The Mystery of Self-Awareness

Students of human behavior have long known that knowledge of oneself – self-awareness, self-insight, self-understanding – is essential to one’s productive personal and interpersonal functioning, and in understanding and empathizing with other people.  My goal in discussing this topic is to help you understand the importance of self-awareness if you are to be a successful manager and leader of either your business or your family.

Erich Fromm (1939) was one of the first behavioral scientists to observe the close connection between one’s self-concept and one’s feelings about others: “Hatred against oneself is inseparable from hatred against others.”  Carl Rogers (1961) later proposed that self-awareness and self-acceptance are prerequisites for psychological health, personal growth, and the ability to know and accept others.  In fact, Rogers suggested that the basic human need is for self-regard, which he found to be more powerful in his clinical cases than physiological needs; however, self-knowledge may inhibit personal improvement rather than facilitate it.  The reason is that individuals frequently evade personal growth and new self-knowledge.  They resist acquiring additional information in order to protect their self-esteem or self-respect.  If they acquire new knowledge about themselves there is always the possibility that it will be negative or that it will lead to feelings of inferiority, weakness, evilness, or shame.  So they avoid new knowledge.  Therefore, we avoid personal growth, then, because we fear finding out that we are not all that we would like to be.  If there is a better way to be, our current state must therefore be inadequate or inferior.  The realization that one is not totally adequate or knowledgeable is difficult for many people to accept.  This resistance is the “denying of our best side, of our talents, of our finest impulses, of our highest potentialities, of our creativeness” (Maslow, 1962).  Freud (1956) asserted that to be completely honest with oneself is the best effort an individual can make, because complete honesty requires a continual search for more information about the self and a desire for self-improvement.  The results of that search are usually uncomfortable.

Seeking knowledge of the self, therefore, seems to be an enigma.  It is a prerequisite for and motivator of growth and improvement, but it may also inhibit growth and improvement.  It may lead to stagnation because of fear of knowing more.  How, then, can improvement be accomplished?  The answer to this question has several components, to which we will begin to dissect in my next blog.