Seeing things as they are

Bringing more awareness into your perceived reality is one of the most powerful things that you can do. It’s a foundational skill to unlocking personal growth and improving the quality of your relationships, including the relationship you have with yourself. Learning to notice and pay closer attention to what is happening allows you to adopt a more honest viewpoint, and it’s from honesty that truly enduring growth and change can emerge. What it requires is lots of curiosity and some bravery. Whether you decide to take action on your increased awareness is up to you, but I hope to convince you as to why you should.

The first step you need to take to improve self-awareness can feel very unnatural: you need to accept that you are not always consciously aware of why you do what you do. Since we all have the subjective experience of consciousness that we experience as being in the “driver’s seat”, the idea that we’re not in 100% control of ourselves at all times may sound preposterous. If you have experience with mindfulness, meditation, psychotherapy, psychological concepts or Buddhism, then this concept may be more familiar to you, but it can still be difficult to wrap your head around, let alone practice it.

To ease into this idea, I’m going to start by approaching increased awareness of other people first. I’ll then shift the frame of reference to yourself, where the same concepts will apply, even if the practice is different. I’m also deliberately choosing to avoid delving deeply into theory or research and will instead take an experiential line of argument.¹ There is a significant body of scientific research and empirical evidence—not to mention several millennia of spiritual practice—supporting the arguments that I’ll make, and I’ve included recommended further reading at the end of this essay.

Observing Others

Let’s begin with something with which we’re all much more familiar: observing, evaluating, and reacting to other people’s behavior. Consider how many of these types of scenarios are familiar in your experience:

• A family member who refuses the advice and pleading from loved ones to see a doctor for a health condition that could have serious consequences if left undiagnosed.
• A close friend who confides the frequent misery that a romantic relationship is causing them but chooses to excuse or tolerate their partner’s behavior because the prospect of dating and finding a new partner involves too much uncertainty.
• The business leader who appears to acknowledge troubling patterns (missed targets, high employee attrition, lack of motivation, etc.) but avoids honestly evaluating the role they play in the outcomes.
• The product manager who prefers to design products based on how users should behave rather than how they actually behave, leading to suboptimal outcomes.

These examples all demonstrate important commonalities. First, it’s much easier to give an objective evaluation of someone else’s situation rather than our own role and involvement in a situation. If you’ve ever asked a friend for advice or support in grappling with a difficult decision, you already intuitively know how indispensable this difference in perspective is. Whether we’d like to admit it or not, the implicit acknowledgment here is that there are often times when we already accept that our own judgment can be biased, imprecise, or incomplete. This is a good foundation from which to increase self-awareness, and I’ll come back to this area later on.

Secondly, every situation above is the result of a choice. It is critical to realize this because it allows you to open up both your own and others’ actions to greater curiosity and inspection. Rather than seeing the outcome of someone’s behavior as a pure reflection of their intent, you can begin to understand their behavior more deeply by being curious about the choice they made. It is through this exploration that the opportunity to bring deeper compassion for others emerges. This also opens up the option to change behavior by first accepting it and then working with where it’s coming from. If you can see that this is true for others, then you have the opportunity to see this in the choices made behind your own actions.

Lastly, there’s nothing objectively right or wrong about the behaviors in the example scenarios above. The behaviors are neutral in themselves, and it is in our role as an observer that we apply a layer of judgment on top of what we perceive. Though it may seem obvious to point this out, this can be extremely difficult to accept when we apply it to our own experience. For example, it’s easy (I hope!) to accept that there is no objectively “right” choice of favorite color. It’s harder to accept that other people can have wildly different political beliefs without labeling others as “wrong”. It’s harder still to accept that there is no inherent “wrong” assigned to a partner’s infidelity in a relationship.² The reason that it’s important to pay attention to this is that when we judge a situation as right or wrong, we completely block our ability to see things clearly. Judgment is mutually exclusive to objectivity and open-mindedness.

I need to mention that not judging behavior is not the same as tolerating or endorsing someone else’s hurtful behavior. It’s about making a choice about how you react from a position of clarity. In responding to your partner’s infidelity, say, you might choose to end the relationship without further discussion; engage in a vitriolic fight that tears down their character; ignore it completely; or try to understand why they acted the way they did with or without the goal of repairing the relationship. These are all potential choices, but some will be more productive than others. If you do decide to try to understand their behavior, it’s a guarantee that judging their behavior as “wrong” from the outset will prevent you from getting the clearest possible understanding of why they acted the way that they did. This is different from communicating that their behavior was hurtful, handling the feelings that resulted from discovering their infidelity, or deciding that leaving the relationship is the best thing for you. I didn’t say that any of this was easy!

