Why It Is Important to Be Self-Aware

Being self-aware is one of your most effective tools in achieving your goals and separating yourself from the crowd.

Knowing who you are means understanding what makes you special and unique. What separates you from the crowd as the real individual that you are.

Being unique can take you a long way in life. But first, you must understand how you are different from the next person. And the next person after that.

On the surface, it can feel like you know yourself. However, there are many signs that show you might not know yourself as well as you think.

If you have ever said:

‘I shouldn’t have done that.’
‘Why did I do that?’
‘What was I thinking?’

All of which are common phrases muttered almost unknowingly. Then the likelihood is, you don’t know your mind as much as you might think.

If you find yourself saying any of these phrases on a regular basis, you are not alone. There are very few people who can say that they know themselves completely.

This puts a whole new meaning on the old saying ‘nobody knows you better than yourself’. If you don’t know yourself, then who does?

“By admitting your inadequacies, you show that you’re self-aware enough to know your areas for improvement – and secure enough to be open about them.” – Adam Grant

Understanding who you are and what you want intertwines with the importance of being self-aware.

Being self-aware is one of your most effective tools in achieving your goals and separating yourself from the crowd.

What Does It Mean to Be Self-Aware?

One of the most common references to self-awareness in the media these days is concerning artificial intelligence. The debate over self-aware artificial intelligence is rife.

But what exactly does it mean to be self-aware?

Put simply, being self-aware is to understand your feelings, character, and personality.

This is a conscious feeling, a complete understanding of who you are and what makes you unique.

While the explanation is a simple one, the connotations of being self-aware are much more significant.

To be self-aware is to know who you are inside and out. It is to know what traits make you individual and to have a clear perception of your unique personality.

This also extends to understanding what other people are like.

When you have a fundamental understanding of yourself, you can identify traits that match yours, in other people.

The debate over whether artificial intelligence should be self-aware shows a crucial part of its importance.

Knowing yourself wholely leads the way to understanding what you want.

Then, putting the plans into motion to achieve it.

Being self-aware can influence every part of your life. From your daily routine to your future aspirations, and your attitude towards achieving them.

Understand Your Individuality

The importance of being self-aware starts with individuality and learning what makes you different to everyone else.

Every human is unique in their own way. If you don’t know what makes you unique, then you can never reach your full potential.

To feel unique is to feel special. Feeling unique also helps you to understand where you need to be to allow your greatest potential to shine through.

With a better understanding of yourself, through developed self-awareness, you begin to understand what your traits are. You change your perception of yourself.

Open the door to new experiences based on what your characteristics make you most capable of achieving.

Positive Traits vs Negative Traits

Being self-aware means knowing what your character is and a vital part of this is knowing what your traits are.

Every person’s character is made up of different traits. These are both negative traits and positive traits, as well as those that can be either, neutral traits.

Very often, a person will apply a selective focus on one side of their traits and not the other side. This delivers a warped or distorted vision of yourself.

If you focus on the positive traits, you ignore your weaknesses.

If you focus on the negative traits, you ignore your strengths.

Digging deeper into your unique personality reveals both sides of your traits.

A balanced focus looks at what you are best at and where changes or improvements may need to be made.

A person who looks at the negative traits might describe themselves as:

Insecure
Lazy
Indecisive
Paranoid

A person who looks at the positive traits might describe themselves as:

Caring
Colourful
Fair
Helpful

On the surface, these describe two very different people. However, there is no reason a single person can’t have both sets of traits.

Being self-aware is able about getting that new perspective. Appreciating yourself for the good traits and acknowledging the bad traits.

Being self-aware gives you an objective view of both sides. The reality of facing both sides is often challenging though.

Embrace Who You Are

Through being self-aware, you can embrace who you truly are. And not who you think you are.

If you embrace one side of your traits, then you’re limiting the person that you can be. If you embrace all of your traits, you start to glimpse what you are capable of.

“Every human has four endowments – self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom… The power to choose, to respond, to change.” – Stephen Covey

The importance of being self-aware is not limiting who can be. Despite the challenges and discomfort of accepting the negative with the positive traits, it is highly rewarding.

This understanding of who you are can help you to advance to where you want to be in life.

Ability to Reflect on Achievements

Being self-aware can help you to self-reflect on your achievements and challenges.

Equally, being self-reflecting can help you to build a healthy form of emotional self-awareness.

Reflecting on what you have done will help you to become more confident, have greater emotional intelligence, and provide clarity to your core values.

It allows you to look back and get a full picture of where you have overcome challenges, where you need to work harder, and what you need to change.

By knowing your character, traits, and personality, you can view self-reflection with an understanding, not a self-judgement.

