“Awareness changes what becomes available for consideration.”
Dr. Mary S. Alverson
Awareness Is Not One Thing
Awareness is often spoken about as though it were one thing. It is not.
Human beings can be aware of many different aspects of themselves, their internal processes, their behavior, their relationships, and the world around them. A person may have considerable awareness in one area and very little awareness in another.
This is particularly important when we talk about self-awareness. People frequently describe themselves as self-aware because they know certain things about themselves — their personality, preferences, history, strengths, weaknesses, habits, or emotional tendencies. But knowing information about yourself is not necessarily the same thing as accurately seeing yourself. True awareness requires observation.
The more specific we become about what a person is aware of, the more clearly we can understand where awareness exists — and where it does not.
“A better question than ‘Am I self-aware?’ is ‘What am I aware of — and what might I not yet be seeing?’”
Self-Awareness
The Inner Foundation
Self-Awareness
Emotional Awareness
Thought Awareness
Metacognitive Awareness
Behavioral Awareness
Motivational Awareness
Intentional Awareness
Impact Awareness
Somatic Awareness
Trigger Awareness
Pattern Awareness
Defense Awareness
Contradiction Awareness
Present-State Awareness
Relational Awareness
Understanding Others
Relational Awareness
Social Awareness
Interpersonal Awareness
Communication Awareness
Awareness of Others
Perspective Awareness
External Awareness
Your Environment & Beyond
Situational Awareness
Environmental Awareness
Sensory Awareness
Attentional Awareness
Cultural Awareness
Temporal Awareness
Risk Awareness
Opportunity Awareness
Beliefs, Values & Identity
What Shapes You
Value Awareness
Belief Awareness
Identity Awareness
Need Awareness
Boundary Awareness
Strength Awareness
Limitation Awareness
Historical Awareness
Conscience Awareness
Existential Awareness
Spiritual Awareness
Information & Thinking
How You Process Reality
Knowledge Awareness
Bias Awareness
Contextual Awareness
Systems Awareness
Awareness Creates Information
Awareness by itself does not automatically change anything. It gives us information.
Once something becomes visible, we can examine it.
Once we can examine it, we can understand it.
Once we understand it, we have greater freedom to decide what we want to do with it.
Sometimes what we discover needs to change. Sometimes it needs to heal. Sometimes it needs to be developed. Sometimes it needs to be accepted. And sometimes awareness reveals that something we believed was a weakness is actually one of our strengths.
The purpose of awareness is not to endlessly search ourselves for flaws. It is to see more clearly.
Because we cannot consciously examine what we cannot see.
Awareness Expands the Field of Vision
We can become aware of ourselves, of our own minds, of our bodies, of other people, of what is happening between ourselves and another person, of groups, of environments, of situations, of systems, of what we know — and, perhaps just as importantly, of what we do not know.
Awareness changes what becomes available for consideration.
Something can exist without our noticing it. A pattern can be operating without our recognizing it. A person can be communicating something we have not registered. An assumption can be shaping our reasoning without being examined. An environment can be influencing our behavior without being considered. A possibility can be directly in front of us without entering our field of attention.
Becoming aware does not create these things. It makes them available to consciousness.
And once something becomes available to consciousness, we have the possibility of examining it, understanding it, responding to it, or choosing what to do with it.
“Awareness expands the field of vision.”
Dr. Mary S. Alverson
Full Reading
Self-Awareness — The Inner Foundation
In This Reading
Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is the capacity to accurately observe and recognize yourself: your internal states, thoughts, emotions, motives, tendencies, behaviors, reactions, strengths, limitations, contradictions, and patterns.
The word accurately matters.
What we believe about ourselves and what we actually demonstrate through our words, choices, reactions, and behavior are not always the same.
A person may believe they are open-minded while repeatedly rejecting information that challenges their existing beliefs.
A person may believe they are an excellent listener while routinely interrupting other people.
