Change Starts with Self Awareness

Change starts with self awareness.

As very commonly noted, it’s easy to say that other people are doing bad and are doing poorly, but it’s much harder to recognize all the ways that our actions or ideas are subpar. With lack of self awareness, people can be much harsher and judgemental towards other people. This double standard creates lots of tension that is really quite unnecessary.

Although a simple idea, like most things, it is much more hard to implement in practice. When calling out others' misconduct, it’s hard to take a step back and think about your own actions in this area in the past. For example, with cancel culture, famous people are “cancelled” for racism and negative qualities, essentially entailing the end of their career. Many critics of this movement call it overly harsh, and not promoting growth. This is true in many retrospects, and is rooted in the fact that people are unlikely to forgive a well known person using their platform to spread hate/injustice/bad ideology. While this should not undoubtedly be tolerated or ignored, cancel culture can adversely impact the lives of many of these influencers. If people were to simply step back a little and reassess their past actions (most have been racist/sexist/stereotyped/been improperly rude before), maybe they would have more room to tolerate the misconduct of these people.

Change starts with self awareness. Endlessly calling others out and reprimanding people other than yourself often leads to little sustainable growth. Instead, when critiquing other people, each chance to see injustice or bad behavior should serve as a growth opportunity for yourself. Educate yourself more on these real issues. Ask, what can I do to solve it?