Essential Ideas: Self-Awareness

by The School of Life

Yet this attitude too can carry dangers. We may lack the confidence not to be cruel and promote greed, but to fight for kindness and wisdom. Our lack of confidence in confidence may be allowing degraded versions of self-assertion to thrive.

Our negative view of confidence can be overly dependent on the quirks of our own histories, or on the sort of people in whom we first encountered confidence, who were not its best representatives. Our real problem may not be confidence so much as a lack of other virtues such as manners, charm and generosity. We may be wrongly diagnosing the root of our objections. There may be a danger of growing into braggarts and self-seekers. But confidence is in its essence compatible with remaining sensitive, kind and softly spoken. It might be brutishness, not confidence, that we hate.

Furthermore, our attraction to meekness may mask some rather cowardly resentments against self-assertion. We might not so much admire timidity as fear giving confidence a try. It was this species of self-protective deception that particularly fascinated the philosopher Nietzsche. He thought it a typical error of many Christians, who might pride themselves on their ‘forgiveness’ while simply trying to excuse th...

To compress the matter: the way we speak to ourselves is an internalisation of the way others once spoke to us. Our conscience has been formed from the voices of our earliest caregivers.

Our conscience may be speaking to us in voices far removed from the values we otherwise esteem. If we saw someone else treating a stranger the way we treat ourselves, would we be impressed?

Emotional intelligence is the quality that enables us to confront with patience, insight and imagination the many problems that we face in our affective relationship with ourselves and with others.

Emotional scepticism refers to an attitude of good-natured suspicion towards the majority of our first impulses and feelings. The emotional sceptic rarely fully trusts what they immediately desire, what they fear and what their so-called ‘gut’ tells them. They understand their minds to be ‘faulty walnuts’, highly liable to be throwing off inaccurate or misleading emotions. They like to pause and create a ‘fireguard’ between their feelings and their actions.

By denying our idiot, we may grow unfeasibly pompous and stiff. Nothing makes us seem absurd faster than insisting on our own seriousness. We are always better off confessing to idiocy in good time, rather than letting it emerge from behind our carefully constructed pretensions.

We may spread our compassion to others as well. They were not necessarily evil when they hurt us; they merely possess a domineering idiot of their own.

voice that we have imperceptibly made our own. Perhaps we have absorbed the tone of a harassed or angry parent; the menacing threats of an elder sibling keen to put us down; the contempt of a schoolyard bully, or the words of a teacher who seemed impossible to please. We take in these voices because, at certain key moments in the past, they sounded compelling and irresistible.

Getting to know ourselves better sounds, on the surface, like a project we might all buy into. But this is to underestimate the extent to which we are, just below the surface, typically highly invested in not getting to know or feel a range of important but troubling things about who we are. Whatever lip service we may pay to the project of self-awareness, we would – it seems – very much like not to know a great deal about our identities.

Part of the reason for our misunderstanding of our normality comes down to a basic fact about our minds: we know through immediate experience what is going on inside us, but only know about other people from what they choose to tell us, which will almost always be a very edited version of the truth.

Our culture often tries to project an idea of an organised, poised and polished self, as the standard way most people are. We should discount any such myth. Other people are always far more likely to be as we know we are, with all our quirks, fragilities, compulsions and surprising aspects, than they are to be like the apparently ‘normal’ types we meet in social life.

Our satisfaction in this life is critically dependent on our expectations. The greater our hopes, the greater the risks of rage, bitterness and disappointment.

Realising we can no longer cope is an integral part of true endurance. Moments of losing courage belong to a brave life. If we do not allow ourselves frequent occasions to bend, we will be at great risk of one day fatefully snapping.