Four Types of Awareness

As you work toward becoming more self-aware, understanding the diverse types of awareness can help you become more mindful and even intuitive. In turn, this knowledge will help you make better choices in life.

The more open and aware you are, the more likely you are to make good decisions for your entire life. Each author specializes or prefers to discuss certain types of awareness. Here we’ll talk about self-awareness, social awareness, organizational awareness, and knowledge awareness.

Self-Awareness

Getting to know your inner-self and your unconscious mindset is important. If you haven’t taken time to get to know who you are, what motivates you, what makes you unique, you need to take time to get to know and accept yourself as you are. This includes your strengths, weaknesses, emotions, behaviors, and your core values. When you do this, you have self-awareness.

Self-awareness is learned, over time. As you grow, learn, and experience all aspects of life, you become more self-aware. To become more self-aware, consider keeping a journal to track your behaviors and examine the issues that stop you from reaching your goals in life.

Social Awareness

When you’re socially aware, you have developed the ability to relate to and understand others. You know how you react with others in different environments. You know automatically that you’ll like or dislike any particular social situation.

To improve your social awareness, observe body language, ask questions, and listen more than you talk. Try adjusting your communication methods based on how the people you’re with are communicating.

Organizational Awareness

Whether you work for yourself or work in a business, there are values and norms for each group. Understanding those is part of your awareness growth. For example, how do you like to interact with people? Do you like leading groups at work? How does the organization serve you?

Learning to deal with diverse types of people in a mindful and productive way takes some time. Most people rely on their intuition in these situations. However, if you take the time to get to know the organization and know what the universal values and notions are, you can become even more organizationally aware.

Knowledge Awareness

This one is kind of tricky. Because as soon as you read this, you’ll have this type of knowledge that is so important for self-awareness growth. When it comes to knowledge, the moment you can accept that you don’t know what you don’t know (Jonathan Raymond), you can start making better choices in life.

There is always something that is unknown. The willingness to accept that you really cannot know everything and accept it is liberating. In fact, exploring the various levels of awareness can help you become more self-aware. As you go through the process, the more mindful you’ll be about the decisions and choices you make in your life.