How Self-Awareness is Related to Success

What is self-awareness and how does it relate to one’s success?

At its core, self-awareness is the conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives and desires. It is not always easy. Knowing yourself involves an understanding of your place in the world and how it relates to others, both the qualities that are loved and admired and those that produce tremendous discomfort. 

But here’s the thing: self-awareness is essential for personal and professional success.

Why Self-Awareness Matters

Self-awareness has many benefits that contribute to career success. Self-awareness is one of the foundations of empathy. A heightened self-awareness also allows for better active listening skills — whether with a client, a coworker, or a team. When you understand your own emotions and behaviors, you’re better equipped to understand others, too. By becoming more engaged, you can build trust and loyalty with your team and clients more easily.

Knowing how and when to let a client know something personal about the clinician, solely for the therapeutic benefit of the client, takes practice and nuance. It can be a powerful tool if used appropriately in helping move a client in the right direction. It is self-awareness that propels this ability to use oneself and one’s experience effectively.

How it Shapes Growth and Communication

When we are self-aware, we stay connected to our core values. We can recognize our strengths and weaknesses, which equips us to know where to focus our growth. 

With self-awareness, we are more in touch with how we engage others and how they experience us. We know when we’re under stress and are more likely to catch ourselves before we say that sarcastic comment or respond curtly. The more self-aware we are, the more in tune we will be with our emotions and how they impact our actions. We notice how we affect others and more deliberately consider what we need to do to act in a way that is respectful to others.

Self-Awareness and Leadership

At the highest level of self-awareness, you’ll realize that change is necessary for you to grow and become the best version of yourself.

Self-awareness is linked to success. Why? It allows individuals to understand their strengths and weaknesses, manage their emotions, and make better decisions, ultimately leading to improved performance and stronger relationships. You embrace change because you understand it’s the only way to evolve into the best version of yourself.

Self-awareness in leadership is one of the most critical yet overlooked factors in determining success. It shapes how leaders make decisions, communicate, and interact with their teams. Self-aware leadership opens the doors to better communication, enhanced engagement and increased leadership effectiveness. Self-aware leaders connect with their team members on more meaningful levels since they understand their employees’ emotional triggers.

It takes time, effort, expertise, and experience to practice self-awareness and use it to help yourself and others succeed in life.

The Challenge—and the Reward

In my experience, self-awareness is one of the keys to doing well in the workplace. Through my professional journey, I have learned the hard way just how critical this concept is to the success of working on a team, even when we’re not holding a leadership and management position.

Unfortunately, emotional intelligence isn’t a given—even in fields that center on empathy. It can be disheartening for young professionals to encounter supervisors or colleagues who lack self-awareness or have little interest in self-reflection. But these moments are also valuable. They show us what not to do. They teach us the importance of being intentional with our presence and behavior.

Knowing how one’s emotions inform their behavior can lead to strong working relationships with co-workers, and an ability to know one’s own workstyle and practice self-regulation, self-respect, and discipline when making decisions and working with others. It also can help a person know their own triggers, particularly in working with other personality types who work in ways they might find aggravating and unproductive. In the end, the ability to be self-aware almost always produces better outcomes and stronger connections to colleagues.

The Truth About Success

Self-awareness is a determinant of success. It is a life-long commitment that will lead to healthier relationships through an awareness of oneself and an awareness of others. All of us have worked with individuals who lack self-awareness, and my guess is that we have learned from it. Know yourself and a sense of accomplishment will follow.

When we lack self-awareness, we miss the social cues that indicate others are walking on eggshells around us or are afraid to speak up. Greater self-awareness helps you understand how others experience you and you can adjust your style to others rather than expecting them to adjust to you.

You can achieve all that you want to be, all that you want to do in life, and all that you dream of—— but only if you choose to do the work to achieve them all. Success requires grit, sacrifice, learning, effort, and dedication. If it were easy, everyone would have achieved it already. But the secret ingredient that often goes unnoticed?

Self-awareness.