Why Self-Awareness is Good and Self-Consciousness is Bad in Sports
Today I am continuing my deep dive into one of the seminal books on optimizing performance, Flow in Sports. This time, I want to share a few unique nuggets of wisdom the authors explain about the difference between self-awareness and self-consciousness.
The key points the authors highlight are that:
- Self-awareness is internal and self-consciousness is external.
- When you’re processing the signals your body is sending you about your physical or mental state, you’re being self-aware
- When you’re worrying about what others think, you’re being self-conscious
- Self-awareness can help performance
- Self-consciousness can hinder performance
Specifically the authors state:
To be self-conscious means that we look at ourselves from the outside, as it were, and worry about how we are doing, how we look to others. Self-consciousness interferes with flow and endangers performance because our attention is split between doing what we have to do and watching ourselves doing it.
When we are self-aware, however, we don’t think about the self at all; we just process information about the fine nuances of our involvement in the activity…
Self-aware athletes learn to listen to their bodies and to know what good performance feels like.
In short, learning how to be self-aware is a skill athletes must become good at if they want to increase their performance. On the other hand, athletes must also learn how to block out external feelings of worrying what others think. Which can be particularly difficult in this age of oversharing and trolling on social media.