Someone may say they do not care what other people think while continually changing their behavior in response to approval or disapproval.
Someone may describe themselves as accountable while consistently explaining their mistakes through the behavior of everyone around them.
Self-awareness includes the ability to notice these discrepancies. It requires the capacity to recognize not only the person we believe ourselves to be, but the person being demonstrated through our actual functioning.
This does not require harsh self-judgment. Awareness can simply observe:
I was jealous.
I was afraid.
I wanted attention.
I handled that poorly.
I handled that extremely well.
I wanted control of that situation.
I thought I didn’t care, but apparently I did.
I said one thing and behaved in a way that contradicted it.
These observations provide information.
If uncomfortable information about ourselves is immediately denied, justified, minimized, projected onto someone else, or explained away, we may preserve our preferred image of ourselves while losing the opportunity to actually see ourselves.
This is why saying “I am self-aware” tells us very little by itself.
A better question is:
Aware of what?
The answer becomes clearer when we examine the many dimensions of awareness.
Emotional Awareness
Emotional awareness is the ability to recognize and identify what you are feeling.
This includes obvious emotions as well as subtle, mixed, layered, or conflicting emotions.
A person may recognize anger while failing to recognize fear beneath it. They may recognize sadness without recognizing disappointment. They may experience relief and grief simultaneously.
Emotional awareness allows a person to distinguish these experiences rather than reducing everything to broad categories such as good, bad, upset, or fine.
Thought Awareness
Thought awareness is the ability to notice what you are thinking.
Thoughts occur constantly, and many pass through the mind without deliberate examination. Thought awareness allows a person to notice the ideas, interpretations, predictions, judgments, memories, assumptions, and internal conversations occurring within them.
Instead of simply thinking, the person can also recognize:
This is what I am thinking.
That distinction creates the possibility of examining whether the thought is accurate, useful, distorted, incomplete, or based upon an assumption.
This includes recognizing your reasoning process, assumptions, mental habits, interpretations, methods of reaching conclusions, and the ways information is being organized and evaluated.
A person with strong metacognitive awareness may notice that they are searching only for evidence supporting an existing conclusion, making an assumption without sufficient information, reasoning from emotion, repeatedly circling the same question, or changing their thinking because new information has altered the structure of the problem.
It is the mind becoming aware of its own thinking process.
Behavioral Awareness
Behavioral awareness is recognizing what you actually do.
This sounds simple, but people are not always accurate observers of their own behavior.
Behavioral awareness includes recognizing repeated actions, habits, reactions, communication patterns, avoidance, escalation, withdrawal, impulsive responses, and other observable behaviors.
It allows someone to compare:
What do I believe I do?
with:
What do I actually do?
Motivational Awareness
Motivational awareness is understanding what is driving you.
Human behavior can have more than one motive, and the motive we consciously identify is not always the only one operating.
A person may offer help because they genuinely care while also wanting appreciation. They may avoid a conversation because they believe it is unnecessary while also fearing conflict.
Motivational awareness does not require assuming that every action has a hidden or negative motive. It requires enough internal honesty to examine what may actually be driving a choice.
Intentional Awareness
Intentional awareness is knowing what you intend to accomplish through your words or actions.
It allows a person to recognize:
What am I trying to do here?
Intent matters, but awareness also requires understanding that intention and outcome are different things.
We can have good intentions and still produce harmful results.
Which leads directly to another form of awareness.
Impact Awareness
Impact awareness is the ability to recognize how your words, choices, behaviors, and actions affect other people.
A person may have excellent awareness of their intentions while having poor awareness of their impact.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you” describes intention.
Recognizing that the person was nevertheless hurt requires impact awareness.
Mature awareness can hold both pieces of information at the same time.
Somatic Awareness
Somatic awareness is awareness of what is happening within the body.
The body constantly provides information.
