Why self-awareness is not synonymous with personality
“Know thyself and you will discover the hidden truth that lies beyond the illusions of your thoughts and beliefs.”
― Ka Chinery,
Too often people equate self-awareness with a process of “just knowing yourself better” and “understanding your personality”. Even though having an idea about your personality preferences can be a great investment in the process towards achieving deep self-awareness, personality alone does not equate to self-awareness. You need to go deeper, emotionally deeper.
The first step is to become unapologetically honest with yourself. This ultimately means acknowledging supressed emotions and allowing yourself to be vulnerable. As quoted by the famous Dan Sullivan, “All progress starts by telling the truth”. You need to be honest to yourself about what you are really feeling. Emotions in and of themselves are just energy in motion, but how you FEEL depends on the meaning you attach to your emotions, in other words, that internal narrative or story you tell yourself. Why is this so important? Because the narrative you tell yourself, becomes your identity, and this identity determines how you behave in the world. Ultimately, supressed emotions will direct your life.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” — Carl Jung
The problem with suppressed emotions are that they lead to the development of unhealthy coping mechanisms, which, in turn, shape what you BELIEVE to be your personality traits. For example, if you suppress your feelings of “not being good enough”, or being a “fake”, you will end up compensating for those supressed feelings by adopting perfectionistic tendencies which will “camouflage” to your fragile sense of self. Consequently, you will label yourself with the personality traits such as “detail orientated” and “perfectionist”. Therefore, personality is really a mixture of true dispositional traits (i.e., characteristics that you are born with) and adopted coping mechanisms. As stated by Gabor Maté, “What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.”
So, how do you start to separate your personality traits from unhealthy coping mechanisms? The two best, immediate ways, are: write and speak!
- Write: Journal
Writing about what you are feeling and bringing those feelings into reality, makes them more valid and manageable. By seeing your thoughts and feelings on paper will help you make sense of your emotions, thoughts and feelings and, in doing so, become far more self-aware.
2. Speak: To Trusted Others
Very often we “know ourselves” best, yet, often the view we hold of ourselves is not how others view us. Therefore, getting honest and open feedback from trusted friends or family members can be truly valuable in helping us be more honest with ourselves and, in turn, reach a higher level of self-awareness.
To reach a level of true self-awareness, you need to let yourself be vulnerable and open to changing those parts of yourself that you may have denied to yourself, or suppressed. By being more truthful, to yourself and to others, you give yourself the opportunity to construct a new, desirable identify for yourself, removed from unhealthy coping mechanisms. In fact, by becoming more self-aware you are able to eliminate these unhealthy coping mechanisms, such as addictive behaviours, distraction, procrastination, etc.
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, knowing your personality traits and characteristic are an invaluable part to knowing yourself, but it does not equate to complete self-awareness.
