5 Ways to Achieve Self Awareness
Firstly, What is Self Awareness?
Self Awareness is the conscious knowledge of one's own character and feelings.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman has proposed a more popular definition of self-awareness in his best-selling book “Emotional Intelligence”, as “knowing one’s internal states, preference, resources and intuitions”.
This definition places more emphasis on the ability to monitor our inner world, our thoughts and emotions as they arise. Source
If you are self-aware, it is easier for you to understand other people and detect how they perceive you in return.
So, Why is Important?
You will be able to understand other people and detect how they perceive you in return.
Self-awareness is the key cornerstone to emotional intelligence, according to Daniel Goleman. The ability to monitor our emotions and thoughts from moment to moment is key to understanding ourselves better, being at peace with who we are and proactively managing our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours.
People who are self-aware tend to have a better outlook on life and are more compassionate with or towards others.
Your own thoughts and interpretation will begin to change as you become more self-aware. Many people assume that they have a healthy sense of self-awareness, but it is best to look at a relative scale to see where you fall on it compared to others.
Being aware creates an opportunity to make changes in one's behaviour and beliefs.
How Can You be More Self Aware?
Below are some of the ways that I have learnt and found out to be helpful in my journey toward better self-awareness.
- Learn more about your personality type
Take personality tests, read books around personality types. All those personality types quizzes you see online? Go try one out an maybe learn more about yourself! I want you to fully understand how you are like as a person.
And of course, you have to accept what you have and what you are, be grateful for everything you have in life and how you are.
- Practice Mindfulness
Mindfulness is the key to self-awareness.
Through mindfulness practice, you will be more present with yourself so that you can “be there” to observe what’s going on inside and around you. It is not about sitting cross-legged or suppressing your thoughts. It is about paying attention to your inner state as they arise.
By practising Mindfulness, you will be able to be more at the moment and more self-aware.
You can practice mindfulness at any time you want, through mindful listening, mindful eating or walking.
- Keep A Journal
You can write about anything in your journal, even if it is not related to your goals. Recording your thoughts on paper helps to relieve your mind of those ideas, and clears it up to make space for new information and ideas.
Use some time every night to write a paragraph of whatever you feel like writing in that journal before you go to bed. Write about your thoughts, feelings, successes and even failures.
This would then make you feel more self-aware. As you reflect, think about how your day went, what can be improved about yourself, how you react to certain things and certain experiences which you are thankful for.
This would then make you feel more self-aware. As you reflect, think about how your day went, what can be improved about yourself, how you react to certain things and certain experiences which you are thankful for.
- Ask for Constructive Feedback
The Constructive feedback will then help you to improve yourself. Whether at work or at school it would be important to ask your mutual friends for constructive feedback. You can also ask for constructive feedback after the presentation of some activity which requires you to put yourself out there.
A lot of the time we do not take feedback as seriously as we should, but if it is given properly, it can really benefit you. You're getting that outside perspective on your actions, and that may point something out to you that you had no idea you were doing.
- Gain different perspectives
Similar to the point above, ask for feedback. Sometimes we can be too afraid to ask what others think of us – yes sometimes the feedback may be biased or even dishonest but you will be able to differentiate them. It is important to get the feedback of people to further improve yourself. To see the points you can't see but others can.
Research has shown conducting 360-degree feedback in the workplace is a useful tool to improve managers’ self-awareness. Of course, It is helpful to gain a different perspective to see a fuller picture of ourselves.
Hope this helps you! What else can I help you with today? Want to learn new things? or if you just want to read more articles. Check out more of my blog here! :D
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