What is Self-Awareness?
Self-Awareness is defined by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) as the abilities to understand one’s own emotions, thoughts, and values and how they influence behavior across contexts. Self-Awareness is one of the 5 core competencies of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) as defined by CASEL. The other core competencies include: self-management, social-awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making.
Each of the 5 core competencies of social emotional learning (SEL) is extremely important to learn while children are developing. Social emotional learning helps students to build the knowledge and the skills to be resilient and able to deal with the ups and downs of life.
When self-awareness is discussed or taught, it is often to expand the capacity in which someone can recognize their strengths and limitations with a sense of confidence and purpose (CASEL). Some examples of this identified by CASEL are:
- Integrating personal and social identities
- Identifying personal, cultural, and linguistic assets
- Identifying one’s emotions
- Demonstrating honesty and integrity
- Linking feelings, values, and thoughts
- Examining prejudices and biases
- Experiencing self-efficacy
- Having a growth mindset
- Developing interests and a sense of purpose
Self-awareness gives us the power to objectively evaluate ourselves, align our behaviors with our values, and understand how others perceive us. It is important that we all learn to look inward so we are able to establish our values, process our thoughts and feelings, and evaluate our strengths and weaknesses.
Emotions can be overwhelming, but having the ability to recognize them can really help a person to better regulate them. This gives a person a sense of optimism that can help them to be resilient and persevere through difficult situations.
Self-awareness can also help us to empathize with others and take on the other person’s perspective. This then helps us to solve conflicts and build healthy relationships with others.
Learning self-awareness is important in a person’s life because it can help a person to set and achieve personal goals, manage their emotions, and establish a healthy identity. Self-awareness gives a person more self-confidence and helps them to become better decision-makers. This helps a person to better communicate with intention and clarity. Self-awareness helps us to identify our strengths, weaknesses, and places we might be able to make improvements on. When we are able to identify where we need to make improvements, this can help us to be the best person we can be not only for others, but also for ourselves.
In the Rock Digi curriculum, we used the CASEL model to write the lessons. Each curriculum works to teach students the skills needed to be able to practice self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.
For more information about the Rock Digi curriculum, visit rockdigi.org.
Free Trial Lessons are available at rockdigi.org where you can see how the Rock Digi lessons are formatted and the standards that the lessons meet.
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