Self Awareness; The Simple Understanding.
Being aware of yourself self awareness areas means that you have a keen understanding of your personality, including your strengths and weaknesses, beliefs and thoughts, and incentives and emotions.
Psychologists Robert Wicklund and Shelly Duval suggest the following:
“When we focus on ourselves, we can compare and evaluate our behaviours with our internal values. We become aware of ourselves as an objective to evaluate ourselves.”
In short: Self-awareness is an approach to self-regulation.
Daniel Goleman, a psychologist, has a more explicit explanation: self-awareness is the understanding of our inner states, resources, preferences, and intuitions.
This explanation emphasizes our ability to track our inner thoughts and emotions the moment they appear. As we see what is happening within ourselves, we accept and recognize things as part of being human instead of punishing ourselves.
Furthermore, self-awareness is much more than a collection of information about ourselves. It is observing our inner state with an open heart. Our minds are adept at containing data about our responses to specific instances, which develop a map of our emotions.
This information generally shapes our minds to respond in a certain way in similar cases. Self-awareness allows us to be aware of these preconceived ideas and mental conditioning.
What makes self awareness important?
Self-awareness is the secret of emotional intelligence. This ability to identify our thoughts and emotions at every moment is the secret to getting to know each other better, feeling good about ourselves, and organizing our feelings, ideas, and actions.
Furthermore, people with self-awareness act instead of responding passively, have healthy psychological health and maintain a positive outlook on life. They live experiences more deeply and are more empathetic to others and themselves.
Many researchers agree that self-awareness is a vital aspect of the success of business leaders.
Why is it so challenging to do self awareness?
The reality is that being self-aware is crucial to learning about our weaknesses. We are generally unaware of what is happening around and within us. Our minds focus on other things instead of what is happening.
For example, our desire to explore, analyze, and recall information that validates our ideas or theories might lead to deception.
Humans are complex and varied. We need to learn about ourselves on many levels to be more self-aware. Our personality traits, values, habits, emotions, and psychological needs that motivate our behaviours are essential areas for self-awareness.
Personality: Humans are diverse and complex. We need to learn more about ourselves to become more self-aware. Personality traits, values, routines, feelings, and the psychological needs that motivate our actions are essential areas for self-awareness.
Values: We each must recognize and prioritize our values. It’s straightforward to lose sight of your priorities on a day-to-day, moment-by-moment basis, for example, if your first concern is “being there for your children” or “your connection with God.”
The problems and opportunities that arise throughout the workday cause us to accumulate more “things to do quickly” than we have time for. Spending too much time on lower-priority activities is simply because very few (if any) are related to what we value most. We likely achieve what we prioritize when we are committed to our values.
Habits: Our habits are the character that we frequently and automatically repeat. We all likely have at least one habit that hinders our effectiveness, even though we would prefer to have the ones that allow us to manage and interact with others effectively.
For instance, if you are a manager who never seeks input from your staff before making decisions, this behaviour may hinder your ability to develop both the commitment to the findings and the decision-making abilities of your staff members.
Needs: Maslow and other scholars have identified several psychological needs that drive our behaviour, including esteem, affection, belongingness, success, self-actualization, power, and control. Knowing which needs influence our behaviours dramatically allows us to understand better how those needs affect our interpersonal relationships.
For instance, many of us have come across people prioritizing status. They are drawn to high-status positions and search for these positions within their organizations. Such people also have a desire for status symbols. In addition to benefits that people with lower social standing are not entitled to, they demand to be treated with respect.
These people occasionally conflict over issues other people see as ambiguous. Needs motivate us, and when they aren’t met, they can lead to stress, conflict, and frustration.
Emotions: One of the five components of emotional intelligence, emotional self-awareness, has recently attracted much attention. Emotional self-awareness is the ability to comprehend your feelings, their causes, and how they affect your ideas and behaviour.
Is it possible to regain the excitement you once felt for your job? Understanding the internal mechanisms involved in handling excitement helps find the answer to that query. It’s more straightforward than it sounds.
For example, a doctor can treat us even if he is not a friend or family because he understands the body’s internal mechanism.
Similarly, someone with high emotional self awareness is more aware of the internal process behind their emotions and can control them.
How we can cultivate self awareness.
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Develop some personal space. Allow yourself to have your own time and freedom every day. It can be when you get up or before going to sleep. This means turning everything off and allowing time to meditate, read, and reflect.
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Practice Mindfulness. This is the secret to becoming more self-conscious. According to Jon Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness is, and I quote, “paying attention in a particular way, for a purpose, at the present moment, without prejudice.” By practising mindfulness, you will learn to live longer in the present moment and allow yourself to see what is happening inside and around you.
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Write a journal. Writing allows us to organize our thoughts and connect with our interior. Numerous studies show that writing our reviews makes us aware of many things we do not see and therefore increases our satisfaction and happiness. Take the habit of writing even on the weekends for a few hours; you will be amazed at the things you discover.
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Master the art of listening. Listening means being attentive to what other people tell us, not only to what they say but to their emotions, language, and body movements. Listening involves empathy and understanding without judging or evaluating, not being prejudiced.
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See things from another perspective. Ask others for their opinions. Studies have shown that accepting the views of others in workplaces increases managers’ self-awareness.
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Check with your friends and ask them to describe you. How can we understand the opinions that others have about us? We must listen to what they tell us and be open to it. Make sure your friends and family do this to help you, not hurt you. Ask them to get your attention when you do something negative and have a repeating pattern of behaviour. For example, if you have a behaviour of not letting other people finish what they are saying and constantly interrupt them, ask your friends and family to inform you when this happens.
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Ask for opinions in your workplace. In addition to your family or friends, you can ask for ideas at work.
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It will take a while to increase your self-awareness and understand yourself better. It may even take a few years, but remember that increasing your self-awareness will improve many areas of your life, especially your interpersonal connections.
Techniques to improve self awareness.
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Please keep an open mind: When you can regulate your emotional world, you can adapt it to the emotions of others. To be a victorious leader, you must be interested in people and everything you can offer them. About new people and everything, they have to offer.
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Be aware of your strengths and weaknesses: People who know their strengths and weaknesses understand what they need help with and what resources they have to help others.
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Concentrate: The connections with those around you are essential, so you should focus on them. Don’t let anything that happens around you distract you.
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Set limits: A leader must have strong limits. Be firm. Say no when you have to. Be serious about your work and your passions, and maintain boundaries for your company to sustain the integrity of its goals and the work you have put into them.
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Know the factors that trigger your emotions: Self-aware people can identify the emotions they are going through. It is important not to repress them or deny their causes.
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Embrace your intuition: Successful people trust their instincts and take risks associated with them. Instincts are based on the survival of the fittest and the need to succeed.
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Self-discipline practice: Good leaders tend to be disciplined at work and in all areas of their lives. It is a character trait that gives them the permanent focus necessary for strong leadership.