Overly judging yourself can put a negative shadow on reflection. If you are perpetually focusing on ‘what I should have done’ then you are not focusing on ‘what I’m going to do’.

Being self-aware during reflection gives the practice of self-reflection a more massive benefit. Instead of focusing on what could have been, you are looking at what can be.

Ask the Important Questions

Having an openness and understanding of yourself and with yourself makes it easier to ask the bigger questions.

Being confused about your traits, or uncertain of your strengths and weakness, can hinder progress and makes the big questions worrying.

The important questions:
‘What do I want from life?’
‘What is my main goal?’
‘How can I achieve that goal?’

All can come with a shadow of pressure and worry. Self-awareness puts a new perspective on things and gives your mind clarity.

With self-awareness, you can take a step back and look at your traits. Then you can analyse your goal and see whether it is something that you can complete.

If you think of yourself as ‘overly timid and passive’, you’ll never make the move to pursue those goals.

Add in ‘creative and dedicated’, and you have traits that can allow you to succeed.

Staying focused, setting yourself boundaries, and keeping an open mind, are all important parts of being a self-aware individual.

Broaden Your Experiences

Self-awareness can help you to broaden your perspective on life experiences

Being self-aware lets, you take everything away from an experience, instead of limiting the benefit achieved by trying new things.

It also opens the door to new experiences, releasing those self-imposed limits that you put on your capability.

If you’re not happy at work, want to make changes to your life, or remove negativity, being self-aware will help.

By considering the good and bad of an experience, you can better develop who you are.

The take-aways from any experience can reveal what you want and how you need to alter your perspective to achieve it.

Build On Who You Are

Knowing who you are as a separate individual helps to empower you to try new things and build on your core strengths and weaknesses.

“Every human has four endowments – self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom… The power to choose, to respond, to change.” – Stephen Covey

If you know that you tend to be unappreciative, then you can actively start to appreciate more things.

And if you know that you are creative, then you can start to express your creativity.

Or if you know that you are unhappy, then you can take steps to add more positivity to your life.

Being unaware of these things can prevent you from growing and expanding within yourself. Self-awareness unlocks the door to self-improvement and a realisation that things can change.

Those changes that you’ve always wanted to make can be realised by understanding what they are and how you can achieve them.

Building on your strengths and knowing your weaknesses leads to becoming a better version of yourself.

It doesn’t eliminate the characteristics that make you an individual but harnesses their capability.

Know What You Want in Life

These changes to yourself through being self-aware can lead to knowing what you want in life. This is one of the most important reasons to be self-aware.

Being self-aware means being able to recognise your goals, understand them, and manage your response to them.

This is very closely tied to emotional intelligence and the benefit of being aware of your emotions and other people’s emotions.

Finding a single goal amongst the fog of emotions and worries is difficult.

If you can’t focus on one thing and deconstruct it, then knowing what you want becomes a never-ending challenge.

Being able to manage relationships, be socially aware, and understanding emotions can help you along the path to finding happiness.

Understanding your character and capabilities will better align yourself with what you want.

Managing the pressure of goal-setting, understanding fear of the unknown, and knowing what you want, are crucial steps towards achieving.

Achieve What You Want in Life

To control what you want out of life, you need to be self-aware and claim responsibility for your emotions.

If fear, regret, or carelessness control you, achieving what you want becomes that much harder.

The importance of being self-aware and achieving lies in the comprehensive understanding of yourself that self-awareness creates.

Going back to that old saying ‘nobody knows you better than yourself’, nobody can tell you what to do.

Succeeding, be it at work or any other part of your life, comes from knowing yourself.

If you want something, then you need to understand why before pursuing it. That’s where self-awareness can lead to success.

An understanding of your behaviour can deliver a crucial understanding of other’s behaviour.

This helps you to understand the desires of others better and then find your path in life.

Becoming Self-Aware

The importance of being self-aware is substantial. It links to who you are, what you want, and eventually, what you will achieve.

“Self-awareness is the ability to take an honest look at your life without any attachment to it being right or wrong, good or bad.” – Debbie Ford

Without the ability to be self-aware, you can be quick to lose your uniqueness. Focus on the bad, not the good. Not realising what your potential is capable of.

So, how do you become self-aware?

Take a moment to think about the traits that describe you.

I don’t mean what you like to do or what is happening in your life. Think about your core values. The good and the bad. The hard to face characteristics and your proudest ones.

Have a list of your most prominent traits? Use that to answer the most important question of all: Who are you?

If you’ve taken on board the negatives and positives of your traits, your answer will be a varied mix. They are what make you unique.

The fundamental importance of being self-aware lies in those exact traits.

They hold your potential and your most significant challenges. When you start to understand these traits better, you can begin to enjoy your uniqueness.

