“Self-awareness is the capacity to take a reality check of your life without any judgement of it being right or wrong, good or bad.” – Debbie Ford.
Self-awareness is the ability to grasp objectively one’s own emotions, which form character, behavior, and ultimately a lifestyle. Are there parts of your own character and even life that you fail to grasp or struggle to understand? Self-awareness may be the key to understanding patterns in your own behavior and working on changing these patterns in order to achieve the desired end goals. If you wish to learn more about me, visit my official website or follow me on Instagram for amazing posts full of life and inspiration.
In this article, I will discuss five simple ways to develop self-awareness, beginner’s guide –
- Learn a New Skill
Learning a new skill throws us out of our comfort zone and forces us to think in novel ways; it’s akin to a child who has to develop problem solving skills because the child has never encountered this obstacle. Thus, learning a new language, how to play an instrument or starting to paint can help us step outside of our daily routine, where we are on a sort of autopilot as adults, and become more self-aware.
- Practice Meditation
Practice mediation, which is the simple act of keeping your attention focused on your breath and perhaps repeating some mantra, like the notorious example “om.” When your mind starts to wander, gently return your attention to your breathing and your mantra. Specifically, as pertinent to self-awareness, mediation is one of the most powerful ways to calm your thoughts and realize that you are not your thoughts. Often, we lack self-awareness because we are too engrossed in our thoughts and not cognizant that we don’t have to grapple with whatever our mind throws at us.
- Start a Thought Diary
Record your emotional experiences throughout the day or at the end of the day if your work scheduled is jam packed. This will help you to objectively analyze a situation, i.e., go on a fact finding mission, to understand if your reaction to the events that took out of place were out of place or were justified. In effect, this helps us to eliminate or at least reduce self-serving bias. On this journey to be self-aware, leave opinions out of the thought diary – this is not an opinion piece – but rather focus on the data and the facts.
- Put on Paper Your Goals and Keep Tabs on the Development Stages:
Perhaps the most ideal approaches to build mindfulness is to write down your end goal and keep tabs on your development. This enables us to objectively assess whether our judgment at the time was sound or whether the outcome was the result of something else like luck. In fact, Warren Buffet is known for diligently noting the reasons for his investment in order to evaluate at a later date whether the success of the investment was due to sound logic or plain luck.
- Request Feedback From Friends, Family and Loved Ones:
Another powerful way to build self-awareness is to ask for feedback; of course, be cautious to make sure that the feedback you receive is from a trusted source such as friends and family. With feedback, you can gain insight into how others perceive you and what you were not aware of and overlooked about yourself.
The road to developing self-awareness is a long one but one worthy of the investment as each crossed milestone serves as a building block for self-improvement. We want to build a sustainable lifestyle where we are able to objectively view our own emotions and assess whether or not they were out of place with the facts at hand. The good news – all the answers you need are inside of you, you only have to be quiet enough to hear them!