Before I move on to apply this same line of thinking to self-awareness, let’s run through the first example in the list above to see how this works. The outcome of the family member’s actions may seem frustrating, baffling, hurtful, or inconsiderate from your perspective if you only consider the result of their decision. But if you set aside your own feelings and judgment of their behavior, what if you instead open yourself up to being curious about what’s happening for that person and what influenced their choice to not see a doctor? Your curiosity about the person’s choice creates a wide open set of possibilities that, beyond leading to more profound understanding, allows you to feel compassion and empathy for why they made the choice they did.³

The reasons behind their choice could be as varied as people are individual: they had a traumatic medical experience in the past; they fear facing the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and would rather pretend it doesn’t exist; they adore the attention their potential illness has created from others; or a million other nuanced reasons specific to that person’s life experiences. Anything is possible! You can only begin to understand why they made their choice, and understand that person’s behavior more clearly and objectively, if you choose to find out.

Lastly, judgment has no place in this process, and it’s crucial that you set it aside. It may feel irresistible to label the outcome of this person’s behavior as “wrong” from the standpoint of the potential harm they’re doing to themselves, but this will actively block you from expanding your awareness. Instead, engage your curiosity and openness, and ask yourself what might be going on for the other person. Let’s say that you find out that this person does indeed adore the attention that their potential illness has attracted from others, despite the possibility of a grim prognosis. You’re now in entirely different territory that invites care and concern for whether they may have been feeling lonely or lacking the social support they wish they had. Even if you aren’t able to learn what is behind their choice—they may not have this level of self-awareness themselves—simply being aware that any number of things specific to this person could have influenced their behavior is a step forwards.

Take a moment to consider the massive leap we’ve made in the last few paragraphs. We’ve gone from exasperation and negative judgment to a place of care and concern, simply by showing curiosity about someone’s choice. Choosing to expand your awareness leads to the possibility for empathy, compassion, and a softening towards someone else’s behavior. This is an emotional space that growth, change, and deepening of relationships all thrive in, and it’s incredibly powerful.

At this point, I’m hoping that it’s starting to become clear how you might apply this same approach to your own decisions and behaviors. Just as showing curiosity about someone else’s choices can entirely change your reaction to and understanding of them, the same is possible with curiosity applied to yourself. By opening yourself up to inspecting why you do or feel or react the way you do, you create the conditions for growth and evolution. If you feel some resistance to the idea that you may not already know why you do what you do, that’s your ego speaking up. We’ll get to that shortly.

Observing the Self

I’ll start the perspective shift from greater awareness of other people’s behavior to understanding your own behavior by reproducing a table from The Gift of Therapy by Irvin D. Yalom, which efficiently illustrates our relationship to self-awareness.

	Known to Self	Unknown to Self
Known to Others	Public	Blind
Unknown to Others	Secret	Unconscious

The proportions between the four quadrants are different for everyone, but if your goal is to increase your self-awareness, you must accept that there are parts of yourself that you are not yet aware of. I’m going to repeat that for emphasis: you are not fully aware of your entire self.

It may be comforting to know that this is everyone’s experience and that it’s a continual, lifelong practice to get to know yourself. Depending on your goals, you might choose to make the unconscious quadrant smaller through, say, therapy, or tackle the blind quadrant by asking for honest feedback on your behavior from a close friend or colleague. The general insight that I hope this opens up is that by definition our existence is one of imperfect self-awareness and knowledge. We are always presented with opportunities to be curious, ask why, and get to know ourselves a little better. The practice of self-awareness is to learn to spot those opportunities and not shy away from diving in.

Before I go into how to put all of this into practice, you should know about another barrier to improved self-awareness. In general, more than 50% of people believe that they are above average, which is, of course, impossible. It’s been further shown that the worse someone is at a particular skill, the more they tend to overrate their competence in that same skill.⁴ I point this out because it’s likely that your own self-awareness is lower than you think it is, especially if you believe that you already possess a high level of self-awareness! Making a conscious effort to staying humble and adopting an openness to growth, regardless of where you are right now, will help.

