The Necessity Of Self-Awareness For Me
Self concept is often defined by self description or self identity. My definition of self concept includes following roles: daughter, sister, baby of the family, granddaughter, girl, guide, introvert, student, employee, Punjabi, Sikh, human and environmentalist. I would describe me as a thin, tall, adventurous, hardworking, practical, realistic, a planner, creative, emotional, sensitive, impatient, introvert, private and a rule follower.
We all have different experiences and those experiences, shapes who we are and what do we think of ourselves. I have been through several events that has influenced me and helped me to reshape my opinion for self concept. Below are few examples of my experiences that changed me. Being an introvert, I tend to bottle up my emotions whenever I feel hurt by others. I usually keep those emotions deep inside me until I broke up. Rarely I share my feelings with anyone because of the fear of judgement.
I had been through number of situations in my life and that weren’t pretty. At the time I wasn’t fully aware of what was happening in my mind. I might have dealt with the situation in a different manner. It might seem common that someone hurts you and you simply feel furious. This is normal reaction for everyone, you then hold onto that feeling and turn into something anger and hatred. Same happened with me, in a group project in my high school, we lacked effective communication among the group members.
One day, in group meeting, I was asked to explain my research on the topic. When I started presenting my ideas for the project, some of the members started giggling and making fun of my ideas. I tolerated this behaviour for once and asked them the reasons behind the problem. Instead of solving the matter, they started fighting with other members to kick me out. Finally, the leader decided to kick me out the group project because I had not presented the ideas accurately as per told by the majority. I was totally out of mind feeling hurt deep inside, because the teacher informed us in the beginning of the project that it will be the decision of the chosen leader to remove any member with right reason. I thought that I had no choice left.
Rather than talking to the teacher I chose to keep silent (being introvert). That was the one of biggest mistake in my school life as the project assignment was a prerequisite for a trip to science exhibition to help students get 50% of the final term. This gave rise to my anger and I started hating everyone and stopped taking part in class activities and stopped talking to anyone. At the end of the project, teacher assessing my grades for the project asked me the reason for not taking part in group. After assessing the problem, I was not found guilty but that was too late. I lost many opportunities because of my lack of self-awareness (self-emotions).
Knowing about these emotions help a person to have control over the growing anger and hate for someone. If one is completely self-aware, he can start rationally question his own emotions, and can prepare much better to get rid of the negativity inside. This can be extremely difficult. We might not be able to control external factors that seem to run our lives every single day, but we can control how we react to those external factors. It was difficult for me to self assess my emotions but with time I really improved my quality of life simply by being aware of my own emotions. It also helped me to better know my internal states, preference, resources, intuitions and a better understanding of emotions of people around me.
