What is Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is defined as the conscious understanding of one’s own desires, feelings, motives, and characters. It is knowing yourself not just on your outside appearance but your true essence as a person. Being self-aware means that you know yourself both as a physical and spiritual being.
Two types of self-awareness:
- Internal Self-Awareness – this is an understanding of your passions, strengths, weaknesses, values, thoughts, and feelings.
- External Self-Awareness – this is the ability to see how others perceive you. People who are aware of how others feel towards them are more empathetic.
Meditation helps to be boost self-awareness
In this technologically advanced world, there is hardly time to listen to your thoughts, with the constant bombardment of a vicious number of stimuli. Sometimes, with the advent of social media, we pattern ourselves to what we see and what we believe is socially acceptable. Because of that, making our lives more complicated and at a loss of ourselves. To be more self-aware, we need to stop everything, even for just five or ten minutes a day to meditate.
Meditating does not only entail sitting on the floor with legs crossed and chanting. There are various ways of silencing your mind. It may be a walk in the park, listening to soothing music or white noise, walking in the park, or simply doing breathing exercises. Practicing meditation does not only improve your self-awareness, but it also helps your overall health and well-being.
Practice meditation regularly to maximize its full potential for self-awareness. Like going to the gym to improve your physique, meditating will transform you holistically. When you apply meditation to your daily routine, you will have a broader perspective and a better understanding of your thoughts instead of getting caught in it, leading to a better way of life.
Scientifically, meditation has been proven to show a lot of positive benefits to your overall well-being, such as the alleviation of depression and anxiety, increased happiness, stress-relief, better cognitive functions, and better social interactions.
Ways to Develop Self Awareness
1. Pay attention to what bothers you
When we get irritated by other people’s attitudes, it is usually something that we dislike in ourselves, as well.
2. Identify your emotional weakness
Everybody has something that they are ashamed of, feel sad about, or a variety of negative emotions that we try to avoid. Understandably, we would like to ignore negative feelings because it is usually painful.
3. Accept criticism be it positive or negative
When someone criticizes you, accept it. Avoid being defensive. It is difficult to hear anything negative said about you, but it is a way for us to know ourselves and to take a step to improve.
4. Write down your goals and plans
Plan your goals and break big goals to smaller ones to not be overwhelmed.
5. Keep a journal
A journal is a great way to keep track of your healing process. It is also a good moment to reflect and check for the balance.
Benefits of Self Awareness
- Better relationships – Since you already know what you like and dislike, you may communicate it with your loved one or your friends
- Improved moods – Self-awareness makes it easier to control our feelings and disposition
- Clearer thinking and enhanced decision making – Self-awareness helps you think clearly
While others may think that self-awareness is a magical and complicated jargon for an esoteric process deep within our human nature, it is not. It is simply our capacity to observe and understand ourselves—pay attention to the feelings, behaviours, and thoughts.
