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...
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