In the light of calm and steady self awareness, inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
The ability to be self-aware is one of the most important aspects of living from the authenticity within you. It is the doorway that leads to what you know is true for you. It is the tool you can use to observe your emotions and hear the inner voice that is your most reliable guidance for acting in alignment with your essence.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman defines self-awareness as “knowing one’s internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions.” In order for this knowing to occur, you must monitor your thoughts and emotions in a non-judgmental, open-hearted way as you go through your daily life.
How Do You Become Self-Aware?
When you are self-aware, you are able to discern your heart-based truth and separate from mentally conditioned responses that masquerade as your genuine truth. It requires that you pause, enter into inner silence, and connect deeply with your honest emotions in order to know the difference.
In that reflective state, you can hear what is right for you almost as inner affirmations that echo your deepest truth.
7 Steps to Self-Awareness
- Make time each day to connect with yourself through journaling, meditation or quiet time away from distractions.
- Make it a practice to be mindful of how you walk, talk, and listen to yourself and others.
- Admit you have blind spots about your behaviours. Ask others for feedback and filter it through your own self-knowledge. What is true for you?
- Be aware of being pulled into distractive behaviours that help you avoid deeply connecting with your emotions and feelings. (Do you eat or drink alcohol rather than allow your feelings about an uncomfortable situation to surface?)
- Respect your emotions and sensitivities about life experiences and circumstances. Step away from judgment about them.
- Acknowledge your own negative behaviours when they surface rather than justify them or making them be who you are.
- Be self-compassionate and self-accepting. Know that your emotions and associated behaviours are momentary responses to a present event and not all of who you are.
How Self-Awareness Transforms:
As you become self-aware and connect to your emotions and what triggers them:
- you are much more capable of managing your behaviours and of changing beliefs that no longer serve you
- you remember your own emotional and reactive responses and thus tend to have more awareness of and compassion toward others’ similar behaviours.
- you are less judgmental of self and others (you can accept all just as it is without the need to change it)
- you have a more positive life view that builds healthier relationships
- you can make decisions more easily and with less stress because being aligned with your truth brings instant clarity.
Self-awareness makes it possible to recognise that all our feelings and responses in life are just what they are – responses and feelings. There is no judgment and there is no distracting ourselves from them by numbing out with alcohol or using other destructive behaviours.
When you become intimately acquainted with your feelings in a genuine and fully honest way, you can then choose to act more confidently in accordance with that self-understanding even if it feels a bit scary or vulnerable for you.
Self-awareness brings you home to who you truly are and increasingly connects you to your values, your imperfections as well as your gifts. You embrace all of you and live in harmony with all that you are. The authenticity of your inner life flows out to the world where you can make a difference through your unique and powerful presence.
Self-Awareness in the cornerstone of authenticity~ unknown
