When you finally decide to be responsible for your life’s actions and intend to improve for the better, self awareness is your go-to plan.
Self awareness is the bridge between the person you are now, and the person you’d love to grow into. This bridge is the shortcut to becoming a better you.
Daniel Goleman says: self awareness is the ability to monitor your inner self.
Being aware of your inner self is the foundation of productivity.
If you want to feel good about the things you indulge in, you have to have a reason for doing these things.
Being mindful of your actions and your environment does the trick.
If you’re self aware, you have a few or all of the following characteristics:
- You’ve got valid reasons for every action you take or every decision you make that concerns your life.
- You acknowledge your strengths and use them to their full potential. You also acknowledge your weaknesses and find ways to improve on them.
- You’re receptive of other people’s beliefs and perceptions of life.
- You accept your failures without looking for who/what to blame.
- You take full responsibility for your feelings, thoughts, and actions.
75% of adults all over the world claim to have mastered the skill of being self aware, but research on psychology says barely half of this population possess the characteristics of a person who is self aware.
So, How Do You Become Self Aware?
1. Respect Other People’s Beliefs.
According to human psychology, a person’s belief is their comfort zone – humans prefer their own beliefs to the belief of others and oftentimes, they do not try to understand or reason with the opinion of the other people they come in contact with.
As someone who wants to become self aware, you need to become more open minded and receptive to other people’s views on various topics.
2.Take Responsibility.
When unfavourable situations occur, Every 6 out of 10 people would prefer to blame other people or circumstances surrounding the occurrence of the event.
Shifting blames means refusing to take responsibility for your actions and the consequences that follow.
A self aware person chooses to take responsibility for their shortcomings and find ways to do better.
3. Embrace Solitude.
Noise has become a part of our lives – from our own thoughts to the noisy roads, construction sites, and the never ending discussions on social media; noise has become something to contend with daily.
You might not know it, but constant noises can have negative effects on your mental health. To avoid this, take out more time to be alone with your thoughts.
Eliminate all distractions, music inclusive.
Getting comfortable with silence helps to get your creative juices flowing. It also helps your brain to process thoughts that are wandering around in your subconscious and transport them into your conscious mind.
Mindfulness practices works perfectly for this exercise. You don’t have to always carry out your daily chores with music in the background too. Get comfortable with silence!
4.Journal & Reflect
Although this seems like a difficult habit to cultivate, keeping a daily journal helps you to process your thoughts in an organised manner. It helps you to understand your behaviours and reactions towards daily events in a better way.
You can be creative with your journal – you can use it to record events worth remembering or studying your behavioural patterns.
You can also use it to set goals and create to-do lists and track your progress on each task/goal, so you’d know when to improve.
5.Set Realistic Goals.
Even if you can lie to everyone around you, there’s one person you can’t lie to – yourself.
The consequence of setting unrealistic goals is that when you can’t reach your goal before the deadline, you might start to lose hope and confidence in yourself and your abilities to crush your goals.
Start small by setting attainable goals for yourself and scale from there. Don’t forget to celebrate your little wins as you go!
Becoming self aware has lots of advantages that can improve your personality and your productivity. Here are 6 things you stand to gain from becoming self aware:
Here’s How Self Awareness Can Improve Your Productivity:
- You become a better person:
By understanding your strengths and weaknesses, you would know the best ways to use them to your advantage in becoming a better version of yourself.
- Self awareness gives you a deep meaning of your purpose in life; hence it increases your level of focus and discipline towards achieving your goals.
- Being self aware saves you time because you’re fully aware of what you want out of life at every point in time. You also get to know when something you’re doing is a waste of your time because it is irrelevant towards achieving your long term goals.
- By listening to yourself more and getting to understand your behavioural patterns and actions, you automatically understand the behaviours and actions of the people around you too, hence making teamwork easier and more fruitful.
- You also become a better leader when you become more receptive of other people’s perspectives to certain issues.
- When you set and achieve your goals, you become confident and happier, and susceptible to crossing more milestones that you set for yourself.
Aziz Acharki – Unsplash
Know Thyself.
If you want to be a better leader, achiever, and a person with an overall improved personality, go ahead and start your journey to becoming en sync with your inner self.
These self evaluation questions could help:
- When am I at my best?
- What kind of person do I want to be in the nearest future?
- Which activities am I doing when it feels like time flies by?
- What is working well in my life and work today?
- Which actions, if taken, would make me proud of myself, regardless of the outcome?
- When negative thoughts arise, how do I deal with them?
- How do I stay grounded when I feel overwhelmed?
- What motivates me to make progress?
You don’t have to give the perfect answer right away, but knowing the answers to these questions can help you strengthen your self awareness skills.