Building Self-Awareness: 5 Tools And Exercises To Understand Yourself Better

Self-awareness is the vital ability to turn your focus on yourself and how your emotions, actions or thoughts align – or don’t align – with your personal internal standards. 

When your self-awareness is high, it becomes easier to manage emotions, evaluate yourself objectively, understand the ways other people perceive you and align your personal behavior with your innermost values. 

 

Here are five tools and exercises that will help you understand yourself better: 

1. Use a thought diary. 

 

Thought diaries build foundations for increasing your self-awareness. They also:

• Track thoughts that are automatic for you.

• Track what occurs that brings on the thoughts. 

• Track how you react emotionally to stimuli. 

 

If you have the time, thought diaries help you to analyze why you experience the emotions you feel. 

 

2. Do something that is new to you.

 

Placing yourself deliberately outside your comfort zone reveals a great deal to you, helping you to determine:

• What you’re comfortable with

• What you do and don’t enjoy

• Where your fear boundary is

 

New activities for you could include learning about new topics. Ask yourself “why” you feel the way you do, to discover the root reason why you wish to do something. 

 

3. Use coaching or therapy. 

 

With coaching, you’ll be tapping into your innermost motivations. This helps you to create a plan for making changes. You can set goals for self-awareness in the future and outline the clearest path to self-improvement. 

 

Therapy allows you to learn a great deal about yourself. Trained professionals are helpful in learning to unpack experiences from your past and to better understand your own behaviors.

 

4. Listen to your inner voice.

 

The words you use daily have profound impacts, helping to shape your relationship with others, things and ultimately yourself. 

 

Many people talk to themselves, and it’s a natural but undervalued skill. It will:

 

• Stimulate useful self-reflection

• Increase your motivation

• Connect you more fully with your emotions

 

There is a correlation between talking to yourself frequently and attaining a higher level of self-evaluation and self-awareness. Using positive words is more helpful. Pay close attention to your own voice – do you speak to yourself in ways you might not let others speak to you? 

 

Also be attentive to the ways in which you respond to success and failure. Your inner voice subconsciously creates valuable feedback loops, which can be turned into positive or negative experiences. 

 

Using phrases like “I have to,” “I can’t” or “I shouldn’t” may limit your potential, as they create a more negative attitude. 

 

5. Practice yoga.

 

Yoga is at once a physical and a mental practice. When you stretch, bend and flex your body, your mind learns self-acceptance, discipline and self-awareness. You’ll become more fully aware of your own body and the feelings you manifest. You’ll also become aware of the workings of your mind and the thoughts that are generated subconsciously. 

You can also pair your yoga with meditation of mindfulness in order to more fully boost your self-awareness. 

 

Conclusion

 

Self-awareness is a vital aspect of your personal growth and subsequent development. It basically refers to your ability to recognize your own behaviors, thoughts and emotions. 

This self-awareness will allow you to more fully understand yourself, including your values, beliefs, strengths and weaknesses. 

 

If you seek professional or personal growth, it’s important to develop a keen sense of self-awareness. It will serve as a strong foundation for effectively managing emotions, making well-informed decisions, building stronger relationships and achieving fulfilment on a personal level. 

 

If you are keenly self-aware, you will better understand your aspirations, goals and motivations, which will enable you to align your actions accordingly. 

 

References

 

https://positivepsychology.com/building-self-awareness-activities/

https://www.betterup.com/blog/self-awareness-activities

https://positivepsychology.com/self-awareness-matters-how-you-can-be-more-self-aware/

 

Baggage Be Gone: How To Let Go Of Emotional Weight

Per Sabrina Romanoff, a clinical psychologist, in an article published in Very Well Mind, emotional baggage “...refers to unfinished emotional issues, stressors, pain, and difficulties we’ve experienced that continue to take up space in our minds and affect our present relationships”

 

In other words, the psychological wounds we carry prevent us from living peacefully. Worse, emotional baggage can lead to ongoing stress and depression, and even begin to create physical issues. It’s not uncommon for people with lots of emotional baggage to experience panic attacks, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, and insomnia. 

 

Though we all carry some sort of emotional baggage throughout our lives, the happiest people are those who learn to control their emotional baggage instead of allowing it to control them. Of course, this is easier said than done. 

 

However, we have some helpful tips on how to let go of the emotional weight so you can start living freely. 

 

Identify What Caused It

 

Think of addressing your emotional baggage like mold remediation. Though your goal is to treat the mold, you first have to identify what caused it because it doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. The same concept applies to this. 

 

If you carry guilt or commitment issues - two very common types of emotional weight - then it’s not enough to just accept what happened or just jump into a relationship to prove you’re okay. Doing so may lead to temporary satisfaction, but nothing sustainable. Instead, you need to figure out why these feelings exist. Like the mold, you have to get down to the real cause and treat that before you can address anything else. 

 

For example, the root cause of commitment issues could be anything from fear of rejection or abandonment that stems from childhood or having experienced abuse in a previous relationship. By identifying the root cause, you can then address its symptoms.

 

Seek Therapy 

 

If you’re dealing with an emotional weight that’s beginning to get too heavy to carry, then one way you can start to let go is by letting someone else help you with the load. One way to do this is by seeking the guidance and support of a licensed therapist.

 

In therapy, you can address your past and how it’s currently infringing on your life. Furthermore, you’ll get a chance to address what you don’t like about the baggage, which can help motivate you to unpack it. 

 

Though therapy has become a little more expensive in recent years, there are affordable options through apps like BetterHelp. Many therapists also work on a sliding scale or even on a pro bono basis, so don’t be afraid to ask about those options. 

 

Learn to Sit With Uncomfortable Emotions

 

One of the main reasons why we tend to hold onto emotional baggage is because we don’t take the time to process it. 

 

Though everyone has their coping mechanisms, it’s never healthy to avoid your emotions or try pushing them under the rug. Even if you do that - and think things are okay for a little while - they will eventually pop up again the next time you encounter a similar emotion or situation. 

 

A good example would be grief. If you don’t take the time to feel sad and angry, you may not be equipped to take care of yourself or be a strong support system for others when they, too, eventually encounter loss. 

 

It’s going to be uncomfortable but sit with your sadness when you start feeling sad. Cry when you feel like crying. Scream when you feel angry. Starting out, and to make this easier, you can even set a timer so you’re only dealing with these negative emotions within a window you feel comfortable with. 

 

When you do this, you take the power back from these emotions, so they no longer control you. With enough practice and time, you’ll be able to encounter a sad moment instead of allowing the emotional weight of a trigger to ruin your entire day. 

 

These are just a few of the best ways you can begin to let go of emotional baggage. While we all have emotional weight, you don’t have to let it rule over you. There’s a grace in allowing yourself to be human and remember that what words or actions hurt you in the past don’t have to be your identifiers forever.