“A person who knows others is wise. A person who knows themselves is ENLIGHTENED.”

Self-awareness is the foundation of a strong character, giving you the ability to lead with a sense of purpose, authenticity, and openness. Having self-awareness means that you have a sharp realization and a clear perception of your personality, including your strengths and weaknesses, your emotions and motivations, your values and beliefs and it explains your successes and failures. Self-awareness also gives you a better understanding of what you will need most from other people, how to understand others and detect how they will perceive you in return.

Self-awareness is the first step in mastering your life. It's easy to fall for the idea that if you know yourself well enough you'll be able to fix all your problems, but that's not how it works. It's just one step! Our minds are feeble with biases that affect our decisions. Knowing yourself completely and solving every single cognitive bias that you have is impossible. However, you can make impactful changes to your life with continuous practice of being self-aware.

As you develop your self-awareness, you are able to make changes to your thoughts and emotions which is an important factor in achieving success. Where you focus your attention, will determine where you go in life. Here are some simple steps to practice self-awareness:

1)    Be a neutral self-observer

This is the observation of one's own mentality, needs and values. Look at yourself objectively and as you really are. What is your truth? This can be a very difficult process, but this is also a safe place to do it.

2)    Examine your observations

This is the examination of your observations and finding the reasons why these have an impact on you. This is where you will sink into your beliefs and get to the root of them. These have an impact on me because:

3)    Examine your reasons

Next step is to delve a little deeper into the emotional and physical responses that you have to your answers. You are not using judgment, guilt or shame here, but to simply understand the emotional and physical responses you have to your answers. My emotional and physical responses to my reasons are:

4)    Examine your emotional & physical responses

For each emotional and physical response, you will need to decide if they are serving you (and others around you) in a positive way and if you are in control of changing these within yourself. 

Positive responses become your values and you will need to create habits in order to have these a part of your life and feel fulfilled.

Negative responses become a past belief and you will need to create habits that move you away from these. Note that you need to give yourself grace and forgiveness to any negative response you may have had. Things that are based on what you believed were valid before could be an influence from the outside world or the expectations from others.

5)    Commitment

This is the practice of creating thinking patterns that are in harmony with your values, so that what you think, say, and do are all in agreement. You will become stronger because you now act from a place that resonates with what you believe in and have removed the confusion of what “should be done” to what you want!

6)    Practice empowerment

This is the practice of being aware of yourself and of those around you. Extending peace and grace to others, modelling self-awareness as a way of being. Encouraging others to form these healthy habits as well. Additionally, you will need to accept yourself even when old beliefs reoccur and to consciously notice them and to mindfully adjust back to a positive direction and growth.

Self-awareness is a continuous process of self-check-ins. Your values today could be your past beliefs in the future. Life changes and so can your mindset. Take some time each night to write in a journal about your thoughts and feelings, and your successes and failures for the day. It is also helpful to ask for feedback from trusted friends and at work to gain a different perspective you may not be thinking of. All of this will help you grow and move forward in your achievements.

It's important to remember that self-awareness is observations of one's own mentality and emotional responses and not self-absorption and overthinking. Being aware of your values and needs and acting on them can help you improve your life, so what you are doing correlates with what you want!

"Leaders creating the LIGHT for Leaders."