Personal Development Emotional Intelligence

Self-Awareness: Understanding Yourself to Make Better Decisions

A practical course on recognizing your patterns, values, emotions, and blind spots with Professor Michael Edwards

Self-Awareness: Understanding Yourself to Make Better Decisions logo
Quick Course Facts
16
Self-paced, Online, Lessons
16
Videos and/or Narrated Presentations
5.1
Approximate Hours of Course Media
About the Self-Awareness: Understanding Yourself to Make Better Decisions Course

This course on Self-Awareness gives you a practical foundation for making clearer, more confident decisions in everyday life and work. Through Personal Development-focused lessons, you will learn how to recognize your patterns, values, emotions, and blind spots with Professor Michael Edwards so you can respond with greater intention instead of reacting on autopilot.

Build Self-Awareness To Make Better Decisions

  • Learn A Practical Course On Recognizing Your Patterns, Values, Emotions, And Blind Spots With Professor Michael Edwards
  • Strengthen Self-Awareness To Understand What Drives Your Choices And Behaviors
  • Improve decision-making by noticing emotional triggers, habits, and mental filters more clearly
  • Develop reflection habits and a personal plan you can use long after the course ends

A practical Personal Development course on Self-Awareness, values, emotions, habits, strengths, and growth.

Self-Awareness is more than thinking about yourself; it is the skill of noticing what shapes your choices and how you show up in the world. In this course, Professor Michael Edwards guides you through the foundations of self-knowledge, helping you understand the difference between seeing yourself clearly and simply collecting opinions about yourself.

You will explore your core identity by examining the values that drive your decisions, the beliefs and assumptions that filter your thinking, and the emotional triggers that influence your reactions. The course also helps you recognize patterns in behavior, habits, and automatic responses so you can interrupt unhelpful cycles and build better ones. These lessons support Personal Development by giving you a clearer picture of what is working, what is not, and why.

As you move into strengths, limits, and social self-awareness, you will learn how to identify your strengths without overestimating them, understand your growth edges, and receive feedback without defensiveness. You will also see how others may experience you under stress and pressure, which is essential for better communication, leadership, and decision-making. With practical reflection practices and a personalized self-awareness plan, you will leave the course with tools you can use immediately and a mindset that helps you make wiser choices, relate more effectively, and grow with greater confidence.

Course Lessons

Full lesson breakdown

Lessons are organized by topic area and each includes descriptive copy for search visibility and student clarity.

Foundations

2 lessons

This lesson defines self-awareness as the ability to accurately notice what you feel, think, value, and do, and how those inner patterns affect your decisions. The focus is on understanding the concep…

Lesson 2: The Two Sides of Self-Awareness

18 min
This lesson introduces the two sides of self-awareness: internal self-awareness , which is understanding your own values, emotions, motives, and patterns, and external self-awareness , which is unders…

Core Identity

2 lessons

Lesson 3: Values: What Drives Your Choices

20 min
Values are the standards you use to judge what matters most. In this lesson, Professor Michael Edwards shows how values influence everyday choices, from how you spend time to how you handle pressure, …

Lesson 4: Beliefs, Assumptions, and Mental Filters

20 min
Beliefs, assumptions, and mental filters shape how we interpret what happens to us. In this lesson, you will learn how these hidden patterns influence judgment, stress, and decision-making without you…

Emotional Awareness

2 lessons

Lesson 5: Recognizing Emotional Triggers

18 min
Emotional triggers are the situations, words, people, or memories that quickly intensify our feelings. In this lesson, Professor Michael Edwards helps learners notice how triggers show up in the body,…

Lesson 6: Naming Emotions with More Precision

18 min
This lesson helps learners move from vague emotional labels like good , bad , or stressed to more precise emotional language. Naming emotions accurately improves self-awareness because it clarifies wh…

Behavior and Habits

2 lessons

Lesson 7: Tracking Patterns in Behavior

20 min
This lesson shows how to track patterns in behavior so you can make more intentional decisions. You will learn how habits form, how to notice recurring triggers and outcomes, and how to separate isola…

Lesson 8: Habits, Defaults, and Automatic Reactions

20 min
This lesson explains how habits, defaults, and automatic reactions shape everyday decisions before conscious thought has a chance to step in. Students learn how repeated cues become reliable behaviora…

Strengths and Limits

2 lessons

Lesson 9: Identifying Strengths Without Inflating Them

18 min
This lesson helps learners identify real strengths without drifting into exaggeration, defensiveness, or self-promotion. Students will learn how to spot evidence of competence, distinguish strengths f…

Lesson 10: Understanding Weaknesses and Growth Edges

18 min
This lesson helps learners identify personal weaknesses and growth edges without turning self-awareness into self-criticism. It explains how limits show up in decision-making, how to tell the differen…

Social Self-Awareness

2 lessons

Lesson 11: How Other People Experience You

20 min
Other people do not experience you the way you experience yourself. In social settings, they notice your tone, timing, facial expressions, listening habits, and how you handle tension far more than yo…

Lesson 12: Feedback Without Defensiveness

20 min
This lesson shows how to receive feedback without becoming defensive, shutting down, or overexplaining. You will learn a simple pause-and-process method for separating the message from your first emot…

Pressure and Performance

2 lessons

Lesson 13: Self-Awareness Under Stress

20 min
Stress changes how we see ourselves. Under pressure, even capable people can become reactive, narrow-minded, or unusually certain of the wrong thing. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to notice your ow…

Lesson 14: Decision-Making with Better Self-Knowledge

20 min
Decision-making gets harder under pressure because emotions, habits, and assumptions move faster than reflection. In this lesson, learners see how better self-knowledge improves choices in high-stakes…

Daily Practice

2 lessons

Lesson 15: Reflection Practices That Actually Stick

18 min
This lesson focuses on making reflection a repeatable daily habit instead of an occasional insight exercise. Professor Michael Edwards shows how to choose simple practices that fit real schedules, low…

Lesson 16: Building a Personal Self-Awareness Plan

22 min
In this lesson, you will turn self-awareness from an idea into a repeatable daily practice. Professor Michael Edwards shows how to build a simple personal plan that fits real life: a few triggers to w…
About Your Instructor
Professor Michael Edwards

Professor Michael Edwards

Professor Michael Edwards guides this AI-built Virversity course with a clear, practical teaching style.