Self-Aware

Self-Awareness and Building Confidence

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People who lack self-awareness often ask me how to increase their confidence. It’s been my experience that people build their confidence by doing things they enjoy and experiencing both success and failure. The common denominator is that confident people tend to be those who confront the challenges in their lives and learn from the outcomes.

Eleanor Roosevelt said:

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”

Taking deliberate and conscious action to increase self-awareness and doing things purposefully to work toward some goal will help you become a confident person. We all have an incredible ability to take on any challenge in our lives, we just have to be willing to actually do something to make things happen.

Try taking on a challenge today and keep doing it until you are an expert. Put one foot in front of the other and keep walking. Then take on another challenge and keep going. In time you’ll wonder why you ever lacked confidence at all.

What will you do to develop self-awareness and build up your confidence?

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Awareness and Attachment to Outcomes

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A lot of personal development experts talk about doing anything you want in life. You can move in the direction of your dreams at any time you want but many people lose motivation when they feel like they aren’t getting exactly what they wanted. The key to success is to gradually build your  self-awareness without focusing on a specific outcome. You never know what you’ll discover along the way.

Cheers,

Guy

The Secret to Developing Self-Awareness

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Developing self-awareness means moving from living unconsciously to thinking, feeling and behaving intentionally. Countless people live their lives stuck in their comfort zones, repeating behaviors that don’t make them happy and not realizing they have other options. Here are five ideas to help you develop your self-awareness and improve the quality of your life:

  1. Be willing to look at yourself. You can’t live deliberately if you don’t take a look at and understand who you are as a person. Make it a habit to continuously assess what you do well and what areas need some strengthening.
  1. Examine your thoughts. Which of your thoughts help you succeed or make you happy? Which ones hold you back or keep you from living authentically? Evaluate how your thinking affects your life, keep what works and get rid of what doesn’t.
  1. Examine your emotions. Learn how to acknowledge and feel all of your emotions, not just the ones you’re comfortable with. Heal and bring closure to challenging issues or past hurts in your life. The more you learn how to feel and appropriately manage your emotions, the healthier and more balanced you’ll be.
  1. Examine your behaviors. There are things you currently do that yield excellent results and some that keep you from working on your dreams. Keep the behaviors that help you live meaningfully and let go of the ones that lead you off course.
  1. Be willing to make changes. It’s very difficult to grow in any way if you don’t believe change is possible or vital to your personal development. There is always something you can fine tune so you can become stronger and better able to live a fulfilling life.

Self-awareness matters because, when you understand yourself deeply, you’re able to live consciously instead of haphazardly. It’s the difference between stumbling through life repeating the same patterns and creating your own destiny. What will you do to keep developing your self-awareness?

Cheers,

Guy

12 Ways to Increase Your Self-Awareness

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Here are some practical ways to increase your self-awareness starting today:

  • Make a list of the things you do well.
  • Think about how you might use your natural talents to live authentically.
  • Make a list of the things you do that might benefit from some improvement.
  • Think about what you can do right now to become wiser and healthier.
  • Decide on one thing you want to improve about yourself and do one small task each day to work on making it happen.
  • Keep an open mind about learning new things and changing.
  • Treat yourself and others well.
  • Be completely honest with yourself about the things you do that lead in a positive direction and the ones that hold you back.
  • Learn how to be comfortable with all your feelings.
  • Work on healing your hurts.
  • Decide that you’re going to live consciously.
  • Listen to your inner voice.

You don’t have to do all these things at once, try doing one at a time until it feels natural and move on to the next. The idea is to get to know yourself really well and live a life that reflects who you are deep inside. What will you do to increase your self-awareness?

Cheers,
Guy

Self-Awareness and Really Loving Yourself

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A lot of people who lack self-awareness loudly proclaim that they respect and love themselves and then get trampled mercilessly by every person who comes into their lives. They also go from one broken heart to another wondering why it keeps happening to them. They never seem to heal or resolve their inner issues. Many people who don’t possess self-awareness navigate the waters of relationships focusing almost entirely on other people’s needs. They invest huge amounts of time and energy into making someone else happy or worrying about how they’re doing while ignoring the most important person in the room, themselves.

Why is it we go through such elaborate efforts to mold our lives around someone else only to find ourselves losing our self-identity and wishing for better relationships?

Somewhere along the way we lose sight of the importance of caring for ourselves. Being self-aware enough to take care of ourselves first is a critically important step in creating fulfilling relationships in our lives but we don’t do it consistently. We benefit from tending to our own needs first so we can be in great shape to attract positive, vibrant people into our lives and share great relationships. So how do we do that? The good news is that there are many straightforward things we can do, starting today, to take care of ourselves and begin the process of respecting and loving ourselves.

You can consciously become healthy and happy by healing your inner hurts, practicing self-love, and behaving in positive ways. Loving yourself requires getting to know who you are deep down inside and understanding how to tend to your own needs and treat yourself well. Only after you’re genuinely healthy and enjoy your own company can you invite other people in.

What will you do to develop self-awareness and really love yourself?

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Awareness Means Telling Yourself the Truth

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A major element of self-awareness is telling yourself the truth about what’s going on in your life. When you do this you’re able to figure out what’s going well and what needs attention. Being truthful doesn’t mean beating yourself up, it’s just the act of acknowledging the areas you want to strengthen.

A lot of people spend their entire lives lying to themselves and doing things that don’t reflect who they really are deep inside. This leads to pain and misery for the person doing it and the people around him or her. Here are some signs you’re telling yourself the truth:

  • You know who you really are deep down inside.
  • Your words match your actions.
  • You follow your dreams.
  • You deal well with your emotions.
  • You’re not afraid of looking at the difficult issues in your upbringing and life in general.
  • You heal the parts of you that are damaged.
  • You make life easier for yourself and those around you.
  • You don’t lie about who you really are.

Cheers,

Guy

15 Characteristics of Self-Aware, Happy People

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Being happy isn’t some unattainable abstract concept, you can consciously work on it until it becomes an integral part of your personal development. The challenge for many people is to increase their self-awareness, look at the things that keep them from feeling joy, and replace them with new ways of thinking and behaving that help them move in a positive direction. Here are fifteen characteristics of self-aware, happy people:

  1. Absence of irrational or excessive fear.
  2. Integration of different parts of their minds.
  3. Ability to behave with empathy and compassion.
  4. Help themselves and others succeed.
  5. Balance and integration between personal and professional lives.
  6. Laugh often and enjoy the lighter side of life.
  7. Able to consider more than one perspective.
  8. Welcome change.
  9. Continually build self-awareness.
  10. Behave joyfully and consistently in all areas of their lives.
  11. Work every day on being happy.
  12. Understand that happiness doesn’t mean endless pleasure.
  13. Actively work on healing their own hurts.
  14. Find meaning inside themselves.
  15. Live a life that reflects who they really are deep inside.

If you already practice thinking and behaving in these ways you know the sense of deep balance and fulfillment they bring. If you don’t, then you have an amazing opportunity to begin working on whichever area needs attention in your life. Being happy isn’t about what you say or how you appear on the outside, it’s about your actual thoughts, emotions and behaviors.

What will you do to develop self-awareness and be genuinely happy?

Cheers,

Guy

The Self-Awareness Guy