How awake are you to your life?
Do you consider yourself to be a self-aware person?
Are you aware of your emotional and spiritual world?
Self-Awareness is knowing your true self. It is knowing your values, beliefs, attitudes, strengths, limitations. It is also about being honest and genuine with yourself. When you are honest and genuine with yourself you can be open, honest and genuine within your relationships.
I have found that self-aware people will be proactive with life rather than reactive. They are more positive in life and have a deeper appreciation of experiences. They are also more likely to be compassionate to themselves and others.
Self-awareness means we are able to observe ourselves and it is this journey of exploring ourselves that makes life worth living. We stop putting our heads in the sand, we can quickly change our state, we can feel alive as compared to be a zombie trudging through the day to day of life.
By becoming confident of the person, I am, has allowed me to awaken from the sleep I was in. I have been able to understand why I was behaving a certain way and that hiding myself away was not making me happy. Now I am able to be open about my dreams, take part in my life, be proactive as to how my life is evolving.
Having emotional balance is crucial to having balance overall in your life to be able to handle negative emotional experiences. If we have emotional experiences daily it can take a toll on our wellbeing.
Learning about your emotional intelligence can serve you immensely.
If you do not address your emotions, your mind and body will become strained. They cause stress if left without action and it is said that we are “…twice as likely to experience anxiety, depression, substance abuse and thoughts of suicide.” (Emotional Intelligence 2.0 Bradberry and Greaves 2006).
When we are aware of our emotions and use this to guide our behaviour our wellbeing increases, we have greater levels of happiness and balance.
Have you heard someone or yourself say, ‘I couldn’t help it’, ‘it was outside my control,’ ‘I didn’t mean it?’ This is where we have let our emotions take over or we are not conscious of what the emotions are that are hijacking our responses.
Our conscious mind needs time to catch up so remember when we get told to count to 10 if you are angry? This actually is true as by taking the time to do the count you let your conscious mind catch up so you can deliver a considered response rather than a reaction.
I use slow breathing when I have a strong emotional response to something. When I used to have big barneys with my partner I could end up saying something hurtful, be vulgar, be hysterical and later I would not understand where that came from. Now I breathe before I say anything and then I give a considered response.
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