Self-awareness is the one known key to being successful in any facet of your life. It could be for relationships, career, business, or overall happiness. Sounds pretty simple, right? It is, only that it is not. Self-awareness is not achieved in a snap. It is a process that a person goes through in life. Also, there’s no end to it.
So, if there is no end to it, how does one become successful? The concepts of self-awareness and success are both subjective and cannot be measured by any other person’s yardstick. With this, it is up to you to gauge them and achieve them.
Self-awareness is a person’s ability to analyze and recognize one’s own thoughts and emotions. It is knowing what makes yourself tick. So what if you know how you feel and what you are thinking? And how does self-awareness even relate to success? Unlike some would think, success does not just fall out of the sky.
Yes, we do read a lot of success stories from entrepreneur and business magazines and websites. Who wouldn’t want to achieve the same success as those people had? But what we don’t see is the hard work they have gone through to achieve their success.
You see, everyone’s situation is different. Success is subjective. Without self-awareness, you will continue to envy other people’s success and will continue to aspire for the same feat to happen to you.
Why should I become self-aware?
Being self-aware would make you discern your own idea of success in the first place. For someone else, having five houses is a success. For another, being debt-free is being successful. Different people would also have different ways to achieve success.
The reason for this is that we vary in strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and ideas of failure. In addition, we react differently to particular situations. The more you know about these aspects of your life, the more you can adapt to the circumstances that we face. Knowing these attributes that make up ourselves can help us analyze how we can learn and improve.
We should also be aware of our emotions. Some may think that emotions are hindrances to logical thinking, which is essential to achieving success. However, we cannot totally eliminate emotions. Besides, they are one of the most important features of being human.
Therefore, instead of putting effort to disregard our emotions, self-awareness helps us understand them more. By understanding how we feel, all the more we can manage it effectively.
Why would you need to manage your emotions, then? Do you think you will ever close a deal if you just break down and cry at times when you get rejected? Most likely, not. Our ability to control our emotions can help us act appropriately in certain situations.
However, managing our emotions is contrary to masking them. Managing one’s emotions is knowing when and how to express them.
“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” – Ralph Ellison
How can I become self-aware?
One of the ways to becoming more self-aware is a reflection. Being mindful of your thoughts can help you discern the factors behind your thoughts. This also goes with knowing your feelings.
Let’s take anxiety as an example. What are the situations that make you feel anxious? What do these situations have in common? With these questions, you can find out why you sometimes feel anxious. This is also one step to avoid situations that can make you feel anxious. Reflecting on your experiences, thoughts, and feelings can help you develop self-awareness.
Writing is also another form of improving your self-awareness. Because writing requires organization, deep, and logical thinking, we become more aware of ourselves. In addition, writing can also help us monitor our progress in terms of our plans and actions. It is also an effective way to keep us motivated by writing our values and inspirations.
Seeking feedback from others can also help you gain more self-awareness. There are certain aspects of our character that only other people can see. As much as we would want to look at ourselves objectively when we reflect on our thoughts and feelings, we may still miss out on some of our attitude or behaviors.
However, make sure that you are open even to negative feedback and still logically examine yourself based on it.
“To be aware of a single shortcoming within oneself is more useful than to be aware of a thousand in somebody else.” – Dalai Lama
Self awareness is a journey
Being self-aware and achieving success is a journey. Each person can take their own paths toward attaining them. With this, we should not judge other people’s way in this process. Some may even go through trial and error.
In addition, you can never be too aware of yourself since there are certain traits or strengths that you can develop later on. You still have a lot to discover about yourself as you face challenges in your life.