Self Awareness

My friend with the deepest understanding of classical philosophy texted me recently stating that he himself probably isn’t self aware, statistically. According to my favorite search engine, 95% of people believe that they are self aware while only 10-15% actually are. That 10-15% of people are supposed to hold an accurate representation of themselves inwardly and outwardly, knowing accurately how they actually are, how they impact others, and how others actually see them.

In a different conversation, it was pointed out to me that people who are self aware aren’t necessarily living lives much smoother than anybody else. Sometimes people believe since they know what a problem is that it’s basically handled without taking any actions.

Statistically, I’m not self aware. Outwardly, I bet people think I’m both strange and not, confident and not, intense and not. I also don’t think words could ever describe precisely how a person feels about anything, let alone themselves, let alone how they feel other people feel about them. I believe that I have above average social skills, and while some people notice that others probably think that I’m clueless. Is it self aware or ignorant to handle a social situation poorly if I know that it’s received poorly?

As I’m writing this I’m realizing that how others see a person is completely dependent on their own values and beliefs. I guess that’s pretty obvious. I believe how we see anything is dependent on our values and beliefs.

A few years ago I went on a two week Baltic cruise with my mom, and it was our second day into the trip when she texted my sister saying “your brother is intense”. I asked many of my closest friends if they agreed with this, and the answer varied. What was interesting was that there was a correlation between the friends that didn’t immediately describe me as intense with the friends that I have the most interesting conversations with. Of course they didn’t think I was intense.

I once asked somebody who was a middle child if she thought her brothers’ personalities made sense based on being the oldest/youngest sibling, and she was taken aback having never thought about it.

Is it self aware to understand that I probably came across as weird or intense in the above situations? I would bet that the astronauts we trained for the Dream Chaser program thought I was incredibly normal, similar to how the stand up open mic MC in Denver assumed I would bomb because I was sitting between two guys that looked like fraternity brothers.

It’s likely all social skills and pattern recognition rather than self-awareness. Can we learn self-awareness over time? If so, is it best to seek it out intentionally? At the end of the day it probably doesn’t matter all that much. Whether it’s true or not doesn’t change the impact low or high self confidence plays in a person’s experience, and self awareness only plays a part in that confidence if it’s valued by the beholder.

When I started writing this post I thought it was going to be about something completely different.