Self-Awareness – The Key to Unlocking Your Best Life
What is Self-Awareness?
Self-awareness is knowledge of yourself. It’s having an understanding of your habits, likes, dislikes, values, needs, and the unique way you view the world. It’s knowing what you want in life and why and having an understanding of your emotional responses.
Having self-awareness doesn’t mean you eliminate all of life’s challenges, but it gives you an accurate starting point and allows you to develop a plan for solutions.
I believe increasing self-awareness should be a priority in everyone’s lives. The power it has to transform you level of success and happiness is beyond measure. So many of the difficulties and dissatisfaction we experience in our lives could be rectified by being more conscious of who we are, what we desire and value, and why we do and don’t do the things that we do. So many people are just going through their lives on autopilot not realizing the power they have to create change. It breaks my heart. It is a mission of mine to help as many people as I can increase their level of self-awareness as the first step to realizing their potential and their best life.
Self-awareness takes time to develop, but the benefits are well worth the effort, I promise you.
Methods for Developing Greater Self-Awareness
Journaling
Journaling is the most powerful tool for learning about yourself. Spend 10-15 minutes each day reflecting on your life. List the meaningful things that happened that day. Include your challenges and what you think caused them. Ask yourself:
- What went well today?
- What went poorly today?
- What changes do you want to make moving forward based on what you experienced and learned today?
- How will you make those changes?
Look at Your Past and Current Relationships
Why did your past relationships fall apart? Review your romantic and platonic relationships that didn’t work out. Why did they fail?
Now, consider your current relationships. What challenges do they face? What positives and negatives do you bring to each relationship? What qualities do you like in a friend or partner? What qualities do you avoid? Why?
What are your biggest regrets?
Where do you think you made poor decisions in your lifetime? Why did you choose what you chose? Why do even feel that these are regrets in the first place? What changes would you make if you could go back in time?
What challenges in your life are constant?
Most of us have a struggle that persists. It might be our health, finances, loneliness, depression, or a overall dissatisfaction with life.
The issues that persist in your life are important to understand. You have the power to change nearly anything, so why does that one challenge in your life seem to persist?
Meditation
Meditation gives you the opportunity to observe your thoughts without judgement. You can learn a lot about yourself by the thoughts that pop up in your mind. Meditation allows you to learn how to create space between your thoughts and your emotions and be more mindful.
Step Back for a Different Perspective
Imagine you were a fly on the wall of your life. What would you think? What advice would you have for yourself? What does the way you spend your time say about you?
Look at How You Deal with Stress
How do you handle stress? Do you eat, drink alcohol, become grumpy, watch Netflix? How do you treat others when you’re stressed? What challenges have you caused for yourself by dealing with stress in an unproductive way?
Get Feedback from Your Friends
Ask your friends to be brutally honest and describe you. Ask them to list your strengths and weaknesses. It is easy for us to overlook our own most obvious traits.
Get Clear on Your Goals, Values, and Priorities
What do you want to accomplish? What life do you want to live? What is important to you? If you were living your perfect life, what would your day look like? When looking at your goals be sure you know WHY you want to achieve that and how does it align with what you value and what’s truly important to you.
Self-awareness is one of the most important things you can possess. The key to enhancing your life is grounded in self-awareness. Self-awareness is important to setting goals and creating the life you would most enjoy. If you don’t have a full understanding of what you want and WHY you want it you will be spending your life chasing the wrong things.
Without self-awareness, you’ll continue to repeat detrimental patterns for the rest of your life.
Join me in the Realizing Purpose Facebook Group for a FREE 5 Day Mini Course on Self-Awareness June 3rd to 7th, 2019.
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