Managing healthy self-awareness

I see you clicked in for vacation to let your mind be free, do read on my previous post on "Can you be too self-aware?" for more information. It will definitely help you to manage self-awareness better.

Self-awareness is made as a choice on where your attention is directed at. It is proven by researchers that self-awareness is developed as a trait, a set of habits you learn to cultivate. There are some common habits and practices in the wide spectrum of self-awareness:

1. Listen more than talk

- Deliberating self-reflection in your own way is the way to facilitate its function to a certain level, but we can build effective self-awareness skills through learning from each other, meaning to socialize around.

To simply being around others won’t do the trick. The true self-awareness needs to come from genuine interaction with people, especially in face-to-face conversations. A good conversation is when your mind is inspired and realizing personalities on a meaningful level of relationships.

By listening to others, opening your heart to really listen and managing your own thoughts before formulating an opinion. The habit of being a good listener is a learning process to undo unhealthy habits and develop a deeper listening. To do so, you should not listen to yourself, put aside any ideas or thoughts when conversing with others.

2. Curious about your own mind

- The habit of thinking differs in the patterns of thought for individuals. Our nature of curiosity and observations led us to have curiosity and create our own worlds such as we can identify a pattern of pessimistic thinking in certain situations and see optimism in others.

- The core reason that a person finds it difficult to be curious about oneself when he or she constantly judges himself or herself.

- To ease the overly-judgemental and let curiosity in our minds to arise, the need of practicing gentleness with ourselves help us to reconstruct the way we speak to our inner self. It's like treating a friend, you offer gentleness and honesty to him or her.

3. Searching for emotional blind spots

- Emotional blind spots are areas of our emotional self ignored because it may be painful to acknowledge. It takes less courage to face the problem and investigate the way we are affected, it could a having a conflict with life events or people we know.

- Knowing the cause of pain, the emotions we experienced and how we subconsciously knows but neglected. And by ignoring the emotion that impacted our life with major changes, the effective method is to seek that feeling proactively.

- To use words to describe that emotion, it is useful to identify it accurately and confront the negative result of hiding the emotions can help to look outside of the toxic repetitive behaviors for solutions.

4. Asks for feedback and take it well (most of the time)

- We can't always see ourselves through other people's eyes, there really no trick to be more objective about ourselves. What all of us are afraid of are bed feedbacks and can be scary.

- Regulate a healthy review of our behaviours and enhance for the better, we need to find the right person who knows you well. Maybe someone whom you respect and ask them to observe any patterns or tendencies in our behaviours and possible to identify such repeated cycles as causes.

- Putting aside the fear to face our shortcomings, we need that honest feedback and be ready to take it well which also means good management of our defensive side. By doing so, we mature emotionally and less overwhelmed by criticism that might be hurtful or painful.

5. Reflect on one's values

- To acknowledge pain, fears and insecurities, we are getting clear about our values, how important it it for us and how to pursue after it. Too much self-reflection leads to a consistent mechanism of regular reflecting and consider you values. The factors that you are always aware of is what you are unconsciously avoiding, also what you clearly strive for.

- It is a thin line between genuine values and fake values can stray us from being realistic and meet the expectations of others.

- A great method is to start with a bucket list. Set aside your busy lifestyle, take a break and have some time to jot down things you would love to achieve or learn or do, it can be something you dream about doing. It is a good exercise for our minds to have some clarification on our values and think of what we should prioritize in our lives.

It is said that to be highly self-aware of yourself has its reasons, such as experiencing pains or traumas during childhood, leaving the young self with vulnerability and afraid of one thing or another. Hence, developing an "emotional shield" in the form of psychological defense mechanisms in order to protect that weaker self. An example will be how some people numb emotional pain with food, or alcohol, or anything that is useful for distraction.

Taking that this continued on, when reaching adulthood, the side effect of not facing our unhappiness leads to self-sabotage, in which the means to numb the emotions escalates. It becomes more harmful such as getting into broken relationships, addictions, even violence.

Fundamentally, it is necessary to shed the emotional baggage and don't let any negativity go unaddressed. Believing that success or happiness is possible and you can feel better if you release the weight of your "emotional shield".

The first logical step is to redirect it off yourself. When you find yourself feeling conscious about the way you present yourself, shift your attention onto others. In a social event, you can bring the topic of conversation onto the people and start building rapport with them.

Then, don't focus on how nervous you are and your feelings at different times that make you anxious. To do it comfortably in a conversation, you redirect the spotlight on another person by dishing out a question that sparks your curiosity or even to get to know them more.

With practice, repeating this process will relieve the stress you are feeling and allow yourself to take note of what's happening in your surroundings, except yourself.