Self-awareness is the foundational emotional intelligence skill needed to learn to live life in peace. It’s about being conscious of your thoughts, feelings, and behavior.
To develop your self-awareness, you can put into practice these five steps:
Know What Triggers Your Emotion
Negative emotions like anger, fear, shame, and sadness are triggered by people we know, situations we encounter, and our thoughts and feelings. When we don’t practice self-awareness these triggers tend to trip us up time again for the same reason. The key is to go back and examine the source of the trigger. You become self-aware by becoming conscious of the way your emotions are affected by your thoughts and felt in your body.
Reflect On Ways To Respond To Your Environment.
Becoming a hostage to your own emotion caused by thoughts and circumstances might will make you sad. To overcome it, take time out daily to respond to your attitude towards the emotions around you. Feel the emotion that you may have felt during an incident that concerns you and allow the emotion to pass through you without judging yourself.
Think Before Reacting To Things.
When you start practicing self-awareness, you observe yourself and react to a change in behavior because you know what’s going on inside you, and how your body language is affecting people around you. Not responding to things quickly might trigger you to lag behind. Evaluate what’s in front of you, around you, and then choose the most appropriate response.
Find Out What Makes You Happy.
To be self-aware isn’t only about having feelings that trigger negative emotions, it’s about knowing what makes you happy. Happiness comes in different ways, it could be pleasant and it could be cheerful. Knowing your feelings of happiness and working out what makes you feel that way is the most important.
Don’t Be Fooled By A Good Or Bad Decision
Your decisions are based on your mood and sometimes it might be regrettable. Self-awareness practice makes us step back from making instant decisions no matter how much we might enjoy the shot of dopamine it gives us. If you allow your mood to decide for you, you remain at the mercy of your emotions. In making decisions based on emotion and reason and not regret it, draw a line down the center of a page, on the left-hand side write down all the things you feel about the decision, and on the right-hand side all the things you think about the decision.
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