When talking about thinking, feeling and ultimately growing, we must start with ourselves. Working on our self-awareness can help us better navigate our life path. That said, this can be a challenging skill to develop initially; looking at ourselves and thinking of our thoughts, aka meta-cognition, is not something that comes naturally to us as human beings. Even the task of reflection can be tricky, we have blind-spots and ego-defence mechanisms such as denial. To fully look at ourselves honestly in all aspects can be a challenging task but we can develop our skills in this area.

Most of us are here because we want to become better versions of ourselves; to try and be better than yesterday, to gain more understanding and developing personal self-awareness. Due to the tactics our minds can play to protect ourselves, this is not something we can do in an instant; often, greater awareness comes with putting ourselves out there, experiencing new things, doing new things and then reflecting on each of our experiences. Whatever our age, there will always be things we are yet to discover about ourselves, as long as there are things we still haven’t tried.

Developing self-awareness skills might not be easy at first, especially as some experiences might bring up difficult feelings or perceptions, but if we can commit to courage and truly facing ourselves, we can grow beyond our own expectations and reach our ultimate goal, which some might consider to be self-actualisation.

Some of us might be hoping to completely change our lives, or simply experience greater sense pf happiness and joy, but both might be finding difficulty in seeing the light, or the next steps to take. One thing that we need to keep awareness of on our journey, is our mind’s tendency towards negative or unhelpful thinking. We might think unhelpful thoughts, such as, ‘why me?’, ‘life is so unfair’, ‘if only x, y, z, would happen’, ‘if only x, y, z, didn’t happen’. These ideas can put metaphorical rocks and glass on our paths to self-development and prevent us from growing around life events.

The most successful people in this world did not waste time thinking of how things hindered them but how these “hinderances” could advance them. This includes getting to know why such adversity made them the best person for the job, and how it taught them more experience or skills that otherwise could not have been learned. That said, this statement is not to downplay any situation that has caused pain or suffering, but to look at how these experiences might have have developed us as individuals, and how we can use their own uniqueness to better ourselves, and even those around us.

Another type of unhelpful thinking that can happen is the tendency to not fully face ourselves in complete honesty. We might blame others, or our circumstances, or where we came from. But to what extent are we holding ourselves back with these kinds of ideas?

We might feel that people are ‘always letting us down’, but perhaps it is our expectations of others that are letting us down. Are we being unfair to ourselves, or have we developed a set of tools for life that aren’t fit for purpose (ever tried hammering screws into a wall anyone)? Perhaps we can develop a new set of tools that are fit for the life we want.

In order to fully develop our tools to be fit for purpose, we first need to garner understanding of what it is we truly want from life.

We live in a world where we are constantly told what we should want, who we should be, where we need to go; but this is simply a prescription from others, not designed by ourselves. We can spend our entire life chasing the dreams of others only to find in the end we are not satisfied despite all of our efforts.

We can better assist ourselves by getting to know who we are, what our values are, what we like and dislike. Here, we can start from the smallest factors in our lives and develop upwards, getting strong in these ideas and committing to live by them, while also making time to constantly dynamically reflect and check how they sit in line to our own personal evolution.

Are you ready to develop your personal awareness of yourself, the world and where you want to be? Keep reading this series if so.