Being self-aware is something that needs working on. Take an objective view of yourself and follow a path that utilises the best of your personality.

The only path to happiness is embracing your uniqueness and putting it to good work.

Drop a comment below, and let me know your thoughts one being self-aware. Want to know yourself better? Find out here.

Mind Your Language For Your Mindset’s Sake

Seems like many of us never stop and think about the language that we use.

I am not referring to your native language or your dialect, but those words that you use every day to express how you think and feel. The words that you use to describe what you’re doing and what you’re striving to achieve.

From the moment you learned your first words to your days at school and up to today, being exposed to new words and new uses for them continually expands your vocabulary.

And with it, your means for potentially expressing yourself. There’s something special about the language you use and something extraordinary about what it’s saying about your mindset.

The language we choose to use to express something dictates the meaning. Both to ourselves and others.

The Language Of Your Mind

Did you know that there is an Italian word, Faloppone, that describes a person who doesn’t finish anything or fulfils promises?

Or that the German word, Wanderlust, describes the urge and desire to want to travel?

There are endless ways to communicate a single thought, direction, or feeling, but not all of them will lead to communication that portrays what you truly mean or what you truly want.

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

The language that you use, both deliberately and unintentionally, can easily be interpreted. So let’s refer to the language of your mind as the way that you communicate with yourself.

Stop for a moment. Reflect on the last hour or two.

Were you communicating positive or negative messages to yourself? Were you telling yourself to try or telling yourself to succeed? Will you commit to doing something, or are you going to try to do something?

The role of language in defining your mindset starts with understanding how what you’re saying matches up with what you want to achieve.

Growth Mindset Versus Fixed Mindset

A growth mindset is having the mindset of development, knowing that to become more intelligent, you have to put in the effort to learn, improve, and grow.

A fixed mindset is the belief that you have reached your limit of growth, that there is no way to develop your intelligence further.

Which type of mindset that you employ comes down, in part, to the language that you use and the language that you’re exposed to.

An example that sums up how language plays a role in the way that we are encouraged to think involves two sentences:
‘Well done, you tried.’
and
‘Well done, try again.’

Both sentences portray a person who made some effort to achieve something and has not succeeded. But there is a big difference in the takeaway or residual impact from each sentence.

Takeaway Or Residual Impact

The first sentence congratulates the person for trying, and then puts the practice in the past tense.

The second sentence offers the same praise but keeps the practice in the present tense with a prompt to give it another go. To get back up, dust yourself off and try again.

In the second sentence, there is a focus on continuing; trying again to master the task. This task could be something simple, like teaching a child to colour between the lines, or something challenging, like learning a foreign language.

Which sentence you’re exposed to can define how you view the task. But what happens when you expose yourself to either sentence?

If your natural internal reply is the first sentence, then you conclude for yourself that there is no future in continuing; demonstrating a fixed mindset.

If your natural internal reply is the second sentence, then you are deciding to continue: demonstrating a growth mindset.

Controlling Negative Language

We are not born to stop trying at the first hurdle. If we were all destined to that fate, then the world would never have developed as it has.

We are born with a choice; keep trying until you succeed or stop when the going gets tough.

To break away from a fixed mindset, you need to learn how to control negative language.

Negative language doesn’t always feel like having a negative mindset, but it can lead to one.

In many cases, controlling negative language means substituting one word for another, changing the way that a sentence is structured, or making a decision. Instead of leaving your mind open to interpretation.

You may not even realise you’re thinking negatively until you step back and take a good look at what you’re saying and how it’s influencing your actions.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone trying to get a promotion, familiar ground for many of us.

You are waiting outside your line manager’s office, there are five other applicants up for the promotion, and all of them are equally qualified for the role.
Whats going through your mind?

If what your mind is saying is something similar to:
‘This is important, please don’t mess it up.’
or
‘Remember to mention your experience.’

Then the takeaways are going to be:
‘Mess it up.’
or
‘Mention your experience.’

We Don’t Think In Negatives

Our brains don’t factor the negative word don’t into the equation. So that phrase that was intended to be motivational leaves a negative takeaway.

What we end up picturing are scenarios where we mess up at a crucial moment or forget to do something important.

“When you change your language, you change your vision of life.” – David Brett-Williams

Now consider an alternative way of looking at the scenario.

You’re in the same situation, but different thoughts are going through your mind:
‘This is important; I’m prepared to do well.’
and
‘I will always remember to mention my experience.’

The concept of the sentences is still the same, but the takeaways are very different:
‘Do well.’
and
‘Always remember to mention.’

Now, when you go into the meeting, you’re picturing a scenario where you’re going to do well and remember to mention key points.

The simple changes can transform your entire outlook on an event; giving you the boost in confidence and the positive mindset that you need to be outstanding in any scenario.

