Self-awareness is knowing:
- How are we different from other people. What is our dominant emotional pattern or in other words, how do we feel and respond emotionally in a different situation.
- What restores us and helps us to bounce back after a rough situation.
Self-awareness is knowing how you behave in a certain situation, what motivates you, what can trigger certain feelings and why you feel those emotions. It’s understanding about how and why we react to social situations and the actions of people around us.
What’s good about self-awareness
Self-regulation – Knowing how we feel and what can trigger a negative emotion will help us to better control our emotions without behaving in a manner that would cause us to regret or feel embarrassed.
- Self-Esteem – Knowing our character strengths and using our strengths in every situation will help to build self-esteem as we will probably perform better at these tasks. Knowing our weakness helps us to work around those weakness and change habits that don’t work for us.
- Self-love –When we can love and accept ourselves for who we are, often we will also be more accepting of other people. Self-love doesn’t always mean pampering ourself with the best that life can bring. Actually, self-love can happen even if we don’t have all the trappings of a comfortable life. Self-love is about knowing your value as a person, the goodness that is in you and not relying on what the world says about you to feel good about yourself. Everyone has goodness and virtues in them. If you are not sure what these are, look at character strength and check out what an awesome person you are.
- Social interaction – when we understand that our thoughts and needs are different from other people, we learn to be more assertive in situations that do not fit in with our believes and goals. We also learn to understand and accept other people better.
How do we have better self-awareness
Self-reflection is the way of thinking deeply about our inner thoughts, values and belief which will help us to understand ourself better. There are two approaches
Solution focused reflection – which is reflecting on what we want and how best to achieve those goals
Self-focused approach – which is trying to understand and diffuse negative emotions, thinking and reactions.
- Set aside time – most of us go from one activity to another without stopping to think about why we behave in a particular way. Set aside some time, on your way to school or work or even in the shower, make it a point to do some self-reflection everyday.
- Understand our emotions – Think about a situation that got you emotional or one where you reacted in a way that you didn’t like. Name and label the emotion. Here’s more information about naming emotions
- Understand why you behave in a certain way. Think about what came into your mind before you acted in a certain way. Ask yourself why do you think this way.
- Understand your Character strength
- What do you really want and how do you go about achieving those goals.
- Ask a trusted friend for feedback about yourself. Often we have blinds-spot about our self and no amount of introspection is going to help. Getting a trusted friend who loves us and only wants the best for us can give us a better picture of who we are.
When we understand ourselves, we can manage our emotions better and behave in a way that is true to who we are. Self-awareness also means knowing what really makes us happy and what we really want and need in life. When we know what are our strengths and limitations are, we are more able to achieve realistic goals in life.
