Self-awareness is the ability to remain in touch with yourself.  It is an understanding of how you think and feel about yourself in different situations. This acquired knowledge about self shapes your decisions and determines your actions and behaviors. Most workers want to understand their motives, conflicts, behaviors, issues, and relationships while at work. Church (1997) maintains that high-performing workers are also highly self-aware and are able to accurately assess and determine their workplace behaviors.

So, take time to do a little introspection and reflect on the following:

• True understanding of yourself requires effortful introspection (Showry & Manasa, 2014). This process of self-assessment can be cognitively complex, and typically occurs at the unconscious and subconscious levels. Yet, it takes the simple conscious decision to do it to get the ball rolling.
• Self-aware workers can express both their strengths and their weaknesses. In so doing, self-aware workers know that they can convert weaknesses into strengths by working on self (Showry & Manasa, 2014).
• Self-aware workers are open to objective feedback (Duval and Lalwani , 1999). When you reject the validity of negative feedback or overlook your faults and failures or take more credit for your group’s work than you give to other members, you are protecting your ego from injury. In turn, this negatively impacts the organization. And while your ego may have been saved from harm, your self-esteem drops.
• The more you understand yourself, your communication at work (and at home) improves. Improved communication at the workplace will ultimately increase your work performance (Wegner and Giuliano 1982).
• Finally, the depth of your self-awareness equals your breath of success (Morris, 2016)

Self-aware workers understand who they are and what they want to achieve. Instead of becoming defensive when confronted with hard times, they accept the situation, transform themselves and thrive.

Selected References:

Church, A. (1997). Managerial Self-Awareness in High-Performing Individuals in Organizations, Journal of Applied Psychology, 82(2), 281-292.

Duval, T. & Lalwani, N. (1999). Objective Self-Awareness and Causal Attributions for Self-Standard Discrepancies: Changing Self or Changing Standards of Correctness, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, (25), 1220-1229.

Ickes, W. J., & Knowles, E. S. (1982). Personality, roles, and social behavior. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Morris, N. (2016, February). Metacognitive Skills Training as a Positive Psychology Intervention for Within-Person Fluctuations of Wellbeing at Work presented to University of East London, London, England.

Showry, K., Mendemu, V. & Manasa, L. (2014). Self-Awareness-Key to Effective Leadership. IUP Journal of Soft Skills, 8 (1), 15+.

Wegner, D. & Giuliano, T. (1982). The Forms of Social Awareness. In Personality, roles, and social behavior. New York: Springer-Verlag.