Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is the habit of paying attention to the quiet parts of your brain.  Those quiet parts do a lot of work that you are not aware of.  Think of it as a team that has headquarters in your head.    Over there in the corner office, your awareness is playing executive.   Making executive decisions.  Pretending that your awareness is in control. 

Other parts of your brain are doing their own jobs.  Sometimes they are working on jobs you assigned them.  Sometimes they are working on other jobs.  Sometimes a module may be working at cross-purposes to the intentions your language channel claims to have endorsed.  Sometimes a module may be anticipating problems with those intentions: problems with the details or problems with the expected results. 

Your executive awareness can stay in the corner office and ignore the problems until tit gets too big to ignore. 

Or you can pay attention to those quiet parts of your brain.  Then you can:

Get their advice.
Find out what they are working on.
Adjust your executive plans to take account of their concerns.
Guide their projects to fit better with your long-term goals.