Muscle tension, changes in breathing, increased heart rate, heaviness, fatigue, restlessness, warmth, discomfort, relaxation, nausea, and other physical sensations may accompany emotional or psychological states.
Somatic awareness allows a person to notice those signals rather than remaining disconnected from them.
Trigger Awareness
Trigger awareness is the ability to recognize what reliably produces particular reactions.
A trigger may produce an emotional, cognitive, physiological, behavioral, or combined response.
Awareness involves more than recognizing the reaction. It involves identifying what preceded it.
Over time, repeated observation can reveal patterns that allow a person to recognize a trigger earlier — sometimes before the full reaction develops.
Pattern Awareness
Pattern awareness is the ability to recognize repetition.
Patterns can occur in thoughts, emotions, behaviors, relationships, choices, conflicts, environments, reactions, and outcomes.
A single event may tell us relatively little.
Repeated events can reveal structure.
Pattern awareness allows someone to stop looking only at isolated incidents and begin asking:
What keeps happening here?
Defense Awareness
Defense awareness is recognizing when psychological self-protection is occurring.
People protect themselves in many ways. They may deny, rationalize, minimize, avoid, blame, intellectualize, withdraw, become defensive, redirect attention, or reinterpret information that threatens an existing belief or self-concept.
Defense awareness asks:
What am I protecting right now, and why does this feel necessary to protect?
The answer can reveal information that the defense itself was preventing the person from seeing.
Contradiction Awareness
Human beings contain contradictions.
We can value something and behave contrary to it.
We can believe two things that cannot both be true.
We can intend one outcome while repeatedly producing another.
We can say we want change while consistently protecting the conditions preventing that change.
Contradiction awareness is the ability to notice these internal inconsistencies without immediately forcing them out of awareness.
A contradiction is information.
Examining it can reveal competing needs, beliefs, fears, values, motives, or unresolved conflicts.
Present-State Awareness
Present-state awareness is the ability to recognize what is happening within you now.
What am I feeling?
What am I thinking?
What is happening in my body?
What am I wanting?
What am I reacting to?
What am I about to do?
Historical understanding can explain yesterday.
Present-state awareness allows us to observe ourselves while life is actually happening.
Historical Awareness — how previous experience contributed to present functioning — appears in its full form within Beliefs, Values & Identity.
Awareness Is Not All-or-Nothing
Perhaps one of the greatest mistakes we make when discussing awareness is treating people as either self-aware or unaware.
Human awareness is far more complex.
A person can possess exceptional emotional awareness and limited behavioral awareness.
Someone can recognize their behavior but misunderstand their motivation.
A person can have strong intellectual and metacognitive awareness while having difficulty recognizing bodily signals.
Someone can understand their childhood history in extraordinary detail while remaining unaware of how those experiences are influencing a relationship occurring today.
A person can know exactly what they intended while remaining almost completely unaware of their impact.
And someone may demonstrate remarkable awareness in most areas while still having particular places they cannot yet see clearly.
Awareness therefore has depth, range, and resolution.
It can also develop.
Full Reading
Relational Awareness — Understanding Others
In This Reading
Relational Awareness
Relational awareness is awareness of how you function in relationships.
This includes recognizing patterns involving closeness, distance, trust, expectations, reciprocity, communication, dependency, independence, conflict, repair, vulnerability, boundaries, and the roles you tend to occupy with other people.
Sometimes characteristics that are difficult to see individually become obvious when we examine what repeatedly happens between ourselves and others.
Social Awareness
Social awareness is the ability to recognize and understand what is happening among people.
It includes noticing social dynamics, interpersonal cues, group behavior, inclusion and exclusion, shifts in tone, cooperation, conflict, influence, expectations, and the ways people respond to one another.
A socially aware person does not merely hear what is being said. They also notice what is happening within the interaction.
Social awareness does not mean assuming we know what another person is thinking. It means noticing available information while remaining capable of distinguishing observation from interpretation.