If you feel resistance to the ideas you’ve been reading about in the last few paragraphs on self-awareness, that’s entirely understandable and expected. I’m approaching a subject that’s inherently threatening to your ego: your concept of who you are. The idea of having an “ego” is colloquially equated to arrogance or self-importance, but you can more precisely think about your ego as a collection of beliefs about yourself. This unique set of beliefs is what you consider to be “you” and is the basis of your identity. I use the word “beliefs” very deliberately because that is what they are: ideas that you choose to believe, both consciously and unconsciously.⁵ These ideas can be relatively concrete (“I am reliable”, “I am generous”, “I don’t cry in public”) to more abstract (what you believe it means to lead a good life, what roles you believe each gender should play in society), but however they are represented within us, the sum of these beliefs represent our model of who we believe we are in the world.⁶

By questioning your level of self-awareness, you’re questioning the accuracy and basis of your self-beliefs, which in turn starts to threaten your sense of identity. The thought that you might not fully understand or be aware of who you think you are is uncomfortable for anyone. The ego’s response to this threat to your identity is to be highly self-protective. Thoughts or experiences that threaten the ego’s system of self-belief set off alarm bells. Your ego responds by springing into action with a range of counter-thoughts that seek to reinforce who you already believe you are and reject anything that undermines that.

The simplest of these defenses is to reject contradictory information (“that’s wrong”, “they just don’t know me”), but our defenses can be remarkably complex and nuanced, frequently operating at an unconscious level. The stronger the defense, the more complex the justifications and explanations can be, which will always necessarily make sense to you but can be confounding to others. This is why improving self-awareness can be such a challenging process. Your sense of identity is intrinsically resistant to any change, making it a very unwilling partner to self-discovery. If you choose to do the work of becoming more self-aware, you’ll need to learn to embrace and work with that resistance.

Notice, Don’t Judge, and Be Curious

So, knowing that self-inspection can be difficult, what’s an approach that you can take? You can divide the process up into the following three steps:

1. Notice. Start by noticing what’s happening in your internal world. What are you feeling when things happen in your environment, or before you decide to act?
2. Withhold judgment. Practice keeping an open mind so that your mindset doesn’t get in the way of getting to know yourself. What you notice is just information, without any intrinsic “good” or “bad” label.
3. Be curious. Use your curiosity to unpack what might be going on behind the scenes of what you’re noticing. The same gentleness and open-mindedness I wrote about observing other people will work for you, too.

The key is practice. Start by noticing whenever you can and build it up as a habit. As you start to notice more, your awareness will automatically expand, and you can start to use your curiosity as a self-inspection tool. Don’t forget to withhold your judgment throughout. I’ll dive into each of these areas in some more detail next, and then end with a personal in-depth example.

We notice things all the time, of course, but by necessity, so much of how we react to the world happens without any high-level conscious thought. Far, far more happens behind the scenes than our lived experience of seeming to be in control of ourselves and our actions would suggest. The objective behind the practice of noticing is to start to bring unconscious behaviors upwards for inspection. It’s acknowledging that there is a “behind the scenes” to our lived experience, and that through its inspection, lasting changes can be made.

Start by noticing that there are things that constantly happen in your internal experience without you having any control over them. The pleasure of seeing a good friend, the irritation of being subjected to secondhand cigarette smoke, the sudden urge to get up from your work and have a snack, the hurt triggered by your boss’s lack of acknowledgment of your contributions, the judgment you feel when seeing the way someone else is dressed, the impatience you feel when someone speaking takes a long time to get to their point, the yearning you feel for wanting to be appreciated by someone or included into a particular group, and so on. Notice that each example starts with a feeling.

Feelings are how our subconscious communicates with us through our bodies. We feel our feelings in our body, and by paying attention, you can locate a feeling in your body as you’re experiencing it: feelings are real things. When something feels “good” this is an indicator that positive things have tended to come from whatever scenario you’re in (seeing a good friend, say), and when something feels “bad” this is an indicator that negative things have tended to come from another scenario (sitting next to someone who hasn’t respected your personal space, say).

Feelings can, of course, lead us astray and hijack our behavior. Just because taking heroin feels “good” doesn’t mean that it’s in your best interest to become addicted to heroin. Even if your experience isn’t as consequential as grappling with drug addition, I mention this because to both small and large degrees, feelings can and do mislead us. Feelings absolutely make sense in the context of your lived experience, but as intense as they can sometimes be, they are also just information. The objective behind noticing is to acknowledge and take your feelings seriously, but not to over-identify with them. Knowing that they are simply information is how you can start to understand and appreciate what they are saying and why.

