5 Ways to Boost Your Self Awareness

The ancient Greeks defined self-awareness in this quote: “know thyself.” And like Sun Tzu said: “know yourself and know your enemy, and in a hundred battles, you will never be in peril.”

From life’s major problems to trying to figure out what to do with your life in the first place, Self-Awareness can be one of the biggest assets you get! It helps one to look beneath the surface into why they behave and think in certain ways… This allows one to heal their weaknesses and harness their strengths. It also helps in knowing what’s tough to chase and what’s tough to completely ignore.

The list of benefits that self-awareness can have on you and your life goes on and on. Psychologist and author Daniel Goleman define self-awareness as the ability to monitor our inner world. In other words, it helps us to see ourselves more clearly & get a deeper understanding of how we operate.

Self-awareness is the key to overcoming the parts of yourself that you don’t like and becoming the version of yourself that you admire!

So here are five ways to help you cultivate a deeper sense of self-awareness:

1. Listening Sessions

This is simply where you let your mind wander to see where it goes and then observe how you feel. Did you ever notice that some of your best thoughts happen when you’re in the shower or about to go to sleep?

Well, that’s because your subconscious brain is always processing and drawing connections between things and ideas in your everyday life. But during the day, we’re so actively engaged in the things around us that we don’t have time to take notice.

It’s only when we stop for a second that gives our brains the space to bubble up these insights to the surface. For me personally, that’s my shower time or the walk that I take every day to kind of get away from my desk. This allows me to observe life from a bigger picture perspective!

But for you, that could be anything such as driving or doing mindless activities like chores around the house. It can be anything that helps disengage your brain so that new ideas and insights can surface to the top!

Just make sure to be scheduling time into your day every single day to let your subconscious teach you stuff. And also, make sure to protect that time if it is a doctor’s appointment or an important meeting. Because personal growth is one of the best things, you could possibly invest in!

2. Treating Your Brain as a Separate Entity from Yourself

What I mean by that is your conscious brain, and subconscious brain are separate… They’re each doing their processing and different activities.

You can control your conscious mind, but your subconscious mind is often doing its own thing to try to protect you and keep you alive. It’s doing things to avoid risk and just make sure to keep you safe.

Understanding this will allow you to look at your brain from a distance and not take everything it does. Personally, you are someone who has a brain, not someone who is their brain! Doing this allows you to kind of take a step back and examine yourself partially… This allows you to see which parts are great and which parts need to be improved without that sense of defensiveness.

Normally, we all have so much junk inside our heads; we’ve all got our issues, insecurities, and our anxieties. All of these things are nothing but mental knots that keeps us from achieving our true potential.

3. Questioning Your Initial Impulses

Building off the last point, it’s important to question your initial assumptions of what you should be doing with life…

You should try to identify where that comes from… A lot of what we take for granted in our thinking comes from culture or parents’ expectations. It can even come from how we have been raised, and oftentimes these societal pressures make their way into our thinking!

But by understanding the root of where different things come from, you can better identify why you act in certain ways… And if there are certain parts of you that you don’t like, you can start to understand how to fix them.

4. Surround Yourself with Friends That Can be Like a Mirror for You

Friends that teach you about yourself, both the good and the bad, in a very loving way. You need to surround yourself with these kinds of friends!

By paying attention to how other people see you, you can start to see past that layer of bias that comes when we try to observe ourselves.

5. Examine Your Past:

It takes some time to think back to your past… There are deeper parts of ourselves that start to get covered up… We usually do this as a way to conform to what other people want from us!

Thinking back to who you were as a child… This will in turn help to shed some light for you on your deeper needs or your natural tendencies. This will help you see who you were when you strip away that layer of who you think other people want you to be.

Conclusion

So as you build your self-awareness in these five ways, you’ll notice you’ll start to have the tools and confidence to tackle different problems in life. This will teach you new ways you never realized even existed! I mean, isn’t it great that you can learn all this just from getting to know yourself?