Awareness of Others
Awareness of others is the ability to recognize that other people have internal worlds that are separate from our own.
Other people may think differently, feel differently, interpret differently, value different things, possess different knowledge, have different histories, and respond differently to the same circumstances.
One of the greatest barriers to understanding another person is using ourselves as the model for them.
We may ask:
What would I mean if I said that?
But the more important question is:
What does this person mean when they say it?
Awareness of others requires allowing another person to provide information about who they are rather than continually interpreting them through ourselves.
It also includes recognizing changes in another person’s emotional state, behavior, communication, comfort, distress, engagement, withdrawal, and other observable signals.
The goal is not mind-reading.
The goal is accurate observation combined with enough openness to learn the person who is actually in front of us.
Interpersonal Awareness
Interpersonal awareness is awareness of what is happening specifically between yourself and another person.
It differs slightly from relational awareness.
Relational awareness concerns your broader patterns across relationships.
Interpersonal awareness examines the interaction occurring right now.
Did the tone just change?
Did the other person withdraw?
Did I become defensive?
Are we still discussing the original issue?
Did something I said change the direction of the conversation?
Are we understanding one another, or are we now responding to different interpretations of what was said?
Interpersonal awareness allows people to recognize a change in an interaction while there is still an opportunity to respond to it.
Communication Awareness
Communication awareness is recognizing both what you are communicating and how you are communicating it.
Communication involves more than words.
Tone, pacing, volume, facial expression, timing, body language, silence, emphasis, word choice, and context can all contribute information.
Communication awareness also includes recognizing the difference between:
What I intended to communicate
and
What I actually communicated.
It includes the ability to notice when a message has been misunderstood and to clarify rather than automatically assuming the other person is responsible for the misunderstanding.
Perspective Awareness
Perspective awareness is recognizing that every person encounters reality from a particular position.
Knowledge, experience, culture, education, beliefs, relationships, physical circumstances, access to information, and countless other factors influence what someone can see and how they interpret it.
Perspective awareness includes recognizing your own position as well as the existence of perspectives beyond it.
This does not mean every interpretation is equally accurate.
It means understanding that your current position may reveal some information while obscuring other information.
Changing perspective can sometimes reveal something that was present all along but could not be seen from the original position.
Full Reading
External Awareness — Your Environment & Beyond
In This Reading
Situational Awareness
Situational awareness is the ability to recognize what is happening around you at a particular moment.
It involves noticing relevant people, events, conditions, changes, risks, opportunities, and other information within the immediate situation.
Situational awareness also requires understanding how these pieces relate to one another.
It is the difference between merely being physically present somewhere and actually registering what is occurring there.
Strong situational awareness allows a person to continually update their understanding as circumstances change rather than continuing to respond to a situation that no longer exists.
Environmental Awareness
Environmental awareness is awareness of the physical environment and the ways it may be affecting you or others.
This can include temperature, lighting, noise, crowding, physical layout, accessibility, air quality, movement, objects, hazards, natural surroundings, and other features of the environment.
Our environments continually provide information and influence human functioning.
Sometimes a change attributed entirely to the person may partially be a response to the environment in which that person is functioning.
Environmental awareness allows us to include those conditions in our understanding.
Sensory Awareness
Sensory awareness is recognizing what you are receiving through your senses and how you respond to that information.
This includes awareness of sound, light, touch, smell, taste, temperature, movement, texture, and other sensory experiences.
People differ considerably in sensory sensitivity. Awareness of those differences can help someone understand reactions that might otherwise seem unexplained.
Attentional Awareness
Attentional awareness is awareness of where your attention is going.
Attention is limited.
At any particular moment, some information is being selected while other information is being ignored, filtered, or never consciously noticed.
Attentional awareness allows a person to recognize:
What am I paying attention to?
What keeps capturing my attention?
What am I ignoring?
What might I be missing because my attention is somewhere else?
This becomes especially important because whatever receives our attention can disproportionately shape our perception of what is happening.
