In many ways, self-awareness is the foundation of the relational skills. The more self-aware you are, the easier it will be to learn the other skills. While it’s ideal to raise our self-awareness first, when we work on learning skills like assertiveness, good boundaries, or emotional management, we will gain self-awareness in the process.

Self-awareness provides the personal receptiveness required to develop other skills.

Self-awareness is important because we won’t gain proficiency in other relational skills if we cannot be honest with ourselves or if we aren’t interested in learning about ourselves and how to relate effectively to others.

Much of self-awareness is the willingness to be reflective, to consider how we could have handled something better, or simply to be curious about our interactions and our feelings.

You’ve probably heard about people who are not coachable or “teachable.”

Those are people who are incapable of the self-reflection and life examination that creates an open mind and the humility required for learning new ways of behaving. We must have the ability to see things from a different perspective in order to learn.

Those who don’t have the capacity to self-reflect might deny the need for it or try to hide that shortcoming. This is often because of insecurity. They may fool themselves and sometimes others who fall for their fake “confidence” which is usually expressed through aggressive behavior.

Aggression and bullying behavior is quite the opposite of confidence. Truly confident people are sure of themselves and therefore don’t need to “throw their weight around.” Confident people are also teachable because they are open-minded and curious about life.

Those who act aggressively to prove themselves usually have little self-awareness. They believe their act makes them look confident or is necessary for them to be taken seriously in a leadership role.

Because of their insecurity, they have no tolerance for self-honesty. They have low self-esteem and it’s therefore too painful for them to admit any shortcomings. People who can’t acknowledge their shortcomings are not open to learning and consequently cannot make improvements in how they relate to others.

These characteristics make these folks “unteachable.”

They won’t find their way to this website, or if they do, it’s unlikely they will stay because they won’t think any of the information here applies to them. It will terrify them and with one click they will be gone.

There will, however, be those rare people who are teetering on the edge of willingness – if that’s you, take a look around – you might find something of value.

It’s about maturity. To be coachable we must have some degree of self-awareness. We must be able to admit that we aren’t perfect and that we can benefit from getting to know ourselves better. We understand that improving our relational skills will improve all of our relationships.

Self-awareness is coming to honestly know yourself. For most people, it’s a life-long process.

It’s the ability to recognize your feelings and to notice the ups and downs of your emotional states. It’s developing an understanding of what triggers you emotionally and why.

Self-awareness is an important component of life. Not simply in and of itself, but as the foundation of the more sophisticated skills that we will look at next.