Welcome to week 2. This week, you'll begin your examination of the self-understanding phase of the self-development model. Activities associated with self-understanding are important because they provide a great deal of information needed prior to making actual efforts at personal improvement. As the name suggests, self-understanding is all about increasing your knowledge about yourself. It involves a number of processes associated with reflecting on feedback and experiences to develop self-awareness. You'll first explore what self-awareness actually means, and how it contributes to the self-development process. Then you'll examined some of the problems and solutions about gaining self-awareness. It's not as easy to achieve as you might think. You might be surprised to learn that psychological research suggests that people aren't very good at accurate self-awareness. You'll look at some of the problems you need to deal with in developing your self-awareness, and how to try and overcome this. Finally, you'll explore the processes by which you can gain self-awareness. One of the important processes that underpins self-understanding, is self-reflection. Reflection is about thinking deeply about our behavior, and we can use a number or sources of feedback about our actions to aid self-understanding. We will discuss the nature of these sources and the role they play in your development. By the end of this week, you'll have a better understanding of the nature of self-awareness, just what it is and what we seek to be aware of, the nature of the challenges to obtain accurate and useful self-awareness. Finally, the processes involved in gaining self-awareness.