If we continually look for threat, we may notice threat-related information more readily.
If we are focused exclusively on proving ourselves correct, contradictory information may receive very little attention.
If we are absorbed in our own internal experience, we may fail to notice what is happening to someone sitting directly beside us.
Becoming aware of attention allows us to examine not only what we see, but what our attention may be preventing us from seeing.
Cultural Awareness
Cultural awareness is recognizing how culture influences beliefs, expectations, communication, behavior, values, customs, assumptions, relationships, and interpretations.
It includes awareness of one’s own cultural conditioning as well as recognition that other people may operate from different cultural frameworks.
What appears obvious, polite, inappropriate, normal, strange, respectful, or offensive within one cultural environment may carry a very different meaning within another.
Cultural awareness helps prevent us from mistaking familiarity for universality.
Temporal Awareness
Temporal awareness is awareness of time and of where an experience belongs in relation to past, present, and future.
Human beings can respond to present circumstances through expectations created by the past.
We can also become so focused on anticipated futures that we stop accurately experiencing the present.
Temporal awareness helps distinguish:
This happened before.
This is happening now.
I am afraid this might happen later.
Those are three very different pieces of information.
Recognizing the difference can substantially change how a situation is understood.
Risk Awareness
Risk awareness is the ability to recognize possible danger, harm, loss, or undesirable consequences.
It involves noticing relevant warning signs, estimating consequences, considering probability, and recognizing when additional information is needed.
Risk awareness does not require living in fear or assuming the worst.
In fact, excessive perception of danger can distort risk awareness just as easily as ignoring danger can.
Accurate risk awareness attempts to understand risk in proportion to the available evidence.
Opportunity Awareness
Awareness is not exclusively about detecting problems.
Opportunity awareness is the ability to recognize possibilities.
An opportunity may involve learning, connection, growth, creativity, change, collaboration, problem-solving, exploration, or an unexpected path that was not previously visible.
People can become so accustomed to looking for what might go wrong that they stop noticing what might become possible.
Complete awareness includes both.
Full Reading
Beliefs, Values & Identity — What Shapes You
In This Reading
Value Awareness
Value awareness is knowing what genuinely matters to you.
There can be a difference between values we have been taught to profess and values demonstrated by the way we actually live.
Examining where we consistently place our time, attention, energy, loyalty, resources, and effort can sometimes reveal our functioning values more accurately than simply listing what we believe our values are.
Belief Awareness
Belief awareness is recognizing what you believe and how those beliefs influence your perception and behavior.
It also includes examining where beliefs came from.
Some beliefs are consciously chosen after careful examination. Others are inherited from family, culture, religion, education, relationships, experiences, or environments and may never have been deliberately evaluated.
Awareness allows a person to examine a belief rather than merely operate from it.
Identity Awareness
Identity awareness concerns the way you understand who you are.
Identity can include personal characteristics, roles, relationships, culture, profession, history, beliefs, accomplishments, experiences, and the narratives through which you understand your life.
Identity awareness also allows a person to ask whether an identity still accurately describes them — or whether they have continued carrying a description of themselves that no longer fits.
Need Awareness
Need awareness is the ability to recognize what you need.
Needs can be physical, emotional, psychological, relational, intellectual, environmental, or spiritual.
People sometimes recognize discomfort without recognizing the unmet need associated with it.
Knowing that something feels wrong is one level of awareness.
Recognizing what is needed is another.
Boundary Awareness
Boundary awareness is knowing where your limits are.
It includes recognizing what you are and are not comfortable with, what responsibilities belong to you, what responsibilities belong to someone else, what you are willing to participate in, and when something has crossed a personal limit.
Boundary awareness also includes recognizing the boundaries of other people.
Strength Awareness
Strength awareness is the ability to accurately recognize your own abilities, capacities, knowledge, talents, resilience, and areas of competence.
