Embrace Yourself with These Five Tips!

How well do you think you know yourself? Or you know about life and self-awareness? Well, there may not be any tests or questionnaire to rate your knowledge as this is not any general knowledge to gain or lose. All you have is yourself and your level of awareness with life. Before you ponder on your life awareness skills and see how you go about improving it, try and see if you truly know what you mean by self-awareness.

As quoted by a famous philosopher, self-awareness is the ability to take an honest look at your life without attachment to it being right or wrong. Simply say, self-awareness is about focusing awareness on yourself. It's the ability to notice your feelings, your reactions, your habits, your behaviors, and your thoughts. Through watching yourself, you will be aware of all those different aspects of yourself as if you were another person observing you. Another manner in which you can become better self-aware, is to pay attention to your intuition, which some refer to as their sixth sense or gut feeling. Or, to put it in even layman terms, self-awareness is all about being honest with yourself.

Try to review your "self" with these tips!

There are many facets to self-awareness and how to improve it so that it enhances every area in one's life. At the same time, self-awareness should not be confused with self-realization, as the latter is a much deeper process of self-awareness that has not to do with one's "worldly" life, or even their mental well-being while self-awareness has much to do with one's mindset, attitude, habits, opinions, feelings, goals, beliefs, values, and so on. So here are five tips that can act as your awareness boosters!

1. "Why" should you backup your decision making?

If you want to feel more confident about your actions or want solid reasoning to backup your decisions/challenges that you are going to take on, simply ask "why?" three times. Until you successfully gain enough self-awareness on the decisions that you make, you are going to keep asking "why?" instead of asking it later in regret.

2. Monitor your self-talk.

Needless to say, self-talk is many a times perpetual and as this mindless chatter goes on and on, at times it eventually leads us out of control. Hence, it calls for some monitoring on our part to regulate this self-talk, as too much of it will only clutter our awareness instead of raising it.

3. Mirror back on yourself, not others!—Use self SWOT analysis.

We often pride our prejudices and judgments about others, but why not do the same minus the prejudice and judgment on ourselves? This calls for greater self-improvement and accountability on our deficiencies, rather than just acknowledging our defects.

Analyze your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats every time you face a challenge or a crisis concerning the goals you wish to achieve in life, social, personal, or professional. Unless you are aware even of your hidden skills and talents, you cannot call yourself a self-aware personality.

4. Keeping a diary is for keeps.

Maintaining a journal every day is one of the best habits to see tangible results in the journey of becoming better aware of thyself. All your progress and patterns can be tracked and recorded in a journal, which enables you to set goals and break them into smaller, more attainable targets. Sigh!

5. Challenge your presumptions!

Do you sense your brain has an excellent workout as your neural connections are well stimulated whenever you question your assumptions and beliefs, rather than defend them or argue them with other's viewpoints? Of course, there can be healthier arguments too, but to get a better view of things, it's always fine to question your thoughts and belief systems.

So apart from practicing the above tips, you can try meditation, yoga, mindfulness, etc. to have a better hold over your mind and body and keep anxiety and stress at bay. Breathing exercises are practiced and recommended by many to focus more on thyself, helping us to improve our self-awareness and to reduce the production of stress hormones.