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    Essential Ideas: Self-Awareness
    Essential Ideas: Self-Awareness
    Essential Ideas: Self-Awareness
    Ebook87 pages1 hour

    Essential Ideas: Self-Awareness

    By The School of Life

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    About this ebook

    The School of Life’s approach to self-awareness - in a pocket format.

    In the second of a series of pocket books, The School of Life has distilled its most essential ideas on self-awareness in order to produce a bitesize manual that is both useful and entertaining. 

    Understanding ourselves is the key to unlocking our true potential. Here is a collection of The School of Life’s most penetrating insights into the puzzles of self-awareness. By exploring key themes within the topic of self-knowledge, such as Emotional Intelligence, Anxiety, Normality, Pessimism and Self-sabotage, this book teaches us how to look into ourselves, how to make sense of our past, and how to overcome anxiety and confusion. 

    In a highly accessible form, The School of Life introduces us to a person we’ve been in flight from for too long and will benefit hugely from getting to know: our deep selves.

    Pair with the Know Yourself Prompt Cards, designed to help lead you through the important task of knowing yourself a little better in life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe School of Life
    Release dateNov 7, 2024
    ISBN9781916753303
    Essential Ideas: Self-Awareness
    Author

    The School of Life

    The School of Life is a global organization helping people lead more fulfilled lives. Through our range of books, gifts and stationery we aim to prompt more thoughtful natures and help everyone to find fulfillment. The School of Life is a resource for exploring self-knowledge, relationships, work, socializing, finding calm, and enjoying culture through content, community, and conversation. You can find us online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the world offering classes, events, and one-to-one therapy sessions. The School of Life is a rapidly growing global brand, with over 5 million YouTube subscribers, 343,000 Facebook followers, 183,000 Instagram followers and 160,000 Twitter followers. The School of Life Press brings together the thinking and ideas of the School of Life creative team under the direction of series editor, Alain de Botton. Their books share a coherent, curated message that speaks with one voice: calm, reassuring, and sane.

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    Essential Ideas - The School of Life

    Introduction

    Socrates, the earliest and greatest of philosophers, summed up the purpose of philosophy in one resonant phrase: ‘know yourself’. A capacity for self-awareness is at the heart of our inclinations to forgiveness, kindness, creativity and wise decision-making, especially around love and work. Unfortunately, knowing ourselves is the (always unfinished) task of a lifetime. We are permanently elusive and mysterious to ourselves.

    Self-awareness might be said to involve a set of fundamental realisations about the relationship between past and present.

    – Who we are today is, to a humbling and maddening degree, the result of events and dynamics in childhood we cannot for the most part remember, almost certainly don’t seek to explore and are understandably invested in trying to think well of.

    – Most of our difficulties come down to a shortfall in love in childhood. The physical vulnerability of children has its counterpart in an elevated degree of emotional susceptibility. Not very much needs to have happened in order for us to pick up a substantial wound.

    – We spend a great deal of energy in trying not to understand our pasts, in the name of maintaining our poise, our illusions and our self-respect. Most of who we are lies in the unconscious.

    – What we feel will happen next around people in general carries complex echoes of what happened back then around certain people in particular. With great unfairness, we constantly attribute to people in the here and now motives and likely patterns of behaviour unknowingly derived from figures from our histories.

    – We become slightly less difficult to be around when we start to appreciate the extent to which we are continually distorting reality through lenses scratched by our pasts. Maturity means no longer insisting too hard on our sanity.

    – To go back over the past is almost certainly going to be a mixture of frightening and irritating. It would be extremely odd if we didn’t have very mixed feelings about the business of self-examination.

    One of the tasks of culture is to offer us tools to assist us with the task of self-awareness. We need a vocabulary to name feelings and states of mind; we need encouragement to be alone with ourselves at regular moments; we need friends and professionals who will listen to us with sympathy and we need works of art that can illuminate elusive aspects of our psyches.

    Above all, we need to be modest about our capacity to easily understand who we are and what we want. We should nurture a stance of scepticism towards many of our first impulses and submit all our significant plans to extensive rational cross-examination.

    Failures of self-awareness lie behind some of our gravest individual and collective disasters.

    What follows is 25 ideas on self-awareness that will set us on the path to truly understanding ourselves.

    Akrasia

    A central problem of our minds is that we know so much in theory about how we should behave but engage so little with our knowledge in our day-to-day conduct.

    We know in theory about not eating too much, being kind, getting to bed early, focusing on our opportunities before it is too late, showing charity and remembering to be grateful. Yet in practice, our wise ideas have a notoriously weak ability to motivate our actual behaviour. Our knowledge is embedded within us and yet is ineffective for us.

    The Ancient Greeks were unusually alert to this phenomenon and gave it a helpfully resonant name: akrasia, commonly translated as ‘weakness of will’. It is because of akrasia, they proposed, that we have such a tragic proclivity for knowing what to do but not acting upon our own best principles.

    There are two central solutions to akrasia, located in two unexpected quarters: art and ritual. The real purpose of

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