What is self- awareness?
Self-awareness is having a clear vision/picture of who you are as an individual and knowing what direction you are headed in life. It is recognizing your strengths, weaknesses and understanding your emotions and triggers. Understanding our emotions is what will effectively transform our emotional responses during stressful times.
Key areas to look at are personal values, personality, emotions, needs, and habits. Defining our core values gives us purpose in life. When our values are not defined, we end up going with the flow and drifting along in life; thus, causing us to make choices based on social pressures instead of our internal being. When we are certain of our core values, decision making becomes much simpler and we are able to tackle difficult questions such as “Does this choice contradict my core values?” Living life then becomes much more purposeful and wholesome when we have direction and are firm on our values.
In romantic relationships it shows up when we react to the whims of our partner. We use our uncertainty and confusion to justify our partner’s bad behavior despite knowing that we deserve better. By knowing and being able to identify what’s important for you in your love relationships, you are then able to spend time enjoying rather than batting and question it.
I strongly advise you to take 5-10 minutes each day to pause and reflect on your values. By taking a couple of minutes a day to reflect you are bettering your results at finding true love.
Begin your journey to self-awareness by being able to answer the following questions:
Who am I when I’m at my best?
What are my personal characteristics and strengths when I’m most engaged in life and inspired?
Who has had the greatest influence on me and what are their positive characteristics?
What do I love about myself?
What am I passionate about?
Do I want to have children? If yes, how many? How do I want to raise them?
How do I deal with money?
Once you can answer these questions, review the answers and choose the value(s) from each one. For instance, if “abundance, integrity, wellness, fun, personal and spiritual growth” are the answers to, “Who am I when I’m at my best?” then these may be some of your core values.
Once you can identify your core values then you are able to figure out exactly what kind of partner you’ll need in order to form a healthy union.
Shared values are extremely important in determining the success rate of the relationship. While you might have shared interests, you will stumble upon roadblocks when it comes to making decisions on marriage, religion, children, and careers if you don’t have the same values.
It is critical to get to know yourself before making the decision to enter a relationship. Once your values, emotional needs, and love patterns are figured out then the mission of finding true love becomes possible. At the end of the day, shared values are what count the most.