If you can get into the habit of noticing your feelings and what’s happening in your inner world in the moment, that’s already a significant step forwards. It’s unpacking the “why” behind those feelings that can be more challenging. It’s the same as the approach of being curious about the decisions behind other people’s actions, but depending on the scenario it can require a degree of honesty and bravery that may take time to develop. Particularly when we run up against parts of ourselves that we’d rather not admit that exist, the ego’s self-defense can make us especially blind or resistant to approaching and understanding those parts.⁷

It helps to start viewing your feelings from a different perspective. Not over-identifying with your feelings means not believing that you are your feelings. Language can help you shift your perspective. Although this is how we normally describe it (in English, at least), when we say “I am angry”, that leaves no space for a feeling just being a piece of information that’s bubbling up. Instead of identifying with the feeling, try this construction instead: “I am feeling mad because X happened to me. I wonder why that is?” The difference is a complete reversal in agency. Instead of being controlled, defined, or acting at the behest of your feelings, you can start to decide how you respond. You’re in control of your reaction to the feeling.

Let’s run through a practical example from my personal experience. Even though my experiences, feelings, and reactions will differ from yours, try to look for similarities to your own experiences to help see how you can start to shift your own self-awareness.

I really dislike being interrupted, especially when someone has asked me a question or my opinion on something. As soon as I’m interrupted, I feel immediate annoyance and a tinge of anger and frustration. If they just asked me something, why on earth are they not interested in listening now? If it’s a common dynamic with a particular person, I’ll often attempt to simply continue speaking, usually to no avail. (Even if the other person does then stop speaking, usually I can perceive that they’ve stopped listening until they can get their point in, providing no relief to my initial annoyance.) Clearly this isn’t a dynamic that really does anything positive for me, yet it’s been difficult for me to shift this habit. Within this seemingly small interaction in time, there’s a lot going on psychologically that’s instructive.

My automatic reaction to my feelings of irritation and anger is to try to teach the other person a lesson that they shouldn’t interrupt me. It happens frequently enough that it’s a well-worn path for me, and the habit is fairly deeply ingrained. However, if I instead approach this from a self-aware perspective, what I can become more curious about is why I am choosing to try to change the other person’s behavior. First, I’ve broken the cardinal rule of interacting with people, which is that the only person you can change is yourself. Second, what is the motivation for this righteous behavior? Why have I decided to (rather indirectly) make sure that anyone who interrupts me knows that they shouldn’t? The first lesson is simpler to unpack for me because it doesn’t come preloaded with emotional baggage; it’s simply something I need to remind myself of and practice. The second question, however, gets at some more profound things.

Both the emotional feeling and the force I feel behind it that I get when I’m interrupted is a hint that this is coming from a more complex and rawer place. The stronger an emotion and the more automatic the reaction to that emotion, the more likely it is that there’s an unresolved psychological wound there.⁸ In my case, what’s being awoken is childhood wounding of not being listened to and understood. While I don’t recall being specifically interrupted as a child, I did have the experience of needing to fit into an acceptable, predetermined range of thought and I did not feel taken seriously outside of that. That left me with an area of insecurity that shows up whenever I feel I’m not being listened to or taken seriously. When I’m interrupted, despite it being a different situation and time, the experience awakens the emotions of the child within me who is being hurt again, begging to be listened to through whatever means necessary.⁹

Only until I understand and accept that that’s what’s happening to me in the moment that I’m being interrupted can I start to heal and change my automatic reaction. I can start to understand that the person interrupting me has nothing to do with the childhood feeling that is returning to me. With that understanding and self-compassion, I can start to let go of trying to get the other person to understand me. Instead, I can begin to accept that people are not always interested in listening or understanding, and that has nothing to do with me. There’s nothing easy about shifting and integrating these reactions, but on the other hand, without self-awareness and understanding, it’s certain that no change will happen.

I’ve gone into a fair amount of detail in this example because I want to emphasize both how much you can open up through self-awareness and how creatively complex our coping mechanisms can be. It’s almost magical how changing your internal frame of reference can convert something that seems relatively superficial (annoyance at being interrupted) into something that creates an opportunity for inspection, care, and healing of old psychological wounds. It’s also equally impressive how the unconscious mind can transmute an old wound into a complex expressed behavior in the present moment.

I picked this as an example of something apparently small hiding something larger, but the psychological chain is also one that is already well-known to me. I only came to understand and learn to identify it over time through psychotherapy. You don’t need to immediately understand all the links in the chain for the practice of self-awareness to be valuable. Practicing awareness is the foundation you start with, and more intimate knowledge comes with time.

