SELF AWARENESS - perception of personality

Awareness is having a clear perception of your personality, including strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, beliefs, motivation, and emotions. Self Awareness allows you to understand other people, how they perceive you, your attitude and your responses to them in the moment. Self awareness means ‘a state of consciousness in which we focus our attention inward, upon ourselves. . Self-awareness is a cognitive process requiring integration of information from both external reality and inner experience. This is reflected in the definition of self-awareness as "the capacity to perceive the self in relatively objective terms whilst maintaining a sense of subjectivity" (Prigatano and Schacter 1991, 13).

 Therefore, self-awareness involves an interaction between thoughts and feelings. It is this subjective or affective component that distinguishes self- awareness from self-knowledge. In addition to an appreciation of one's present state (and how it differs from the pre-morbid state), self-awareness involves the ability to determine one's future state, or set realistic goals for the future. The ability to observe one’s behaviour, to be aware of one’s own actions, and to appreciate one’s thoughts, feelings and emotions, is now understood to be essential as a foundation for exceptional leadership. Leaders, who are self-aware, understand how their environment affects them and how they affect their environments. They know what affects them positively and negatively and how that impacts on their job performance (Shay, J. M., 2003).