4 ways to increase Self-awareness

As per the scientific definition of Self-awareness by Alain Morin, Self-awareness represents the capacity of becoming the object of one’s own attention. Let’s make this definition little simple, Self-awareness means having a profound understanding of one’s strengths, weakness, emotions, drives and needs. Which also means, Self-awareness is your potential to see yourself clearly through self-analysis. That’s the reason Daniel Goleman, author of the book Emotional Intelligence described self-awareness as the first ingredient of emotional intelligence.

How does a person with a high degree of self-awareness look like! They understand how their emotions and feelings affect them, their relationship and the people around them, their work-life performance. After reading this, you will surely think I understand all my emotions and feelings! But the truth is most of us, including me, think we know ourselves very well and this thin confidence is absolutely baseless¹. It is also proven in many research that our self-assessment system is having many flaws to assess the reality of life as it is.

Throughout our life, we are being carried by our instincts, reactions, everyday patterns and habits. We don’t really need to understand each and everything of these. It’s nearly impossible. Most of our reactions, instincts, everyday patterns and habits remain unaware to us and they are in of no control. The messed up part arises when all these factors start to control us. For example, sometimes our eating habits start to get unhealthy without our awareness. As a result, after a few years, we start to see negative impacts on our health. Whereas a person with self-awareness get the early signs of negative impacts of unhealthy eating habits and can stop it before it gets worse.

How self-aware you are!

1. People with a higher level of awareness, able to make their own evaluation more realistically.
2. They are able to deliver their speaking accurately and openly.
3. Acceptance of own failure.
4. Humble guys.
5. Good self-deprecated sense of humour.
6. Absolutely comfortable to talk about own limitations. They also don’t take their limitations as a threat to failure, rather they take it as constructive criticism.
7. Self-confident.
8. Does not hesitate to ask for help when needed.²
9. Driven by own set of Values.

Benefits of Self-awareness

1. Improves better decision-making skills.
2. Enhances communication skills.
3. Strengthen the relationship.
4. Increases the level of Emotional Intelligence.
5. Helps us to improve our acceptance level.
6. It makes us better at our workplace and enhances our work-related wellbeing.
7. Help us to develop a healthy perspective to look at life.
8. Enhances self-esteem and self-confidence.
9. Improves leadership competency.

How to increase your self-awareness

#1. Mindfulness

Mindfulness means simply noticing what we are thinking, feeling and doing without any judgement or reaction. In other words, be present at the very moment and pay attention to what is going on in your brain, body and surroundings with full acceptance.

Meditation is not similar to mindfulness but one of the important part of Mindfulness. Practising meditation helps us to be less distracted so we could focus more on ourselves. As a result, you can focus on everyday life with less distraction. Ellen Langer, author of book Mindfulness provides a broader definition of mindfulness. She says, “The process of actively noticing new things, relinquishing preconceived mindset and then acting on our new observations” After all, to get better thought clarity and better acceptance is the ultimate goal.

#2. Solution orientated approach

We all have problems and we seek the solutions for them as well. The solution-oriented approach helps us to think less but understand more about the problem areas of life. This approach was first developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg as Solution Focused Brief Therapy. However, This approach was developed for married couples but later on, it was used to get good results to treat depression, stress and crisis management.

Instead of getting stuck at the problem, develop solution-oriented thinking. For example, at your work, your boss is always looking for solutions from the team. As a result, you all start to look, rather develop a solution approach which makes you more aware of your problem areas. In conclusion, develop a solution-oriented approach by understanding the problems.

#3. Write a daily journal

Write down your feelings and thoughts daily. This will help you to understand your thoughts and feelings clearly. Also, by writing, we are able to focus forcefully towards our scattered thoughts and be able to navigate them on the paper.

This simple way of writing a journal helps you to sort out your ruminating thoughts. Gives you more clarity about your feelings and thoughts. Above all, keep your journal simple and clear.

#4. Ask your loved ones for honest feedback

Self-awareness is internal as well as an external process. Asking your loved ones, what they think about you helps you to understand what others think about you. In fact, others have a different and better perspective about us. Asking our loved ones is much safer, as they know you very well. It will also enrich the trust within the relationship and can help us to gain more awareness.

This approach also needs a great level of acceptance. For instance, if your close friend comes up with horrible but honest feedback, there are chances you might not able to digest it. Because we all have some sort of grey shade and we kind of don’t accept it until we realise it. After listening to every feedback write it down in the journal. Work on the negative feedback with mindfulness.

In conclusion, self-awareness is a life long journey. Self-Acceptance of our flaws is vital in all the process of awareness. With the help of above-described ways we all can be on the path of awareness and that is also enough.

Footnotes

1. Book Insight by Tasha Eurich.
2. HBR book series on Emotional Intelligence.