Self-Consciousness vs. Self-Awareness
Self-consciousness is that uncomfortable feeling, which may come on us suddenly, that “everyone is looking” at us. When we are self-conscious, we are acutely conscious of how our speech and actions may appear to others. We fear that others will judge us badly. We fear appearing stupid, ridiculous, or incompetent. As a result, we may feel awkward, clumsy, insecure, nervous, and ill-at-ease.
We may especially suffer the ill-effects of self-consciousness when we are under pressure to perform in public, such as giving a speech, a presentation, or a musical performance. Suddenly it seems very important to get everything just right. The more significant the occasion, the more important it is that we do well, the more is at stake, the more self-conscious we are likely to feel.
When we are self-conscious, we tend to focus our energies on stopping ourselves from doing things that might embarrass us. We do our best to avoid making mistakes. Unfortunately this tends to inhibit us, making it more difficult to keep in mind what we wanted to say. We may find ourselves tongue-tied, unable to think of what to say next. This makes us feel even more self-conscious and nervous, as we wonder if others notice the awkward gaps in our speech as we try to recall the words that were within our grasp moments earlier, but have seemingly fled for good. We long to return to our normal state, to be able to express ourselves naturally, without self-monitoring, to be able to lose ourselves in what we are saying and not feel that we are the object of focused attention. We long to recapture the sense of spontaneity that we were experiencing just a moment before. What normally would be spontaneous, unconscious, and automatic has become labored and difficult.
In some cases, self-consciousness may fade on its own, as we become comfortable with our audience and begin to feel accepted by them. In other cases, we may find it difficult to recapture our sense of spontaneity—of just being our “natural” selves—and we may be left with that uncomfortable feeling of pretending to be someone other than who we are. In such cases, we may be able to combat those feelings by turning self-consciousness into self-awareness. Whereas in a state of self-consciousness, we are aware of the audience looking at us, in a state of self-awareness, we are aware of ourselves looking the audience. We have a heightened awareness of ourselves as actors, as having values and intentions and of wanting to accomplish certain goals. We recognize that we have the freedom to act by choice, according to those goals, values and intentions. We are aware of sharing who we are and how we think with others. When we become self-aware, we shift our attention from how we are viewed by others to how we are presenting ourselves.
Self-awareness consists of being conscious of what we are doing to convey our message, both its content and the manner of its delivery. Our focus is on the positive things that we can do to get our message across. We are actively engaged in communicating what we have to say. We are actively looking at the audience with the goal in mind of connecting to them through eye contact, facial expression, and the like. We may control our tone of voice, pausing to let a point sink in, speaking slowly and clearly enunciating our words, to get our point across. As we do these things deliberately, we start to realize just how much control we have over our situation. As our own positive energy and excitement flows outward toward the audience, it overcomes any negative energy that may be coming inward. As we realize just how free we are to communicate who we authentically are, our inhibitions disappear.
The following chart summarizes the differences between self-consciousness and self-awareness:
How this power tool might be implemented with clients:
This tool could be particularly effective with clients who have difficulty speaking in public or suffer from awkwardness in social situations. You could ask a client to imagine a scenario in which they have felt self-conscious in the past, then have them replay it with themselves feeling confident and self-aware. Have them notice the things that they can deliberately control (i.e,, hand motions, mouth, eyes, tone of voice, loudness, rate of speaking, rate of breathing). Do a role play with them in which they speak on a topic on which they expect to be speaking in the future. Have them vary all of the above so as to heighten their awareness of doing these things deliberately until they feel that they have control over those aspects of their presentation. Then have them imagine themselves in the dreaded scenario doing all of the things they did so effectively in the role play.
