It's all self-awareness
You know those questions people ask something along the lines of "If you could give everyone in the world a skill what would it be?" Self-awareness. Self-awareness!
Previously I'd've said critical thinking. Which would still be nice. Critical thinking is about being able to assess other people and other things. Self-awareness is doing that to yourself.
The problem is self-awareness is a Socratic paradox. The more you have the more you realise you don't have it.
Last week I had some training and that evening I said to my wife how next time I'm demanding a rider. I'm not going unless definitely the presenter and ideally the other participants have done some self-awareness training. If people don't understand unconscious bias, I'm out. If people can't listen to someone else for thirty seconds, I'm out. Also I'd like some wine gums with all the liquorice ones taken out. This seems unlikely to go down well.
I just want to be in a room with people where we all know we don't know anything. Where we all know we have so much work to do.
This is especially obvious with all my wife's reality tv Survivor or Traitors shows. Stuff with real human dynamics. I love the part where they realise "I'm really bad at this game. I don't know what I'm doing. Nothing I think is real." Which applies to all of us all the time!
On these shows you watch people swear up and down they or someone else phrased something a certain way - apparently forgetting that it's all been recorded and we watched that interaction minutes ago. I wouldn't swear in a court of law I'd ever said or done anything.
Humans are so unreasonable. It's just how we are made. We've got very little idea what's going on around us at any time. We are oblivious, irrational animals operating on instinct and hormones. The ultimate unreliable narrators.
It's like that "You're not stuck in traffic, you are traffic." That's a leap we just can't make. I'm out here to get a McFlurry, everyone else is out here apparently just to get in my way. My motivations are nuanced and important, everyone else's are not.
There's a developmental step with kids where they come to understand other people are their own autonomous entities with inner lives. Theory of Mind. But I'm not sure we ever really get that. The mystery of consciousness is just as applicable to my own wife as it is to a bat.
Maya Angelou wasn't talking about cognitive psychology but the quote works here too:
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Because it's vibes, basically. Our whole brain is just vibes. It can't be any other way or it would fry. Self-awareness is understanding that about ourselves. Which means accepting that about other people. And realising we are all just stumbling through life the best we can.