What is Self-awareness

Lots of people are tired of hearing about the term self-awareness and if you've been exposed to any kind of self-help book or motivational section of the library, it can be a little daunting sometimes to look at all the ways you can better yourself.

Sometimes you hit rock bottom

And there’s extreme pain and you acknowledge that there's something bigger than yourself, something bigger than your ego. Self-awareness is all of those things and so much more depending on who you ask, right? But the perception of you by others and what roles and identities you have agreed to is part of yourself, including the easy or genius levels of qualities, skills and traits, but also the things that you need to outsource because you're not good at. And that's what self-awareness is about from my perspective, knowing that you contribute to your situation at any given moment is an important thing to realize, and being aware of your contribution every time there's a person that you're communicating with. You may walk away from experience, feeling frustrated or overwhelmed or angry or furious or elated and excited and energized. You are bringing 50% of whatever's happening in that scenario to that scenario and a hundred percent of how you respond to it is your responsibility.

Knowing what your tendencies are, knowing that there are tender spots that might be poked pretty easily is part of self-awareness. And when you know those things, there are so many benefits to intentionally seeking out ways to improve the awareness of you, your being of your existence, of how you present yourself, of how people perceive you.

Why self-awareness is so important

When you are more aware of your abilities, what you can and can't do well, what your strengths are and what the things are that you're better off leaning on someone else's strengths for, you're more confident in your decision-making. So each day you're making decisions, minute by minute, whether it's professionally or personally, it becomes easier to make those decisions when you're more aware of yourself. 

Having self-awareness and intentionally seeking out the avenues in which you can fine tune your self-awareness will also provide a better quality of physical health. If you know that you struggle getting up and going to the gym every morning, knowing that about yourself will allow you to stop trying to do that thing that doesn't work any of the times and releases the guilt, the stress and the anxiety, and will allow you to say, okay, that's not a viable option.

The cool thing about self-awareness

You're changing and you're growing. So the things you discover about yourself now are not permanent stories that you have to continue following. You may want to, and there are parts of you that you're going to dig in deeper and lean into. 

But the things you're exercising now are just one chapter of the same story. You'll ask yourself a year from now, two years from now, 10 years from now and you'll probably have a different answer then because you’ll know a different version of yourself. You’ll know parts of yourself that have evolved and have learned from the experiences around you.