What Does It Mean to Be Self-Aware?
Awareness, a word some of us may often hear being thrown around. A word that thanks to social media may bring an idea or image to your head but may not exactly bring with it a definition. So what does it mean to be self-aware or aware? Let's find out.
Creating awareness meaning
The term becoming aware might sound familiar if you’ve been in therapy or like I’ve said, frequent social media. It’s an important concept that means having the ability to observe yourself and your thoughts. Self-awareness is something that grows as we spend more time getting to know and understand ourselves.
As we go about living we may come to certain points in life where nothing seems to work or everything seems to go wrong. We may feel frustrated and stuck in our partnerships, at our job, or with ourselves. We may even find ourselves in similar situations over and over again wondering why. Moments such as these are usually when our awareness starts to expand. At this point many of us start to become curious as to why life may not be going the way we imagined it so. As we start exploring the possible reasons for these negative feelings or this hardness in life we may start on our journey to understand the direct role we’ve played in these outcomes. We start getting curious about our behavior and thoughts. This slowly starts building our understanding of ourselves. This is what raising awareness means.
How does self-awareness serve us
So why is awareness important? Or what does it mean to lack self-awareness? If you’ve ever paid attention you might notice that when you sit quietly somewhere without doing much you might start to hear an inner voice. If you think back, you might realize this inner voice is always there. A voice that’s always commenting on everything happening outside of you, you might as well call it an inner critic. When our awareness is not yet expanded we may unknowingly believe that these thoughts are who we are, meaning we identify with these thoughts therefore reacting and acting from them. The problem with identifying with our thoughts is that this “inner critic” is made up of our past experiences and beliefs that we’ve been taught over the years. It’s made up of our protecting mechanisms or defenses that may cause us to react and behave in ways that may not align with who we want to become. Remember that the number one goal of our protecting behavior or mechanisms is to keep us safe, if you’d like a bit more information on this check out, “How to Overcome Negative Self-Talk.”
As you might imagine, creating and raising awareness slowly starts shifting the way in which we view the world. This impacts how we move about the world. It gives us the opportunity to approach and solve our situations differently since we are now questioning the thoughts present in our mind. Remember that the thoughts we usually have are made up of past experiences, our reactions to these past experiences, and the beliefs we were taught. A thought rooted in fear that might’ve once kept us from achieving something may shift to simply being a fear that’s now accepted and validated but not keeping us stuck and frozen. Raising awareness helps us bloom in the following ways:
Starting the journey of learning to love ourselves deeply
Being more intentional with the way we treat ourselves and others
Moving from places of fear and judgment
Forming a relationship with our mind
Questioning the thoughts that form and take up space in our mind is a helpful tool to have since it gives us the ability to ask ourselves whether a current thought serves our highest self or not. Once again, getting curious about the thoughts that are often circulating our mind will influence our actions and how we go about living. It gives us the ability to choose what we want in our life and what no longer serves us. As we start to notice this inner world of thoughts it’s important to keep in mind that some thoughts are simply jibber jabber. To the perfectionists out there, make sure not to spend too much time on every single thought you have. Some thoughts are simply meaningless. Practice letting thoughts come and go and most importantly remember to be kind to yourself. Move away from judging your thoughts to being an understanding witness.
