“Self-awareness is a powerful skill. It enables you to see yourself clearly. It informs your decisions and helps you to weigh opportunities. It allows you to test your limits. It empowers you to understand other people. It makes partnerships with others stronger. It allows you to maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. It opens the door to greater capacity.
What stops people from reaching their capacity often isn’t a lack of desire. It’s usually a lack of awareness. Unfortunately, people don’t become self-aware accidentally.
On top of that, there are factors that also work against us and prevent us from developing great self-awareness, such as excuses, success fantasies that are ungrounded in reality, talking with
out listening to others, unresolved negative emotions, habitual self-distraction, absence of personal reflection, and unwillingness to pay the price to gain experience.
Most people who have developed self-awareness have had to battle one or more of these factors to get where they are. They’ve had to work very hard. It takes a desire to make self-awareness discoveries. It takes discipline to look at yourself and reflect on your experiences. It takes maturity to ask others to help you with your blind spots. They might see you more clearly than you can see yourself.”
No Limits: Blow the Cap Off Of Your Capacity, John C. Maxwell, p. 6-7.
