Self-Awareness There Are Many Traits of Great

Self-Awareness

There are many traits of great importance to the midwife in order to accomplish a successful job and a positive experience by the patient, and self-awareness is perhaps one of the most essential. Self-awareness consists in part of understanding one's motives and motivations -- knowing why certain actions are seen as desirable -- and in a more philosophical sense can be understood as a recognition of the set of experiences that create the personally identified ("I," "me") individual without necessarily defining or limiting that individual (Wickham, 2004; Brooks & DeVidi, 2011). In other words, self-awareness is truly being aware of the self -- of it's physical and psychological makeup and construction, insofar as is possible, and of how the specific construct that is the self interacts with the world. For the midwife, this means understanding how patients and other perceive actions, and the degree to which the midwife can help them become more self-aware themselves (Wickham, 2004).

Some time ago, I was in a position that required greater self-awareness than I currently had. Faced with a difficult situation regarding a patient during her pregnancy, I found myself becoming short-tempered. I had developed enough self-awareness, thankfully, that I was able to remove myself from the situation and reflect away from the ward entirely, coming to the realization that a different earlier experience had created a certain judgmental perspective in me. This type of development is a natural and ongoing part of self-awareness, but it still felt like a minor failure on my part for not having developed self-awareness in this issue earlier on, before it began to affect my quality of practice as a midwife.

It was reflection that led me to greater levels of self-awareness and enabled me to restore appropriate levels of understanding and care, and reflection on the experience overall -- from the mergence of the problem through its solution -- can help lead to even greater progress from the incident. John's model of reflection includes five basic questions or steps, beginning with a description of the experience (provided above) and then a reflection on the desired consequences, the influencing factors, what better choices could have been made, and explicit reflection on the learning that results (Johns & Joiner, 2003). Each step has direct and significant bearing on the situation I experienced, and understanding what I was trying to accomplish both when I lost my temper and when I removed myself from the situation are key in developing greater levels of self-awareness from this experience.

Learning in midwifery is intended to promote greater caring, which includes helping patients achieve greater senses of the worth and complexity of their own personhood (Wickham, 2004; Johns, 2009). What I was trying to accomplish in losing my temper really was born out of a desire to see the patient overcome the difficulty she was experiencing; my reaction was obviously counterproductive to this desire, but that was the real intent. Frustration led me to lose my temper, and then by removing myself form the situation I was trying to avoid further harm while allowing my own frustrations to ease. This enabled me to acknowledge and understand my own personhood and my reaction of frustration, while also giving the patient room for her own sensibilities and emotions. In the meantime, and in fact while I was coming to understand these things, I reflected upon and came to understand the factors that had influenced my reaction (specifically an earlier experience that had also been quite frustrating) and a more appropriate way of handling the situation -- the next two phases of John's model of reflection -- before returning to the patient and resuming care with greater quality and efficacy (Johns & Joiner, 2003). My learning from this incident grows each time I reflect upon it, and even now I am making discoveries.