Trailheads & Pivot Points

Cultivating greater self-awareness will serve you well throughout a lifetime of on-going self discovery and continual personal growth. Let’s start with a working definition of self-awareness:

Self-awareness is the ability to understand your own thoughts, emotions and behaviors AND how they impact you and others.

Now that you have strong foundational building blocks to work with, tapping into your self-awareness becomes much easier. Use these foundational building blocks as frames of reference for growing and expanding your self-awareness.

For example, if you find that you are struggling to meet a rather benign moment without a lot of emotional reactivity, you can do a little check-in on your body budget. Are you hungry, tired, brain-drained, dehydrated. If you were better resourced, it would be easier to meet the present moment in a right-sized, mature manner.

If you find yourself emotionally triggered, blowing your stack or having a meltdown, you can remember that emotions are just data and not launch pads. Begin to recognize and label your emotions with the same neutrality that you do for a “check engine” light on your car. Work with your emotions to identify the source of your reactivity so that you can attend to the right issue with a level-head. Your emotional intelligence is calling attention to what is important to you.

An added benefit of paying closer attention to your emotional intelligence is that it helps you get a lot of clarity about your values and what matters most. Is there a pattern to your emotional trip wires even though there may much variability in the circumstances and situations? Get more curious about the pattern of an emotional trigger to lessen its grip.

Another place to develop more self-awareness is when you notice that you are limiting yourself or self-sabotaging the very goals you want the most. Are you trapped in a fixed mindset with very restrictive beliefs about your potential and abilities? Pivot to a growth mindset and open up to possibilities and unlimited potential. Remember that everyone started from scratch at some point in their life. You haven’t mastered it — yet! That word “yet” is a lever you can pull to shift you into a growth mindset. We are all “works in progress”.

Perhaps one of the most relevant foundational blocks to use for cultivating an abundance of self-awareness is storytelling. What is the story you are telling yourself? Is it helpful, kind and true? Or is it just an old story that is in dire need of editing and updating? Don’t let the main character of your life stay stuck in the trap of old stories.

Remember too, that when it comes to storytelling, we often create a cautionary tale based on what we believe other people may be thinking about us. Brene Brown suggests this simple practice to help reframe and rethink stories that we make up about our interactions with others: Say this outloud — “the story I am telling myself is (fill in the blank). ” When we say outloud the stories that are in our heads, it also helps us to do a little “reality check”.

When you can use body budget, emotional intelligence, growth mindset and storytelling as the frames of reference for self-awareness, it becomes much easier to be an objective observer of YOU.

That is the core of self-awareness; an ability to objectively observe yourself and learn how your thoughts, emotions and behaviors are shaping your life, impacting your decisions, your goals and your relationships.

RELATABLE BLOG POSTS: