Self Awareness During Unsettled Times

In response to the current events around COVID-19 and the level of fear and uncertainty it brings with it, I see it’s brought out a lot of stressors in our communities near and far.

I think it is important to talk about self-awareness today, in light of this situation and how important it is to draw attention to working towards or improving our levels of self-awareness.

I’d like to start this with: self awareness is an on-going internal relationship and action we have with ourselves.

Understanding that we can continuously work on this skill as it takes time to have realizations turn into an action.

Self awareness is defined as an ability we have (or can build) to determine how we feel or what is coming up for us in different situations before reacting or ‘putting our foot in our mouth.’

From the acknowledgement of our feelings we can then operate from a place of purpose and how we are feeling, what is triggering us and how we want to respond.

It takes our brain six (6) seconds essentially to switch gears or change the chemical balance potentially from a negative to a positive. In those six seconds it’s extremely important to look for a positive opportunity for learning or view how your actions and words will impact the person or people you are speaking to.

Today, self-awareness is a great core skill to have because it does things like:

Strengthen conversations

Improve our relationships

Help us self identify our fears and where they’re coming from

Help demystify false beliefs or beliefs that no longer serve you

Point us in the right direction for positive interactions and reduce negative responses to others

Give us a feeling of freedom in presence to productively contribute to conversations (vs. getting tied up in our emotions and reacting directly from those emotions)

There are many things that we can do to ensure we’re discovering and building on our self-awareness. Things like:

Asking for feedback from loved ones or even peers, journaling, investing in a coach or assessment tool

Reflecting or taking moments (from a place of constructive criticism) to look at our conversations we’ve had throughout the day with the intent to identify how we were feeling – very happy, sad, triggered, or upset and how did we react?

Do we think about our actions or words before putting them out there to the universe or to the other person we’re communicating with?

I encourage everyone to take a moment and think about how the recent impacts of the COVID-19 have impacted our self-awareness: are we in a reactive mode or are we in a place of reflection and purposeful action?

I hope that this quick self-awareness moment has helped you and prompted you to think about your interactions with others.

If you’d like to discover more, feel free to schedule a one-on-one consultation.