Most people rush through their daily activities without occasionally examining how their behavior affects their life choices. When you’re self-aware, you realize the way you act, think and talk impacts your life and the people around you. You understand that changing your behavior, for good or ill, will change how others perceive you and affect your career and personal relationships.
Conversely, if you’re unaware of how your words and actions affect others and your own life, you’ll continue to make the same mistakes over and over and find yourself stuck in the same unpleasant situations time and time again.
Being self-aware means you recognize your personality and how it appears to the world. You’re not caught inside your own little bubble; you know how you act in most situations, and most of the time, you know why.
A self-aware person recognizes their emotions, strengths, weaknesses, beliefs, values, and motivation. Some people are naturally self-aware, while others need to work on it. You can improve your self-awareness with practice. Change your mindset to better interpret your thoughts, actions, beliefs, feelings, and social skills.
More self-awareness can change your relationships, friendships, and career for the better. Self-awareness helps you improve all aspects of your life, and gives you more confidence.
You can improve your self-awareness in a myriad of ways, and many of them are fun as well. The following self-awareness activities and exercises will help you refine your behavior and decision-making abilities to get the best outcomes in your personal and professional life.
Keep a Journal
A journal records your thoughts, feelings, and activities in your life. A journal lets you rediscover how you felt and acted during various events.
Reading your journal helps you understand how you’ve changed through the years, and what you can do to avoid making the same mistakes you did in the past.
You’ll see how you’ve matured through the years, and get perspective on your life when you’re feeling down or discouraged.
A journal can help you track your behavior in certain situations, and recognize patterns you would have missed if you didn’t write down your experiences.
Keeping a journal is a form of inexpensive therapy, and it can also help you get more out of counseling sessions if you do see a therapist.
Reframe a Negative Event
After you have a bad day or suffer a setback in your career or relationship, use the reframing approach to learn more about your beliefs, what caused the bad event, and how to fix the problem. The bad experience that triggers your concern will make you form a belief. You’ll need to deal with the consequences of the beliefs formed after the event.
Analyzing and reframing bad situations can help you identify what causes stress in your life, and how you can handle these triggers better. Reframing negative events can help you discover automatic thoughts. When you are depressed, mad, or upset, you may have automatic thoughts.
An automatic thought is a subconscious response to an everyday event. These subconscious thoughts affect your mood and behavior. Automatic thoughts may prevent you from living your best life.
If you’re stuck in a long line at the supermarket, you may complain about how inefficient the cashier is, or how you’re going to miss your appointment if the line doesn’t start moving. This behavior won’t make the line move faster.
You can choose, instead, to put on your headphones and listen to music until it’s your turn. You could also leave your grocery items behind, go to your appointment, and go shopping when the store is less crowded. You can’t change how slowly the line is moving, but you can change your behavior.
Reframing helps you learn how to stay calm and choose better alternatives in everyday situations.
Create a Mission Statement
Write a mission statement listing your core values, beliefs, and what you want to accomplish in the next few years -and overall in your life. Think about your goals and how you want to achieve them.
Write down fun goals (hang gliding in Alaska) as well as realistic ones (becoming a supervisor at your job.)
A mission statement is your call to action. This statement not only clarifies your goals and beliefs, but it also lets you brainstorm a plan for living the life you want.
Prepare a mission statement by asking yourself:
- What do you believe in?
- What words or inspirational sayings define your beliefs?
- What do you want to accomplish in your life?
- How do you spend each workday?
- What activities do you enjoy in your free time?
- Are you creative? If so, do you paint, draw, write, make music or make films?
- Do you do volunteer work or give to charity?
The mission statement is one-third autobiography, one-third goal-setting device, and one-third value clarification. A mission statement defines your direction and your priorities. You can devise a tactical approach to make your life better.
Make a Video
When you’re at home, practice talking in front of a mirror. Take a video of it, or have a friend take a video of you having a conversation with another friend.
The goal of this exercise is to find out what traits are holding you back in your daily life.
Analyze your speaking voice, body language, and choice of words. Are you inadvertently saying or doing things to alienate people? Are you sarcastic, or do you name-drop or brag?
Perhaps you come off as meek or shy. Looking and listening to a video of yourself in action will give you an idea of your strong points and your weak points in daily life.
