understanding others

Self awareness if not so much a gift, but a reward. So many people believe that they are self aware, but they have no idea what sort of impact they have on others. They often wrongly estimate the positive and negative impacts that they have on people and the world. This is understandable. We are each only one person, and the perspective of others can never truly be taken into consideration because we simply cannot override our natural thought processes. We can try, but it won't happen. Other peoples' beliefs and opinions cannot become our own, there will always be a part of us that is skeptical or has an opposing opinion. This makes self awareness difficult, as we can never be truly aware of the impact that we have on others. We can only see what we see, and believe what we believe.

With this in mind, some people manage to get as close to self awareness as humanly possible- they take other people into account with most things they do. They try to understand how people will react to things- whether what they say will make someone feel happy, sad, angry, confused, the list goes on. Knowing and understanding how someone will react requires previous knowledge of their personality- so someone that is considered a friend would be a perfect candidate to test self awareness on.

Many people these days are not self aware. They speak and act without considering how they will impact others. Often they are confused by the person's reaction. They will think to themselves: I wouldn't have been upset by that, so why were they? They don't fully understand that we are all different and that their words and actions have the power to change someone's emotional state.

Being self aware, and understanding how we impact other people is incredibly tiring, and it's often a trait that a certain type of person has. The more I observe people, the more I understand how to categorise people into groups. The accuracy is often frightening. Almost every single person I speak to is placed into a category in my mind, I only place them in this category when I feel that I know enough about them to do so. Sometimes this can take five minutes, sometimes five weeks. But most of the time, I'm correct with the categorisation and with this I can completely predict someone's reactions.

This is tiring, it's a lot of effort, but the accuracy makes me want to keep doing it. One thing I have learned by categorising people is that I may be able to understand lots about others, but I will never understand as much as I would like to about myself.