Self-awareness can be a tricky, slippery emotional state for certain ages or stages of life.  Meta-cognition requires that the brain have enough maturity and connections before a person can begin to really work on self-awareness.  Place yourself in your age zone.

Erikson’s traits tries to generalize and mark some of the stages that people can go through during their lives.  This is not a stable state of being, but one that people can jump or skip stages both up or down.  Thus, despair not if you find yourself in a lower stage or have difficulty staying in the higher level of your age stage.  Being aware of this ever changing and highly influential aspect of your life can bring some calm know the flux is completely normal.

One of the first steps, towards working on the self-awareness trait is making sure all of your basic needs are met.  These needs are layer out in the chart of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  In order for learning to occur the basic needs of students/people need to be met.  After those are achieved, there is the psychological level that fosters long term learning, personal challenge and personal growth.  The last stage marks the traits of being self-aware as a person is free from negative social pressures and self-doubt.

Please look at where you fall today as far as your needs are concerned.

Leadership requires a high level of self-awareness, as a leader will have to as objectively as possible be able to look at the scenarios of choice and not just the self-preferences of the leader.  Fairness, confidence and empathy all stem from being self-aware.  Like all psychological traits the idea of self-awareness depends on age.  

For this idea to work, a person must make a focused effort on understanding what level they are currently operating under and if they are able to move to higher level of self-awareness.

To help:

• Challenge your fears – ask a deep question about why you afraid.
• Journal and keep your continuing perception and sense of yourself as a reflective goal.
• Work towards understanding your enemies point of view.  Using and having empathy towards others requires that you be able to think outside of your own subjective needs.