Self-Awareness
What is Self Awareness?
Self-awareness involves clearly understanding your process. Your process can be described as – your thoughts and beliefs, understanding your motivations, emotions, strengths and weaknesses, and why you behave in certain ways. Self-awareness is the often seen as the foundation of personal growth and success.
Being self-aware helps you gain insight into l your emotions, thoughts and behaviour Having self-awareness gives you choice and the opportunity to make changes (or not) with respect to your behaviours and beliefs. Becoming aware of your beliefs and behaviours is likely to assist you act in a way that is more consistent with what you actually want. Instead of reacting to events and emotions, you can learn to choose your desired response which will result in greater self-confidence and assertiveness.
How can Self-Awareness help you?
Self-awareness is really just about being aware of who you are and knowing yourself better. By becoming self-aware, you start to understand your strengths and limitations, thus opening up greater opportunities and creating more honest and genuine relationships. Being self-aware lets you see the effects of your thoughts and emotions. It also allows you to take more ownership of your emotions, behaviours and beliefs and ultimately make the changes you desire in your life.
This might help if you:
- Want to better understand yourself
- Don’t understand why people in certain ways to you
- Feel like you’re different or don’t fit in
- Want to increase your self-confidence
- Have difficulty making a decision
- Keep making “bad” choices
- Want to be kinder to yourself and/or others
Remember, self-improvement is impossible without insight.
Emotional Awareness
Emotional awareness involves being able to recognise your emotions and their effects of your emotions. If you are emotionally aware you will have the ability to:
- Know what emotions you are feeling and why you are feeling this way
- Understand the link between emotions, thoughts and actions
- Understand how your feelings affect your performance
- Ensure your feelings and actions match your particular values
Sometimes we mask our emotions instead of listening to them. When you are aware of your values, you can understand why you have an emotional reaction to a particular event or person. Being aware of your own emotions, and how these affect your behaviour, is the key to effective interaction with others. But more importantly, it can be vital to your health and well-being.
Self-Assessment
Understanding your emotions, thoughts and behaviours requires a good understanding of your personal strengths, weaknesses, inner resources and importantly, your limits. It can be very difficult to acknowledge any personal weaknesses, especially in our competitive world, but it is crucial for self-awareness, emotional intelligence, personal growth and overall well-being.
People who are accomplished at self-assessment can usually laugh at themselves and are aware of their shortcomings. They are often very reflective, open to feedback and learn from experience. Importantly, they start to recognise and value their own strengths.
Self Confidence
The result of true self-awareness is self-confidence, understanding your own value which leads to self-worth, and becoming less reliant on others for validation.
People with good self-confidence are:
- Able to present themselves well
- True to themselves and their values
- Prepared to voice unpopular opinions, rather than always ‘go with the flow’.
- Decisive and able to make good decisions that match their own values.
The more confident we are in our values and actions, the better we are at making appropriate decisions and performing to our optimum.
What next?
Let’s be honest – we’re stuck with ourselves for the rest of our lives, so we might as well get to know who we truly are. Self-awareness isn’t a magic bullet, but it is step one. Knowing yourself well won’t fix all your problems, but it is the first step to helping you achieve more authenticy in your life.
Self-awareness can’t be achieved alone. It takes more than reading a few self help books.