[This post is part of a series on The Model — my model for the human emotional system designed for use in leadership, self-awareness, and general purpose professional and personal development — which I find the most effective and valuable foundation for understanding yourself and others and improving your life. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.]

Do you also find people talk about awareness, self-awareness, emotional intelligence and related topics loosely, without knowing precisely what they mean?

The Model lets us circle back, discuss, and clarify these concepts.

Perhaps ironically, people with low awareness would tend to benefit most from increasing theirs. Without a meaningful definition, they end up the least able to help themselves. People with low awareness often consider themselves most aware, if they care about their awareness, figuring they know they about their physical selves, like that they have two arms and legs, etc. I call that a low level of awareness — important, but just a beginning.

Self-awareness beyond the obvious knowledge of your physical self means knowing that you have a motivational system, how it works, and its state at any given time. In our Model, that means knowing that you can have a model, knowing the Model (or your version), and knowing the beliefs you’re operating under and the emotions motivating you.

Self-awareness is tremendously useful for leading yourself and creating the life you want for yourself.

Awareness besides self-awareness means knowing the same concepts apply to others. High awareness and self-awareness help you connect with people about things like intent and meaning — what people generally call depth in a relationship.

Awareness in general is tremendously useful for leading others.

I use the term emotional intelligence almost synonymously with awareness, perhaps also implying skills in managing emotions.

I designed the Model to clarify and demystify these concepts to ease their understanding and, most importantly, to help you raise yours. I believe simply having a model, whether my Model or your version, immensely increases your self-awareness, especially in cultures, like mine, that romanticize emotions, mystifying them in the process, making them seem irrational. They do differ from rational thought, but they still follow a logic based in their system, modeled by the Model.

A main goal of many posts in this blog is to help you raise your awareness — or at least share things that helped me raise mine, hoping you can benefit from them like I did. Whatever my level of self-awareness now relative to yours or anyone else’s — I’m sure some ten-year-olds have more self-awareness than I do — mine is higher now than it was before.

You can raise yours too, which can only improve your life.

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