Self Awareness is having a clear perception of your personality, including strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, beliefs, motivation, and emotions. Self Awareness allows you to understand other people, how they perceive you, your attitude and your responses to them in the moment.
Self awareness is the first step in creating what you want and mastering your life. Where you focus your attention, your emotions, reactions, personality and behavior determine where you go in life. Having self awareness allows you to see where your thoughts and emotions are taking you. It also allows you to take control of your emotions, behavior, and personality so you can make changes you want. Until you are aware in the moment of your thoughts, emotions, words, and behavior, you will have difficulty making changes in the direction of your life. Image Source
5 Ways to Cultivate Self-Awareness
Create some space for yourself: When you are in a dark room without windows, it is fairly difficult to see things clearly. The space you create for yourself is that crack on the wall where you allow light to come through. Leave yourself some time and space every day – perhaps first thing in the morning or half an hour before sleep when you stay away from the digital distractions and spend some time with yourself, reading, writing, meditating, and connecting with yourself.
Practice mindfulness: Mindfulness is the key to self-awareness. Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally”. Through mindfulness practice, you will be more present with yourself so that you can “be there” to observe what’s going on inside and around you. It is not about sitting cross-legged or suppressing your thoughts. It is about paying attention to your inner state as they arise. You can practice mindfulness at any time you want, through mindful listening, mindful eating or walking.
Keep a journal: Writing not only helps us process our thoughts but also makes us feel connected and at peace with ourselves. Writing can also create more headspace as you let your thoughts flow out onto paper. Research shows that writing down things we are grateful for or even things we are struggling with helps increase happiness and satisfaction. You can also use the journal to record your inner state. Try this at home –choose a half day on a weekend, pay close attention to your inner world – what you are feeling, what you are saying to yourself, and make a note of what you observe every hour. You may be surprised about what you write down!
Practice being a good listener: Listening is not the same as hearing. Listening is about being present and paying attention to other people’s emotions, body movement and language. It is about showing empathy and understanding without constantly evaluating or judging. When you become a good listener, you will also be better at listening to your own inner voice and become the best friend of yourself.
Gain different perspectives: Ask for feedback. Sometimes we can be too afraid to ask what others think of us – yes sometimes the feedback may be biased or even dishonest but you will be able to differentiate them from real, genuine and balanced feedback as you learn more about yourself and others. Research has shown conducting 360 degree feedback in workplace is a useful tool to improve managers’ self-awareness. We all have blind spots, so it is helpful to gain different perspective to see a fuller picture of ourselves.
Ask Yourself Questions: Asking yourself questions is a great way to develop a better understanding of yourself and your actions. When you ask yourself questions, you can start to look at the bigger picture, why you feel a certain way, or why you reacted to something the way you did etc. Questions that you could ask are:
Why do you avoid this certain thing?
What are you trying to achieve?
How are you feeling right now, and how is that affecting you?
How do others perceive you and feel about your actions?
In doing this, you can start to find out things that perhaps you do not even think twice about in day to day life, and this can be a great way to start developing your self-awareness.
As I conclude this blog post, self-awareness is the first step toward designing your lifestyle around whatever it is that you want in life. Its about focusing your awareness on you, ability to notice your feelings, physical sensations, reactions, habits, behavious and your thoughts. Been aware of aspects of yourself just like the way it will be if it were someone observing you and paying attention to your intuition.
The one constant factor in all your endeavors is you; understanding yourself is therefore paramount.
