Self Awareness

Self Awareness

 

Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.

                                                                                                           James Thurber

 

 

Have you ever sat back at the end of the day and wondered why you did the things you did that day?

Have you ever wondered why your life has turned out the way it has?

If you have then chances are that you have an insight into yourself and are aware of at least some aspects of your self.

By improving your self-awareness you can come to know yourself and understand why things happen the way they do and your own reactions to them.

Self-awareness is your capacity to feel, see and understand who you are, where you are coming from, what you are doing, why you are doing it, how you come across and what your body, spirit and mind is experiencing and telling you.

Without self-awareness, you will tend to repeat patterns, ignore intuition and miss out on the rich and subtle experience that is life. It is all about asking yourself questions and answering them honestly.

To Achieve some level of awareness we provide you with many questions to reflect on and answer for yourself.

 

Definition:

The ability to attend to, monitor and examine our behaviour, thoughts and feelings is called self awareness. 

Self-awareness can operate on many time scales. We can be aware of ourselves at one moment in time, being aware of specific feelings and responses or we may have a more general, ongoing awareness  over a much longer period. We may have a sense of being a single unitary self or of having many aspects of that one self. 

When we are being self aware, we can be aware of many kinds of things, the focus of which depends on our philosophical orientation, those of our teachers, therapists or books we are reading. Being self aware also means knowing the contents of the less conscious aspects of our mind as well as of the conscious aspects.  It means becoming aware that we are part of a much more expansive self, and  this larger self includes the ’shadow’ aspects of ourselves that we usually deny or fail to acknowledge.

Self-awareness can help to integrate the internal with the external. When we are aware of our needs and longings, then we are more likely to see and seize opportunities for meeting them in the external world.

A high level of self-awareness is associated also with a high level of self-control. For example, it makes it possible for us to identify and counter self-defeating thoughts and, more generally, to regulate the communication or self talk we have with ourselves. If we are self aware we are more likely to accept responsibility for our actions and our lives because we have a much clearer idea of the kind of person we are and are capable of becoming. 

Self-awareness is essential for establishing successful relationships with other people. We can only understand what other people may be feeling and thinking if we know our own thoughts and feelings. This applies to both working and personal relationships.

For people disconnected from their inner lives, connecting and becoming aware again can be uncomfortable or even painful. This disorganization or disequilibrium a person may experience when they begin to find out ‘unpleasant things’ about themselves is called the ‘fear of disorganization’. 

 

 

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

                                                                                                                    M Scott Peck

 

 

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