Future² Innovation

Self-awareness is a hot topic nowadays. You can hardly open a business or psychology book without coming across numerous mentions of emotional intelligence, EQ or self-awareness. The theory of objective self-awareness goes back to 1972, when it was published by Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund. Daniel Goleman’s definition of self-awareness, immortalized in his best-selling book Emotional Intelligence, simply puts it down to “knowing one’s internal states, preference, resources, and intuitions.” I’ve written previously that we probably shouldn’t trust our intuitions, because they are a byproduct of evolutionary programming, genetics, fetal conditions, infancy and upbringing, past experience, microbiome activity and our current environment. Given this, there is immense value in being self-aware. Knowing that a feeling in our gut willing us not to do something we really need to — like make an important presentation in front of a large audience — is really just evolutionary programming