Putting it all together

We’ve covered a huge amount of psychological ground together. Almost every topic I’ve touched upon has enough behind it to fill a book, and I encourage you to keep learning more. The briefest summary I can offer is the following: Your life experiences have created beliefs and patterns that define who you are. These beliefs are contained within the concept that is your ego, your perceived sense of self. Being consciously aware of why you do every single thing you do would be overwhelming to your conscious mind, so we evolved to get through life by responding to our feelings.¹⁰ Feelings are expressed through our bodies and effectively summarize our reactions to our lived experiences. Understanding and changing behavior requires noticing that feelings arise at all, and when they do, what they might be saying and why. With awareness and understanding, compassion and enduring change can take place by making different choices.

As you begin to expand your self-awareness, the best thing you can do is to remind yourself to notice. Do it now. Do it the very next time you feel something, big or small. Get curious. Does me telling you to practice make you feel something? If so, what? If it’s easy to name the feeling, take the next step and ask yourself why. Once you start noticing, you’ll become increasingly aware that there is a lot going on beneath the surface and that there is a huge amount of material we each have to work with.

So, go ahead and take that first step towards more self-awareness, be open to what comes forwards, and stay curious.

Further Reading

• Bradford, David L.; Robin, Carole (2022). Connect.
• Harris, Sam (2014). Waking Up.
• Kolk, Bessel van der (2015). The Body Keeps the Score.
• Langer, Ellen J. (2014). Mindfulness.
• Maté, Gabor; Maté, Daniel (2022). The Myth of Normal.
• Pollen, Michael (2019). How to Change Your Mind.
• Sapolsky, Robert (2023). Determined.
• Yalom, Irvin D. (2010). The Gift of Therapy.

Notes

1. The theoretical underpinnings are fascinating, though, and I encourage you to read more if you’re curious. ↩︎

2. I’ll posit that the closer we get to what feels like a moral transgression, by definition an objective right or wrong, the more difficult it is for us to view an action with detachment and the more mindful we need to be. ↩︎

3. This is what psychology refers to as theory of mind, which is our ability to connect actions to the internal motivations of others. The better we know someone, the more refined our theory of mind is for them. This reinforces why getting curious and understanding someone’s choices better creates a more intimate relationship with that person. ↩︎

4. These are respectively known as illusory superiority and the Dunning-Kruger effect. There is no strong agreement on exactly why people behave this way, so for our purposes we can accept it as an empirical reality. ↩︎

5. I’m going to side-step the mind-bending philosophical argument here, which is that if what you think of as “you” is just a set of beliefs, then who is the “you” without the beliefs? We’re sticking to the empirical realm here, and this concept of ego-as-beliefs holds true. ↩︎

6. After I first wrote this essay, I watched Inside Out 2, and this concept is covered visually in the first few minutes of the story. It’s a beautiful film, and it does a fantastic job of conveying many of the inner world concepts I mention in this essay and more. One particularly powerful idea that’s conveyed in the film is that there is no “away” for anything that’s happened in your life. You can try to avoid feelings and experiences, but until you fully integrate them into who you are, they are likely to haunt you in psychological or even physical ways. Self-actualization requires the acceptance of all of our experiences, even the ones we don’t like. Another reason that self-awareness is such a fundamental skill and practice. ↩︎

7. Carl Jung called this the “shadow self”, the parts of ourselves that we’re ashamed of, not proud of, or otherwise wished were not part of our whole selves. Only through acknowledging, accepting, and integrating all parts of ourselves, including the shadow self, can we become our whole selves. ↩︎

8. I’m paraphrasing to avoid using the word “trigger” here because of how overused the term has now become. The primary characteristic of a true emotional trigger is one where your reaction is automatic and unconscious, where in the moment it’s almost as if you’re watching yourself react on autopilot. (This, by the way, is precisely what a PTSD episode is, except to a debilitatingly acute degree. If you’re interested in learning more about this, I’d highly recommend reading The Body Keeps the Score.) If you say or react in a way that you later come to regret, this is likely an example of a trigger. This is not the same as colloquial “trigger warnings” where something may be said or shown that simply makes people feel uncomfortable. ↩︎

9. Every once in a while, in the context of therapy, I get the question of what the point is of digging up things from your past instead of just looking ahead and “powering through”. This example is a good answer to that question. There is no “away” for your experiences and feelings, and if they were significant enough, they will come forward to impact the present moment in ways that you may be blind to or unconscious of. Integrating the past heals the present. ↩︎

10. It’s more correct to say that feelings came first in our evolution as animals, and the sense of consciousness that we perceive came later on with the development of the neocortex. Anyone with a pet at home most certainly knows that animals have feelings, and perhaps even some level of basic consciousness. The most important thing is to understand that feelings are what primarily drive us; it is our conscious mind that gives meaning, story, and coherence to the actions that we take based on our feelings. ↩︎