Self-Awareness: Your New Years Achievement Plan
The holiday season is upon us. And with New Year’s eve around the corner, all the articles, columns, posts, and tips about goal setting and resolutions are soon to come too.
I’m all for goal setting and have the posts to prove it.
But instead of looking ahead this year, I think we all need to cultivate a little more awareness about what’s happening right now.
Not politically or socially. We are all hyper tuned in to every news event and President Trump tweet. I’m talking about awareness of the self.
Figuring out who you are and how you relate to the world is self-awareness.
Often times, self-awareness seems like this new age, woo-woo concept. But it’s much more grounded than that. Awareness is about discovering how you genuinely feel about your current circumstances so that you can take definitive steps to change what isn’t working and be grateful for what is.
Awareness of self can also set you up for the new year better than any resolution or goal setting system ever will. And here are notes on how.
Defining Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is an awareness of everything that makes up our identities. This includes our bodies, minds, emotions, histories, relationships, feelings, and environment.
If a person is self-aware, she knows why she is motivated to react in a certain way before taking that action. And in that space between recognizing why she wants to react and actually taking that action, she can decide if that activity moves her toward the future she wants or further away from it.
And isn’t that what we all want? The opportunity to choose what we do next.
Giving yourself that choice comes down to being self-aware enough to recognize that you have one.
How Self-Awareness Helps You Personally
Self-awareness helps us to really see why we do the things we do and how we feel about those actions and ourselves.
In life, it can sometimes feel like things just happen to us.
- A loved one dies,
- Our relationship ends,
- A best friend moves,
- Our significant other cheats, and
- Our car dies just when the rent is due, and we don’t have any extra cash.
We can’t always take in all of the emotional upheaval that comes with these stressors, so we avoid it with distractions. We stare at our phones. We entertain ourselves. And we numb with food, booze, sex, and Instagram. We transport our minds to insulate it from the pain of day-to-day life.
Now there is nothing wrong with a little distraction. I’m all for a bit of fun and am certainly down for great sex. It’s just that, after a while, we stop consciously choosing to enjoy these distractions. Instead, they become a compulsion — a way to numb our feelings when we are having a hard time.
Compulsions are the reason you eat a piece a cake every night even though you know you shouldn’t eat a piece of cake every night. Your mind has conditioned itself to dull all the pain of the day with cake. (Plus, sugar tastes so damn good.)
Self-awareness takes us out of that cycle. It helps us to become present to our compulsions and our decisions to engage in them.
To gain this awareness, we take a moment, usually in meditation, to remove all of our distractions and observe why we are acting or reacting in a particular way. From that vantage point, we can determine if our actions are by choice or an automatic way to stop our feelings.
Self-Awareness and Feelings
Removing distractions also forces us to deal with the emotions we’ve been avoiding. Ultimately, self-awareness is about discovering how we really feel about the circumstances in our lives. And if we’ve been putting up with a bad situation for a long time, admitting to ourselves that we need to change can feel overwhelming…in the short term. But if we just go with it. If we just let ourselves feel angry, ashamed, sad, and all the other feelings that we don’t want to deal with, in the long run, we’ll see that it will lead to better decisions and better outcomes.
Self-Awareness and Business
The same self-awareness principles are valid in business. You have to be aware of where your business is today so that you can create space to make choices for your future, instead of just reacting to problems. Often business owners will bury their heads in the sand because they don’t feel up to finding solutions to seemingly impossible challenges. But everything can be changed and renewed. The first step is being aware enough to realize that it’s time for a change in the first place.
What’s your biggest takeaway from this post and about self-awareness generally? Let me know in the comments below.