The potential to live an outstanding life is all there: you have the vocabulary, the desire to do well, and the ability to achieve. You need to make the change and mind your language use!

Turn ‘Can’ into ‘Will’

Many of us are responsible for shelving projects, stalling, and shying away from doing what we really want to do.

Why? Because we tell ourselves that the time isn’t right, that before you can do one thing you have to do another, that we aren’t ready to dive in and do it yet.

There’s an old saying that most people hear during their childhood and its one that everyone deserves to hear:
‘You can do anything that you set your mind to.’

The simple saying holds a wealth of potential. It tells you that there are no limits, no restrictions, that what you want is entirely possible. It’s a beautiful saying, but it comes with a lot of pressure.

This is where one of the most significant changes you can make to the language of your mind comes in; the transition between can and will.

Telling yourself that you can do something is almost like a scapegoat. You’re saying that you could do it, perhaps even that you should do it, but not that you will do it.

As soon as you make the change to will, you begin a new journey; you start what you have been putting off and make the next step in your life.

Not committing to anything can fill your mind with negativity, always leaving you in that state of limbo. The freedom of saying can is one of the biggest restraints that you will put on your potential in life.

Will is a commitment; a decision to do more, and one of the simplest ways to set your mind free. With a will mindset, you give yourself the positive language you need to achieve what you want.

Understand Your Path

Its ok to be scared about committing to a new path. Change is a scary thing. But you can make it easier on yourself and make the most of your positive mindset.

Understanding where you want to go gets rid of some of that fear and uncertainty; it gives you something to aim for. Think of it as a destination that you want to reach.

Deliberation is the enemy of progress. Decisions should be thought out, but deliberation can introduce those negative language terms that cap what your mindset can achieve.

If you’re serious about changing your path and your mindset, then commit to a will and see it through to a have.

With that achievement under your belt, the next one will be easier, and you begin to discover what a positive mindset is really capable of.

Reclaim Control Over Your Mind’s Language

The best part of your mindset? It’s yours, and you have total control over it. Others can influence it of course, but at the end of the day, the language that you allow to alter it is entirely down to you.

If you’re ready to make a change and reclaim control over your mind’s language, then there are five crucial stages to the process.

The five R’s of reclaiming control: Route, Reframe, Reflect, Remove, and Refocus, will help you to identify what you want to achieve, show you how to mind your language, and decide for yourself who gets to influence your mindset.

Stage One: Route Your Course

The first step to any change is deciding that you want to change.

Making that decision is an introduction to controlling the language that you use to express yourself. As soon as you say that you will mind your language, you’re already taking a positive step.

Routing your course is giving yourself a plan to follow, setting up those first few steps that are going to start you on your journey to a more positive outlook.

Give yourself a target and strive for that. It can be anything personal to you. Got an idea for a book? Start writing. Want a new career? Take a look at the opportunities.

Stage Two: Reframe Your Mind

The language that you use likely comes very naturally to you.

Because you are used to thinking in a certain way, saying certain things, and expressing your thoughts in a set way. It’s time to take a step back and re-examine what you’re saying and how it’s influencing you.

Work on giving yourself positive reinforcement by telling yourself that you will do something.

This is a conscious step that you’re going to need to practice. It may not come overnight, and you may struggle at first, but its worth it in the end.

Stage Three: Reflect on Achievements

Success is a feeling that can fill your mind with positivity – make sure you use each and every success to your advantage. Achieved something new? Reflect on it at the end of the day and give yourself the praise that you deserve.

Every night, pick two or three things that you’ve achieved, and take note of them – enjoy what your positive language has delivered!

Stage Four: Remove Negativity

Feedback is one of the best ways to help you improve, but you should never construe feedback as negative.

Rather, if your life is filled with people that can only see negatives in positive experiences, then it is time to re-evaluate.

You should never give control over how you feel to anybody else if you’re setting out to achieve something. Most of all, focus on feedback that offers value, not feedback that takes it away.

Stage Five: Refocus Your Attention

When something doesn’t go to plan, then refocus your attention, discover what went wrong and find a new solution.

Never allow your mindset to slip into negativity just because something hasn’t gone the way you wanted. The key to minding your language is to remember how important it is when the pressure is on!

Your mindset can give you the determination to carry on, the strength to achieve new things, and lead the way to a happier and more fulfilling life.

If you give yourself the language that you need to nurture your mindset, you’re allowing it to grow and deliver on its potential.

We could say that minding your language for your mindset’s sake is easy, but it can be challenging.

What we can focus on is to start every day with an I will and end every day with an I have; give your mindset the best chance to guide you in the right direction.

Drop a comment below, and let me know how you use language to enhance your mindset. Want to develop a better mindset? Find out here.