Self-awareness — or, the conscious knowledge of your character, feelings, motives, and desires — is the first step in creating the life that you want to live. When you learn who you are (and who you aren’t), it allows you to more clearly understand what you want out of life (and, perhaps, what you don’t).
The first step in this process is understanding where you currently are, and pairing that with a desire to become better. After all, without a desire to improve yourself, you may find experimenting with self-awareness to be more difficult.
If you already have a desire to ‘be a better you’, you have probably identified something that needs improvement — probably a habit of some kind that has led to a negative outcome. For example, maybe you’re frustrated that you hit the snooze button on your alarm too many times in the morning, which creates a rushed, hectic start to your day, inevitably impeding your productivity.
Making the choice to become more self-aware requires a certain amount of vulnerability. You have to be honest with yourself, and recognize that doing this will require leaving your comfort zone.
In other words, you must unmask your insecurities.
Why Take a Journey of Self-Awareness?
Have you ever felt like you’re wearing a ‘mask’ in public?
Maybe it’s because you are scared of being vulnerable and showing your true self to others. Maybe you don’t feel 100 percent comfortable with who you are. Or maybe you’re afraid you won’t be accepted by others.
Whatever the reason, practicing self-awareness will help you better understand both the good and the bad — and work to improve yourself, which, in turn, helps you build the confidence necessary to remove your metaphorical mask.
When you are self-aware, you can see where your thoughts and emotions are guiding you. It allows you to take control of your actions so you can make the necessary changes to get the outcomes you desire.
Some people may roll their eyes and scoff at those that read self-help books or frequently talk about this topic. However, it reasons that if you are happy and content with yourself, you will live a happier and healthier life.
Additional benefits in practicing self-awareness:
- Can help you become more patient and well-rounded, improving your mental/emotional health.
- Can help with anger management, and learning to control the amount of anger in certain situations.
- Can help one learn to better control their fear, by learning how to face it rather than living with it in the back of their mind.
- Can help individuals to become more confident, by overcoming situations where they will feel pressured or challenged (physically and/or mentally).
- Can help to push through situations against boundaries that might have previously hindered growth.
- Can help to promote self-esteem, and when paired with positive thinking, (the combination) can literally transform lives!
- Can help you become more successful.
In fact, the most lucrative business people and professionals out there never stop learning (and this is not just in continuing education, but in self improvement and personal growth).
A Korn/Ferry International Study found that self-awareness impacts companies’ bottom line. In studying the stock performance of close to 500 publicly traded companies, researchers found that companies with strong financial performance, tend to have employees with higher levels of self-awareness than poorly performing companies.
Ultimately, in practicing self-awareness, you’ll find more purpose. This process will give you something to work towards and to look forward to. Your own personal thoughts and interpretations will begin to change. This change in mental state will also alter your emotions and increase your emotional intelligence, which is an important factor in achieving overall success.
In practicing self-awareness, you can become also become an inspiration to others by trying to achieve more in your own life. Being able to do this for yourself, and motivate others, makes it even more exhilarating.
The Intersection of Self-Awareness and Empathy
I wrote a blog about empathy last month, and through my exploration of that topic, I found self-awareness to be a crucial component to empathy. After all, it’s impossible to empathize with others if you believe that everyone is exactly the same as you.
To better understand and navigate relationships or connections with others, we must first understand ourselves. Self-awareness helps us to see our own biases, which can help keep us from simply projecting our own perspective onto others. By better understanding our own tendencies and patterns, we learn what truly makes us tick.
Daniel Goleman, author of ‘Emotional Intelligence‘, believes that emotional intelligence may even be more important than one’s IQ. I tend to agree. Empathy is technically the “other-awareness” — literally the direct counterpart to self-awareness. It is clear that both self-awareness and empathy are are two of the main pillars of emotional intelligence.
5 Tactics for Improving Self-Awareness
There are many unique ways to improve your self-awareness. Reading books that explain techniques through example are effective.
The following are five more ways to help you begin today:
Meditation. While I’m not personally the most experienced when it comes to meditation, I know people who swear by it for its health benefits. This is an exercise that makes you more aware of your internal world of thoughts and feelings, and can assists oneself to accept these in a non judgemental way. Meditation can help one to observe without reaction, which is a fundamental part of emotional intelligence. I personally, am hoping to adopt meditation into my daily routine more often.
There are some outstanding apps out there that have been recommended to me:
Journaling and Visualizing. Keeping a journal of your daily experiences, and the feelings and emotions that go along with them, will allow you to more easily reflect. It is interesting to see how your values change over time. Further, when you write down your goals and your priorities, you can then weigh them against your actions. When you break down what is important to you on paper, it will helps you see how far you actions differed from your expectations.
By journaling, it helps to recreate your mindfulness of ideas and thoughts that you may not cling onto throughout the day. This process can also help you turn ideas into a step-by-step actionable process. You might quickly realize how important it is to actually visualize what you want to accomplish.
Role Playing. A way to discover more about yourself is to pretend to be someone else. This is not easy to do, but will most certainly provide a different perspective and reveal aspects of yourself, that you often wouldn’t think about.
Psychology and Personality Quizzes. Learning more about your personality, is a key to understanding how your mind works. It also helps to discuss this with others in comparison so you can understand. These will help you categorize some of your personality traits and give you some insight as to how others may see you.
Some resources for these tests/quizzes include:
Ask Those Closest To You. Perhaps my best piece of self-awareness advice came from the book, The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. In this book there was an awesome exercise which best described in this blog post recap called ‘The E-mail that Will Change Your Life”. Essentially, you identify those closest to you, and make yourself vulnerable by requesting feedback (minus the sugar coating). While I do think it is best to do this in person, for the purposes of this exercise, I think doing it by email works. So I tried it out for myself.
I sent this to 33 of the people closest to me, and received quite a bit of feedback. While some chose not to answer (it is an understandably tough request), the answers I did receive were incredibly valuable. Oftentimes, our friends and family can know us better than we know ourselves.
Conclusion
Self-awareness is a difficult thing to “master”. And, in fact, can never truly BE mastered, as the process of practicing self-awareness is a journey, rather than a destination. Self-exploration will never fully end or be considered complete, because, as humans, we’re constantly evolving.
The process of learning and experiencing new things changes us, which is why working on becoming more self-aware is a valuable tool you can utilize for the rest of your life.
