AWARENESS MATTER?  Self-awareness is important for one reason: it offers us a path to greater happiness and fulfilment.  A lack of self-awareness leaves you open to accident and mistaken ambitions.  Armed with the right sort of self-awareness, we have a greater chance of avoiding errors and making good life choices. SELF-AWARENESS MATTERS: LOVE 1. Choosing the wrong partner: We try to get together with people who don’t really suit us, because we don’t understand our needs 2. We repeat unhealthy patterns from childhood: We often attach to people who will frustrate us in familiar but hurtful ways 3. We fail to explain our feelings to others We don’t understand ourselves well enough. We act out our feelings rather than spell them out, often to destructive effect. (we break the door rather than explain we are mad with anger). 4. We are unaware of the effects of our words on others We don’t notice how often we say critical things to them. SELF-AWARENESS MATTERS: WORK  Without self-awareness, we are unclear about our ambitions: We don’t know what to do with our lives and because money tends to be such an urgent priority, we lock ourselves into a cage from which it may take decades to escape.  We are too modest: We miss out on opportunities because we don’t know what we are capable of.  We are too ambitious: We don’t know what we shouldn’t attempt. We lack a clear sense of our limitations, wasting years trying to do something we’re not suited to.  We don’t grasp the ways in which we are difficult employees or bosses: We might be crazily defensive, or resistant to trusting anyone or too eager to please. SELF-KNOWLEDGE MATTERS: DEALING WITH OTHERS  We don’t realize the effect we have on other people: Without meaning to, we might come across as arrogant or cold, or attention-seeking or nervous and shy or getting furious in dangerous ways.  We feel unnecessarily lonely: Not understanding what we really need and what makes us hard to get to know.  Difficulties of empathy: Not acknowledging the more vulnerable or disturbed parts of oneself; means not seeing oneself as being ‘like’ other people in crucial ways. It’s hard to understand the deeper bits of others without having explored oneself first. WHY IS SELF-AWARENESS SO HARD TO COME BY? THE UNCONSCIOUS  In general, we can argue that we suffer because too often we are behaving unconsciously.  We need to make heroic efforts to correct the imbalance and bring more of our lives into the conscious realm. WHY IS SELF-KNOWLEDGE SO HARD TO COME BY? THE EMOTIONAL AND THE RATIONAL MIND  A traditional way of conceiving of our minds is that there’s a small rational part and a far larger, more dominant emotional part.  Plato compared the rational part to a group of wild horses dragging the conscious mind along. NOWADAYS, NEUROSCIENTISTS TELL US ABOUT THREE PARTS OF THE BRAIN: 1) The reptilian brain: as the name sounds, the earliest and the most primitive. It’s interested in basic survival and responds immediately, in knee-jerk ways, unconsciously and rather aggressively and destructively. It’s what’s engaged if a lion surprises you in the jungle. 2)The limbic part of the brain: a later development is concerned with emotions and memories. 3) The neocortex: a very late development, is where our higher reasoning abilities are. THREE PARTS OF THE BRAIN Alot of our lives is dominated by automatic, over-emotional responses by the ‘lower’ parts of the mind Only occasionally can we hope to gain rational perspective through our higher faculties. WHY IS SELF-KNOWLEDGE SO HARD TO COME BY? FREUDIAN RESISTANCE  The unconscious contains desires and feelings that deeply challenge a more comfortable vision of ourselves. We might discover – if we got to know ourselves better – that we’re attracted to a different gender, or have career ambitions quite different from those our society expects of us. We therefore ‘resist’ finding out too much about ourselves in many areas. It shatters the short-term peace we’re addicted to.  But, of course, for Freud, we pay a high price for this. Short- term peace is unstable, it is, to use another word of his, ‘neurotic’, and cuts us off from the benefits of long-term honesty about aspects of our identity. WHY IS SELF-KNOWLEDGE SO HARD TO COME BY? OTHER PEOPLE WON’T TELL US  There are many aspects of our identities that it is simply hard for us to see without the help of another person. We need others to be our mirrors, feeding back their insights and perspectives on the elusive, hard-to-see parts of ourselves.  However, getting hold of data from others is a very unreliable process. Very few people can be bothered to undertake the arduous task of giving us feedback.  Either they dislike us too much and therefore can’t be bothered. Or they like us too much, and don’t want to upset us. WHY IS SELF-KNOWLEDGE SO HARD TO COME BY? WE HAVEN’T LIVED ENOUGH  It takes time. Many bits of self-knowledge only come through experience.  Self-knowledge therefore isn’t something we can always do in isolation, retreating from the world to look into ourselves.  We acquire knowledge dynamically, by trying things out and colliding with others – which always carries a risk, and takes time.  In careers, for example, we can’t know what we might want to do with our lives simply by asking ourselves this question. We need to head out into the workplace and try things out. We need to spend a week at an architect’s office, or go and meet someone in the diplomatic service etc.