Self-awareness is not exclusively about finding problems.
Underestimating yourself can be just as inaccurate as overestimating yourself.
Accurate awareness includes seeing what you do well.
Limitation Awareness
Limitation awareness is recognizing what you do not know, cannot currently do, have not learned, or are not equipped to handle.
This is not self-devaluation.
It is accuracy.
Someone who knows the boundary of their knowledge can seek information. Someone who recognizes the boundary of their ability can seek assistance, learn, practice, or choose differently.
A limitation that cannot be recognized cannot be intelligently addressed.
Historical Awareness
Historical awareness is understanding how your previous experiences contributed to your present functioning.
Family, childhood, education, culture, relationships, successes, failures, losses, opportunities, trauma, social environments, and accumulated learning can all contribute to present beliefs and patterns.
Historical awareness helps answer:
How did I get here?
But understanding where something came from does not automatically mean we are aware of how it is operating today.
That requires present-state awareness, which appears in its full form within Self-Awareness — The Inner Foundation.
Conscience Awareness
Conscience awareness is awareness of your internal moral responses.
It includes recognizing feelings of responsibility, moral discomfort, internal conflict, concern for consequences, and your relationship to what you understand as right and wrong.
It also includes noticing what happens internally when your behavior conflicts with your own moral standards.
Existential Awareness
Existential awareness concerns the larger questions of human existence.
It can include awareness of mortality, meaning, purpose, freedom, responsibility, isolation, belonging, existence, and the significance a person assigns to being alive.
These questions may become particularly visible during major transitions, losses, accomplishments, crises, aging, or periods of profound reflection.
Spiritual Awareness
Spiritual awareness is awareness of one’s spiritual life, experiences, beliefs, sense of connection, and perceived relationship with realities beyond the ordinary material self.
For some people this involves God or a religious tradition. For others it may involve consciousness, transcendence, interconnectedness, sacredness, or other understandings of spiritual reality.
Spiritual awareness includes recognizing these experiences and examining what meaning they hold within one’s life.
Full Reading
Information & Thinking — How You Process Reality
In This Reading
Thought Awareness and Metacognitive Awareness also concern how we process reality. Their complete readings appear within Self-Awareness — The Inner Foundation.
Knowledge Awareness
Knowledge awareness is recognizing what you know, what you think you know, what you do not know, and what you cannot currently know.
These are different categories.
A person may possess information.
They may believe something without sufficient information.
They may know that information is missing.
Or they may be dealing with something that cannot presently be determined.
Knowledge awareness allows a person to distinguish among these states rather than treating confidence as evidence of knowledge.
One of the most important forms of intellectual awareness is the ability to say:
I don’t know.
Not as a failure of intelligence, but as an accurate description of the current boundary of knowledge.
Bias Awareness
Bias awareness is recognizing the assumptions, preferences, expectations, experiences, and learned filters that influence how you interpret information.
Everyone processes information through an existing mental framework.
Bias awareness does not mean eliminating every bias. It means becoming capable of recognizing that your first interpretation is not automatically objective simply because it occurred inside your own mind.
Contextual Awareness
Contextual awareness is recognizing how circumstances affect your functioning.
People do not behave identically in every environment.
Stress, safety, authority, familiarity, fatigue, social expectations, power differences, relationships, uncertainty, and many other conditions can influence how someone thinks, feels, and behaves.
Contextual awareness helps a person understand not merely what they do, but under what conditions they tend to do it.
Systems Awareness
Systems awareness is the ability to recognize that individual things often exist within larger structures.
A person’s behavior may be influenced by a relationship.
A relationship may be influenced by a family.
A family may be influenced by a community.
A community may be influenced by cultural, economic, institutional, historical, or environmental conditions.
Systems awareness asks not only:
What is happening?
but also:
What is this connected to?
It allows us to recognize relationships, dependencies, feedback loops, consequences, and patterns that may be invisible when each piece is examined separately.
