6 Signs you Lack Self-Awareness
When you lack self-awareness, you fail to identify what you’re feeling and how it manifests itself in your daily actions. You fail to see the patterns in your behaviors and thinking. As a result, you tend to experience more negative emotions because you don’t know how to better align your choices with what you want.
You need to
identify where you lack self-awareness in life before you can be more self-aware. Try to approach this list with openness, vulnerability, and courage.
1. Your emotional reaction doesn’t match the situation
Have you ever felt a strong emotional reaction that felt larger than the situation required? Perhaps you went into a nervous breakdown about a new bit of news, or maybe you flew into a rage at something your friend did (or didn’t) do.
If your emotional reaction doesn’t match the situation, you’re more than likely lacking self-awareness. Your extreme emotions were triggered by something much more deeply rooted than the present events.
When my fiancé wouldn’t follow through with something he said he was going to, I became hypercritical of him. (Even if it was something super trivial). I would express my fury and feel the frustration boiling in my chest. It took me a while to realize that the unsent mail wasn’t causing my anger. It wasn’t even anger at all. Instead, anger hid the
deep fear of disappointment that I harbored away.
Step back and consider when your emotional reactions are too dramatic for the situation. What might be the underlying cause instead? What can you do to change your response?
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2. You get defensive when receiving feedback
It’s our natural tendency to reject feedback when we receive it. We want to protect our pride. Not to mention, we listen to confirmation bias and struggle to accept information that contradicts us.
Beneath it all, however, is a
fear of vulnerability that’s causing a lack of self-awareness.
Receiving feedback is tough. We can’t help but focus on the negative pieces of information. This taps into some of our primal fears of
not belonging and not being good enough. We switch into defensive mode when people tell us something about ourselves that we don’t already know. This defensiveness might manifest in the form of making excuses, lashing out,
being passive aggressive, or trying to control others.
Because we’re built to lack self-awareness, we need feedback to understand ourselves better. If you find yourself fighting against feedback, ask yourself why this is. If you are self-aware, more feedback will simply help you better understand what you already know. This can also help improve your self-awareness
at work.
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3. You repeat negative emotional patterns
Emotions are incredibly complicated to recognize and control. That’s because they’re rooted in some of the deepest parts of our brain wiring. Because they’re so deeply rooted, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s causing them. And if we don’t know what’s causing them, we can’t do anything to stop them.
A clear sign of lacking self-awareness is if you find yourself repeating negative emotional patterns.
These negative emotional patterns are different for everyone. Some of you might fall into fits of anxiety and panic; others might become super lonely or depressed. I tended to get super worked up and critical over my relationship conflicts (even if they were tiny). The reason these patterns repeat themselves is that you aren’t able to recognize what’s going on.
The more self-aware you are, the more likely you’ll be able to do two things. First, you’ll identify that you’re in a negative emotional pattern. Second, you’ll be able to recognize what caused this pattern and what might need to change to prevent it.
Check out
5 Sure-Fire Questions to help you Identify Your Emotional Patterns.
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4. The things you do to “make yourself feel better” don’t actually make you feel better
We all fill our time with hobbies, time-wasters, and behaviors that are supposed to make us feel better. For you, this might be having a glass of wine at the end of a long day. For others, it’s taking a mental break and scrolling through social media.
If you are self-aware, you can be intentional with these actions as a means of self-care. However, a clear sign that you lack self-awareness is when these “feel better” behaviors don’t actually make you feel better.
This lack of self-awareness becomes particularly evident when we’re feeling extra stressed or low. We want to mask our negative emotions with distractions. When I used to feel uncertain about something in my life, I tried to regain a sense of control by diving into work. The focused hours, however, didn’t make me feel any better or help me solve my problems.
Whatever you try to numb your emotions with (whether it’s work, alcohol, TV, etc.), it merely takes you away from the main problem you have to deal with. Ultimately, it adds to your lack of self-awareness.
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5. You haven’t found a way to be consistently successful
You might think it’s bold to declare you should be able to be consistently successful. After all, life is unpredictable and throws a lot of obstacles at us. But how you handle these obstacles and maneuver toward success can be consistent.
If you’re consistently facing the same challenges over and over again, failing to achieve success, you probably lack self-awareness.
Being self-aware won’t magically make challenges go away. It will, however, help you understand yourself well enough to know what you can do. You can
identify your strengths and weaknesses. Then, you can create environments and situations that will highlight your strengths and diminish the impact of your weaknesses. Even
how you dress can affect your awareness.
Over the years, I’ve found out that I’m extremely disciplined and organized. These skills have helped me tackle projects in my personal life and in my professional life that bring my skills to the forefront. As I’ve grown, I’ve learned that “big picture” ideas sometimes challenge me because I care more about completion. Knowing this, I can tap into my self-awareness to know when I’ll be in my comfort zone, and when I need to find myself some extra support.
Consider
these questions to determine your strengths and weaknesses.
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6. You regularly regret decisions in your everyday life
Have you ever made a purchase and regretted it? Or maybe you’ve said something that you wish you could take back? We’re human, which means we’re bound to make a ton of mistakes. But, while we can’t be perfect, we also shouldn’t consistently feel regret in everyday life.
If you regularly regret the decisions that you’ve made, you more than likely lack self-awareness.
We learn through our mistakes. If I purchase something on a whim and then regret it three days later, I learn that it wasn’t the best decision. Maybe I follow a similar pattern a couple of times before realizing it’s not what I need to be doing. However, if I keep repeating the same cycle of buy and regret, I’m clearly not learning any lessons about myself.
This cycle of action and regret can manifest itself in different ways. For you, it might look like an unhealthy choice, a poor reaction, or a failed attempt to change. Whatever it is, you can pause the cycle by improving your self-awareness of what you want and need.
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