Self-awareness can come to us in many ways, and when we pay attention to what's happening to us, we may well find that such a moment has occurred even if we didn't notice at the time. These moments may not come as on the road to Damascus where Saul of Tarsus has a flash of insight, quite literally a light, which knocks him off his horse and turns him into Paul later a Christian saint. That's exciting, and its looks that way in the movies and television. A person with complex and confusing relationships with self and others along with all kinds of other problems gets a flash of insight, and she/he has changed for the better. Everything changes for the better, the music rises, and everything is resolved by the end of the movie or show: "God bless us everyone," as Dickens would have it.
Our lives don't resolve so easily, and they shouldn’t. We live our lives out, and the meanings in our lives develop with our lives. It's in the development of our lives where self-awareness begins and where it opens more and more fully. Our lives and the meanings contained within them exhibit the wonders of an ever foliate flower which endlessly blossoms without withering. Self-awareness can open us to our own beauty, to the best of ourselves which lives within us whatever we have done with our lives so far and whatever we have thought about ourselves until now.
Carl came to training to learn more about using a computer and for help with writing a business plan. And that's what we did. What also happened to him, what awareness he discovered happened, in part, because he succeeded in ways he had not expected. All of a sudden, he felt he could choose to see himself as smart. That didn't mean to him that he changed at all. He didn't think he wanted change, and no change was required. He simply found that he could make a choice about how he saw himself and thus how he could re-tell his story. We all live with those choices within us even as we live with our ability to make form out of the seeming chaos of the world and of our lives. Making story is making form. The greater our self-awareness, the greater our relationship to our power to make choices that make sense to us in the moment and make new choices when we experience how any choice works itself out. Self–awareness empowers us. It's even quite good fun.
So why don't most of us spend much time searching for and experiencing self-awareness? The answer I have found when I asked is simple. We don't think we want to. There's a story to how that awareness came to me.
My formal studies came in Interdisciplinary Humanities with an English concentration. That led me to teach many different things and in many different ways. I got a call one day from someone who asked if I would teach a short course on interviewing and another on résumé writing. I replied honestly that I had never done so before, but I thought I could make them up. She gave me the weekend.