Self Awareness

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.”~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Know thyself.” ~ Socrates

Self-awareness is the cornerstone to transformation. If you do not understand yourself, how can you change?

One easy way to increase your self-awareness is to put yourself into an observational mode by watching how you usually react to people and situations. Bring your awareness into an observational mode by paying attention to your patterns of being and questioning your thoughts and behavior. You can then assess your behavior. Distinguish if the way you are acting is in alignment with who you desire to be. Do certain people seem to upset you or cause you to feel stressed? Discover what it is that you are thinking around them. Watch yourself and you will find out what situations push you into automatic reactions. Once you can recognize these situations, the mere fact of recognizing them brings a state of higher awareness. Then you will have the power to be however you choose to be instead of driving on impulse.

You may be surprised to find that when you come from a place of reaction, you are not in alignment with how you would choose to respond if you had given the situation a moment of thought. Once you have attained this watcher awareness, you will have the power to respond to life instead of operating with your automatic default reactions. Remember your ABCs of responding to life: Awareness, Breathe, Choose. Then you can choose love over fear, peace over conflict, and happiness over despair.

Lesson:

Watching how you interact in the world raises your self-awareness.

Exercise:

Practice observing yourself. Learn to shift your awareness as necessary. When you are watching yourself, you are in a state of higher awareness. In this mode of consciousness, you will be open to new types of behavior as well as increasing self-awareness.

Don’t judge your efforts. Any amount of attention you give to this practice will enhance your ability to move into higher awareness at will. Have fun with this exercise. You will learn things you never knew about yourself.