Self-awareness / Self-reflection

You might ask yourself:  Do I have high self-awareness?  How often do I self-reflect and is it fairly easy for me to self-reflect when I make time for it?

     What is self-awareness?  How is it defined?  There are many definitions for self-awareness and there are different aspects of self-awareness.  In general, I would say self-awareness is being conscious of your own mind, body, emotions, and the impact your mind, body, and emotions may have on your surrounding physical & social environment.

     We can start with emotions.  Are you able to reflect and identify if you are currently feeling emotions of joy, anger, fear, excitement, overwhelmed, overworked, or some other feeling?  Taking time to identify what your own emotional state currently is from time to time can be extremely helpful.  If a person is in a state of anger and is unaware of it, that person can go to work or school and have a terrible day and get into arguments with people which can create additional unnecessary anger or problems.  If a person is aware of their own emotional angered state, they can potentially take some action in order to lower or remove that state of emotion before entering a workplace, speaking with a child, or discussing something important with a loved one.

     Conversely, if a person is in a state where they are feeling great joy, identifying this and analyzing this from time to time can help increase the likelihood of prolonging or increasing this emotional state.  Being grateful for this emotion can also assist in protecting any potential negative emotion that may come along the way later.  Identifying your own emotions or states of emotion is the first step in building emotional awareness.  There's a wide range of different emotions that a person may encounter, can examine, and can learn from.

Some techniques that can help take you through the path of self-awareness may be:

A) Check-in with yourself from time to time – a person who is inexperienced with self- awareness might want to do a self-check every 10-15 minutes or so.  For example, every 10 minutes the person might want to stop and ask themselves how they are currently feeling.  As a person becomes more and more experienced with self-awareness, they can increase the time between check-ins to say every hour or every few hours.  Eventually, a person might not need to do this anymore because this skill will be developed to be near second nature.  With practice, what this can do is help a person recognize changes to their own emotional state.  It can snap the person out of being reactive to their own emotions, allow for the self to recognize the changed emotional state, and allow an opportunity to course-correct that emotional state if desired.  As a simple example, a person may be doing just fine for most of their day, then checks in with their own emotions and finds that anger has been building up within.  The person can examine what may have happened in the last 15 minutes to cause this change in emotions.  The person realizes that they had read an email from a co-worker who isn’t particularly friendly.  The email had a sentence that could be taken offensively.  At this point, the person has the opportunity to change their own emotional state or continue to be angry.  The person recognizes that anger was building but decided that emails lack tone, and the few sentences that were taken offensively could actually be quite innocuous if a friendly tone was placed along with it.  The person has made decisions that changed their own emotional state and allowed the anger to subside and was able to have a wonderful day.

B) Meditation – There are different types of meditation for varying purposes.  Sometimes sitting still & finding calmness and allowing for deep thoughts to flow through your mind can help you find answers you are looking for.  A person can meditate and assess how they have been feeling throughout the day, the week, month(s), or even reflect on an entire year.  Taking that time to quietly recognize their own feelings for any given period of time, assess the reasons why they may be feeling how they have been feeling, and explore potential healthy actions that can be taken to improve their own emotions can be very helpful.

C) Picturing and viewing yourself from above – with your eyes closed, you can utilize your imagination and visualization skills to view yourself.  A good place to start may be from a comfortable sitting position where it is safe, quiet, and you can concentrate undisturbed.  Try viewing yourself as if you had left your body and were watching yourself from above.  Tell yourself to breathe slowly.  Tell yourself to relax.  Before you take any action or movement, ask yourself if you were to stretch out your arms, if you would knock anything over or bump into anyone.  If you feel it is safe to stretch out your arms, do so and continue to watch yourself if you were above with your imagination.  With your eyes still closed, imagine if you were to stand up.  Would your actions lead to you knocking anything over or hitting anything?  If not, visualize yourself standing up. Then actually stand up for a moment.  Before sitting down, visualize yourself sitting down.  If it is safe to sit, then go back to a sitting position once again.  Utilizing your visualization only, picture yourself walking around your home.  The important thing is to practice the visualization and also asking yourself if your actions will have an impact on something in your physical environment.  What might you bump into before you decide to make a movement?  Practicing the visualization aspect can help you learn to first know to think of possible outcomes before you act and, secondly, to know that your actions have an impact on your environment.  Thirdly, using visualization to watch yourself can help you reflect and see how your actions can have a positive or negative impact to what is around you.  The physical impacts are obvious, but it can affect the mental and emotional states of people around you as well.  This may, in turn, have an impact to your own physical, mental, or emotional state.  Ultimately, a person should know that their physical actions, verbal or written words, and emotions can affect the people around them.  For this reason, it is important to think ahead of time and be cognizant of the actions you take or words you speak which can greatly reduce the chances of any misunderstandings or accidents.

D) Self-reflection – this can greatly assist and help a person improve over time.  There can be occasions where reflecting and maybe even using visualization to replay an event or something that may have happened earlier is possible.  A person can reflect and ask himself/herself if the best choice of words were used or best course of action selected.  If not, the person can ask how he/she can improve next time.  Without self-reflection, a person may never learn their mistakes and may continue to make similar mistakes in the future.  This can be thought of as assessing your own self-actions and looking for ways in the future to improve.  Going deeper, you may even ask why you acted in the way you did initially.  Understanding yourself and your behavior better, with grace, can help accelerate your own path of growth and improvement.

     Some of the above-mentioned techniques can also be applied to your mind/mentality as well.  For example, rather than checking in with your emotions, you can check-in with your mindset.  Are you in a positive state of mind?  Are you in a negative state of mind?  Are you feeling strong and impactful?  Are you operating in an apathetic state?  How might you change your current mentality and be in the state that you may want to be in?  We may dive deeper into additional exercises and techniques if needed in the future.  For now, the focus is providing a big picture view.

     It may also be important to discuss the topic of balance.  Learn to give yourself some grace and know that small progress and time may be part of the process of your journey.

What do you plan to do to increase your self-awareness/ Self-reflection?