Self-awareness, self-criticism, and self-advisory are built-in faculties of a conscious, discerning mind.
Together, they form an inner mechanism that lets us observe, question, and guide ourselves.
Self-awareness is the ability to pay attention to our own thoughts, feelings, reactions, and behaviour, as well as to the world around us.
Self-criticism is the willingness to examine ourselves honestly. It helps us recognize weaknesses, mistakes, prejudices, and recurring behaviour patterns. Its purpose should not be to condemn the self, but to correct and improve it.
Self-advisory is the inner counsel we develop from accumulated knowledge, wisdom, and experience. It is the voice that tells us what we might do, avoid, reconsider, or change. But it comes with an important footnote: it can be wrong and subject to change.
These three inner faculties can influence and convince us more than messages from outside, whether feedback, criticism, praise, assumptions, opinions, or even backlash.
Yet our inner voices do not exist in isolation. They constantly react to the world around us. What we see, hear, experience, and learn becomes part of the conversation taking place within.
This raises an interesting question:
Is gut-feeling, which is the product of self-awareness, self-criticism, and self-advisory, always right?
The answer lies in self-evaluation.
Self-evaluation is the process of examining our own thoughts and behaviour.
In self-evaluation, the inner voices of awareness, criticism, and advice are evolutionary processes that help develop sound, rational behaviour.
Without such self-evaluation, the inner voice can become an echo chamber. Awareness can turn into self-absorption; self-criticism can become either defensiveness or self-condemnation, and self-advisory can harden into certainty.
A personality that stops examining itself can become stagnant, and, at its extreme, may develop narcissistic tendencies.
Therefore, intelligently managing the self does not mean shutting out the outside world.
The inner window needs an outer window.
Feedback, criticism, disagreement, and advice from others may sometimes be uncomfortable, mistaken, or unfair. But they can also act as mirrors, revealing aspects of ourselves that our own inner voices fail to see.
For this reason, shutting down outside reactions, advice, or criticism is not the right mindset for managing the self intelligently and judiciously.
-Promod Puri
promodpuri.com
