How Self-Awareness Can Change Your Life

What is the meaning of Self-Awareness?

Dictionary meaning of Self-awareness is conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives and desires.

“We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in the future can be produced by our present actions ; so we have to know how to act.” By Swami Vivekanand

Keeping Swami Vivekanand’s quote in mind, let’s understand how self-awareness motivates people to take the path of Self Development, brings real Happiness in their life and help them achieve Success in Personal and Professional front.

How Self-awareness is going to help you?

Through Self-awareness, you are actually consciously fine tuning your mind-set in such a manner that you start paying attention to your character, emotions, motives, desires, thoughts, actions, reactions in different situations.

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Basically you start living in the present moment and start understanding situations and your reactions to those situations in an unbiased manner.

You become fully aware of your strengths and weakness and accept them with full humility. Once you accept reality, it becomes a lot easier for you to work upon overcoming your shortcomings. 

Awareness about your character – Character is a combination of traits and qualities distinguishing the individual nature of a person. It is important for all of us to clearly understand our character. We all face testing times both on Professional and Personal front. In these situations, our realistic assessment about our characteristic traits helps us in effective handling of the situations.

One of my friends gave me an interesting perspective relating to character. He told me whenever they had a fight as a couple, his wife had the habit of coming out with a long list of faults and wrong doings on the part of her In-laws. And after that she used to use all sorts of abusive language for them.

My friend on the other hand could hardly recall any incidents so that he could rebut. But bad mouthing for his parents always made him sad. So in order to teach a lesson to his wife, he decided to copy her style and pay back in similar fashion.

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So for next two months, whenever there was a fight, he would say all bad things about his In-laws. During all those fights, wife used to start crying because this time around, abusive language was being used for her parents.

My friend told me after 3 months, “i stopped this”. It was because, one fine day a thought came in his mind that the pain on the face of his wife was not at all making him happy. Though he may have taken revenge from his wife, but her trauma used to make my friend also sad.

He realized it was not in his DNA to go to such a level even if it was only for the purpose of teaching his wife a lesson. Even if it was Tit For Tat, he didn’t want to pursue it. Actually his act was ruining his own Happiness.

Awareness about your Emotions – You can’t allow your emotions to rule your life. You need to recognize and understand your emotions. We all have the power to control our emotions. But very few of us are aware about it and exercise it. 

“If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.” By Daniel Goleman  

Awareness about your Motives and Desires – One should be very clear about his Goals and Desires. We should be fully aware about our Long Term Goals as well as Short Term Goals. This helps in aligning actions in the short term keeping larger goals in mind.

We all know that whenever we have clearly defined task in hand and we are highly focused on achieving it, there’s high probability that we will accomplish it. Same way if we are not clear what we want to achieve from our precious Human Life, how is it possible that finally we will end our journey happily, peacefully and with a sense of accomplishment.

But the sad part is that most of us are completely ignorant about the purpose of our life.

Awareness about your Thoughts – We all under estimate the power of thoughts. Both positive and negative thoughts keep cropping in our mind. Success is always a result of actions taken on the basis of positive thoughts in our mind.

Negative attitude or mind-set on the other hand is a major factor leading to fear of failure, inaction and ultimately resulting in failures.

But very few of us realize that God has given us the power to choose one thought over another. God has given us the choice to feed the mind with positive thoughts don’t allow Negative thoughts to take charge of our mind.

We may not have control on the tough situations faced by us in real life. But we have the option of deciding our actions to overcome the situations with a positive mind-set. And we know that the probability for Success with a Positive mind-set will always be very high.

Awareness about your actions and reactions in different situations – We should pay attention to our actions and reactions in different situations. Have you ever noticed that when we are generally in happy state of mind, even if the other person irritates us or does something to provoke us, we tend to remain calm and composed and avoid confrontation?

However when we are in disturbed state of mind, even at the slightest provocation or many times, even if the other person didn’t want to hurt us, still we overreact and get provoked easily.

Are you now able to understand how your state of mind takes control of your actions and reactions?

Can your awareness change your reactions in these situations? The answer is of course yes.

Brahmakumari Sister Shivani explains this beautifully. She says no matter how much the other person abuse us; he cannot actually hurt our feelings till the time we accept to get hurt. If we tell our mind that we don’t agree with what the other person is saying and i am not going to be bothered by the hate words of other person, and you are willing to forgive other person believing that he is ignorant, his best of efforts can no more hurt your feelings.   

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I believe if you start paying attention to the above mentioned points, slowly your Self Awareness will start improving. This will make you more composed and you will have more control on your mind. And this Self Awareness will ultimately give you everlasting Peace, Happiness and Success in your life.

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