Self-awareness can be valuable. Cultivating it can create personal growth and genuine development. It can help you know what you want, open doors to new opportunities and make life richer and more enjoyable. I’ve noticed in my counselling practice how it can make someone more open to, and engaged with, therapy.
However, I’ve also seen how self-awareness can be a double-edged gift. The most self-aware people can be the ones who are most stuck and frustrated. Striving for personal growth can fuel perfectionism, keep you locked in self-criticism, create blind spots, and prevent you from tackling core issues which could unlock the growth you desire.
Four ways it can work against you
1. It feeds the inner critic and perfectionism
Self-awareness can seem like you’re onto a good thing. It can be reassuring to feel like you understand yourself well, especially if your self-esteem is low. It can make you believe you have a good understanding of the world around you and that sense of clarity can almost feel powerful. Especially if you think you can clearly see things that others close to you can’t.
But it’s often actually a false sense of security. Because the person with low self-worth who has a dominant inner critic and a perfectionist streak often turns their awareness into another performance standard. Self-awareness can give your inner critic more fodder – more things to think about, to monitor, to be good at. Whilst you’re telling yourself that more self-analysis is needed for growth, you’re setting yourself up to still never be quite enough.
2. It locks you in self-analysis so you don’t see what’s actually wrong externally
Building self-awareness typically involves a lot of self-analysis. This can be misplaced or become obsessive if you’re not careful. It’s often in reaction to what’s happening around you. For example, ‘If I only improve myself, the situation will change’.
But the risk of always turning the analysis inward is you can miss genuine problems which are outside yourself. This means you may overlook the issues in your relationship, workplace or social life which actually need naming and acknowledging. You might think you have a detailed understanding of the situation. But by trying to explain something away, you may actually be letting the culprit off the hook whilst keeping yourself stuck in a cage you’ve inadvertently created.
3. It creates intellectualised blind spots – the unturned stones
Self-awareness typically creates a lot of information. Often this can be too much for you to fully process. You read the self-help books, listen to the latest podcast and intellectualise things. But the highly self-aware person often has a significant blind spot or two.
These blind spots can be like stones in a rockpool you’ve not looked under because you’re too fixated on being your best self. But what’s lying beneath those stones is often the treasure you’ve been hunting for which can unlock everything.
I see how smart, self-aware clients work hard to be a good partner, employee, friend, continually trying to be their best self – whilst below the surface dealing with complex trauma which shows up as low self-esteem, people pleasing, shape shifting, keeping busy. Their self-knowledge keeps their head full and striving forward whilst they miss the issues that could create real change.
4. It becomes a shield – a way to avoid the really uncomfortable material
Being self-aware can take work but self-development can also be a comfort blanket. Keeping yourself busy with growth can mean you avoid the icky, uncomfortable feeling of actually being quiet with your own thoughts.
There’s a sense of needing to keep working on yourself to compensate for other things. There’s a belief that growth is good. But this busyness also keeps you from finding the best stones to uncover in the rock pool.
The paradox of self-awareness
People who are highly self-aware have often become so as a coping mechanism. It doesn’t usually arise for no reason.
Instead, it’s serving a need in them to be good, better, please others or be more perfect. And this is typically because of something that happened to them in the past or due to their conditioning. Self-awareness becomes a bit of a shield, a way for them to feel safe.
It usually stems from a feeling of not being good enough. Of not feeling comfortable enough in their skin to simply be themselves. This sense of striving to be better develops over time as they seek to make themselves feel OK.
When the wheels are spinning
When being self-aware is not serving you, it can feel a bit like pedalling a bike when the wheels are spinning. You believe your self-awareness is the propulsion that keeps you growing but if you’re honest, you’re never making the progress you’d like to.
This is where it helps to realise how self-awareness can be a double-edged gift at times. Whilst it can feel empowering, the downsides are it can also keep you stationary. Sometimes you need to pause your efforts and survey if they are truly supporting you.
This might feel completely counterintuitive but stopping, or at least, slowing your efforts and identifying which stones are not unturned may give you the traction you’ve been seeking and be the start of real progress.
An invitation to get quiet
Building healthy supportive self-awareness often means putting your existing self-development plan on hold.
What if the most self-aware thing you could do right now is stop striving and get quiet? To stop trying to push forward, pause and actually listen to what comes up in the silence. This may feel uncomfortable but – be honest – are you really feeling at ease in your current way of being?
This is an invitation for you to look at things differently rather than simply trying harder to spin your wheels. To stop seeking for answers through making yourself better and actually listening to the answers which are already inside you, hidden from view.
Practices like journalling and creating a life timeline can help you look back at events, relationships and messaging for clues about where your unturned stones might be. Sometimes this is where working with a counsellor can be supportive. They might be able to help you see what is currently out of your awareness.
Self-awareness can be a wonderful thing but it can also reinforce patterns and practices which are unhelpful. Why not take a little time to check-in with your self-awareness rock pool and see if there are any stones worth looking under.
