The Power of Awareness: How to Increase Your Self-Awareness for Personal and Professional Growth
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Awareness is the foundation for change. Without it, initiating any type of conscious change is impossible. With little or no awareness, we move through life like zombies, marionettes, or leaves blown by the wind.
Awareness is the knowledge or perception of a situation or fact. One of the characteristics of awareness is that it cannot be undone: Once we become aware of something or someone, we cannot unlearn it.
The Law of Being says that who you are being is based on your level of conscious awareness of who you really are. For us “to be”, we need to increase our awareness. Only then can we decide whom and what we will attract, and what kind of life we want to create for ourselves.
One of the main aspects of my work as a coach is to create awareness for my clients through thought-provoking questions and observations.
Increasing our awareness has many advantages such as enhancing our emotional intelligence, managing stress, reducing judgment and fear, and taking back control of any situation.
“Awareness is all about restoring your freedom to choose what you want instead of what your past imposes on you.” Deepak Chopra, author and alternative-medicine advocate, physician and public speaker
How can we increase our awareness?
1) Know Thyself
Self-awareness means understanding your belief system, values, thoughts, feelings, and emotional responses. Realizing what is happening within and around you at any given point is crucial. This includes understanding what causes you stress as well as influencers and obstacles that may block your energy.
Once we have this knowledge, we can choose to either continue what we are doing or try something new – we can determine our attitude and not be subject to repeating past reactions.
My client Harold was promoted to lead a new group at his company. One of his goals is to become a strategic thinker and planner. Having a new team and book of work presented him with a unique opportunity to learn this skill. During our session, through a series of questions, we discovered that Harold did not feel in control of his own destiny – life had thrown him many curve balls resulting in conditioning him to not dare to plan for the future. Once he had this realization about himself, Harold now had a choice: would he continue to be afraid of planning for the future or would he use his past experience to create stronger plans with multiple contingencies?
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” C.G. Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist
2) Distinguish Between True and Truth
One key component of awareness is that of reality, which is the ability to discern what is actually happening from our mind’s interpretation of what is occurring.
When we describe an event with added stories and explanations, we create what is true for us, rather than the objective Truth (i.e., the facts of what actually happened).
I love an anecdote about Mariano Rivera, New York Yankee World Series Most Valuable Player. In describing his job, he said “I get the ball, I throw the ball, and then I take a shower.” I think we can all agree this description is factual.
The next time you are analyzing an event, pay attention to the words you are using such as good, bad, should have, etc., which are associated with judgment. Try to recount the event following Mariano Rivera’s job description and stick only to the facts, which do not have ego, emotion, or judgment attached to them.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anaïs Nin, writer
3) Go Deep
To increase our awareness, we want to consider both what we see and what we do not in a situation. For example, if someone is curt with you at work, you can see their facial expression, hear their words and tone of voice. But what you cannot see is the fight they had with their partner that morning.
Similarly, when we are not performing to the best of our ability, we could have apparent reasons like having issues with the Internet connection or receiving questions we did not expect during the presentation. But there may be small factors that may seem unrelated, and we may discount them as unimportant. For example, if we did not have a proper breakfast, we may not have enough physical energy to conduct a performance review. If our new shoes are not comfortable, it may be challenging to stand and deliver an awesome presentation to a new customer.
“Awareness is like the sun. When it shines on things, they are transformed.” Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk and activist
One More Thing Before You Go
Awareness is a superpower we want to constantly develop. The more we have it the more we want and need it.
Increasing our awareness takes practice and it is the base for any personal and professional development goals we have.
Awareness is to our negative emotions like the sun is to vampires or what love is to Voldemort. It significantly debilitates them. Once we become aware of the messages from our judge, they lose their power over us. Once we realize that there could be a number of reasons why our boss is acting differently this morning, we release our fear.
By making conscious choices to move past judgment, stories, and explanations we will pivot faster, create different outcomes, and see many more options at our disposal.
How do you go about increasing your awareness? Please, let us know in the comments.
As a leadership coach, I enable talent to achieve bold goals with high standards. My mission is to empower underrepresented women in the financial industry transition from mid to senior level leadership positions using mental fitness to achieve peak performance, peace of mind, and healthier relationships.