Have a close friend you can trust help you analyze the video and come up with a list of alternate ways you can speak/act to get better outcomes.
Do a Funeral Test
The funeral test will help you rethink your life goals and give you renewed purpose to live every day to the fullest. The funeral test was introduced in the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.
Write your own eulogy, and think about how people will remember you after you’re gone. What will they say about what kind of person you were?
The funeral test may seem unusual at first, maybe even morbid, but it will make you think seriously about your choice and their outcomes. This exercise may also make you reconsider acting out of anger, depression, or fear.
Create a Bucket List
A bucket list helps you think clearly about goals that are important to you. If you’re stuck in a daily routine, you’ll lose sight of what matters to you, and let chances pass you by without even noticing it.
When you think about your time being limited, you’ll be forced to consider goals you’ve neglected for years, like going back to school, traveling to exotic locations, or writing a book.
Once you’ve written your bucket list, do one small thing every day to get closer to one of your lifelong goals.
If visiting Tibet is one of your goals, read guide books or websites devoted to traveling in that region, or read about the Dali Lama and the history of Tibetian Buddhism.
Question Your Assumptions
People use assumptions to make sense of situations and other people. Assumptions are a quick way to summarize how a particular place should look or how a specific person should behave or dress. Your assumptions may be wrong and nowhere near reality.
Test your assumptions by replacing a period with a question mark after all your opinions. Forming a question instead of a statement will help you rethink some of your beliefs and correct irrational thoughts.
Practice Meditation
Achieving self-awareness means you need to clear your head of clutter and think clearly. You need to listen to your mind work at its most basic level and make adjustments from there.
Modern life never seems to let up, leaving many people tired and frustrated. Nonstop responsibilities lead to stress, anger, depression, and bury many peoples’ self-awareness deep in their psyche.
Meditate to calm your mind and transform your thoughts. Meditating even a few minutes a day can eliminate negative thoughts, calm you down, and help you think more constructively. It may be hard for you to master mediation if you’re a high-strung or consistently stressed person, but it will be worth it.
Sit in a quiet place for a few minutes. You don’t need to sit cross-legged, and you can sit in a chair, on the bed, or on the floor. Play some quiet meditation music or sit in silence.
Clear all thoughts from your mind. Keeping your mind clear may be hard for you at first, but you can achieve it with practice. Ideally, you should meditate in the morning to prepare for your day and at night to unwind.
Keep Moving
Walk more and exercise, either at home or at the health club. A sedentary lifestyle makes the mind just as sluggish as the body. You don’t need to run marathons or spend hours at the gym, but you do need to move around more.There are many physical activities that will clear your mind and strengthen your body, from gentle yoga to vigorous swimming and boxing.
Yoga helps balance your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual sides. There are several types of yoga, but the simplest is Hatha Yoga, which consists of stretching exercises called asanas. These postures help increase blood flow, make the body more limber, and can even improve back problems.
The slow, fluid movements of Tai Chi, a Chinese martial art, calms the mind as well as the body. Tai Chi boosts muscular, circulatory, and skeletal function. These simple movements are based on ancient Chinese medicine. Tai Chi improves nei jin (internal strength), qi (vital energy), and other faculties to increase health and self-awareness.
Taking up a solo sport helps you to be self-reliant and make better decisions. You won’t be tempted to rely on your teammates because you won’t have any. All decisions are yours and yours alone.
Solo sports include cycling, archery, swimming, track and field, running, skiing, tennis, golf, and kayaking. In solo sports, you can practice whenever you want; you don’t need to wait for teammates or coaches.
Your success or failure in a solo sport depends on your efforts alone. Individual sports may be good for people who need to build their self-confidence as well as self-awareness.
Draw a Freedom Diagram
Draw a Freedom Diagram for a fun take on self-awareness. This diagram shows you where you expend your energy in daily activities. Talent, demand, and fun are the three parts of the Freedom Diagram.
Talent refers to what you like to do and where your skills lie. Fun refers to what makes you happy – an activity you would do all the time, even if you weren’t paid for it.
Demand is the realistic, worldly component of the formula. Demand refers to what people want, need, and will pay for, and you need to weigh demand against your talents and what you would do for free.
If you are talented in direct sales and would love to do it even if you weren’t getting paid, you would also satisfy demand if you did it as a career.
You may be skilled at writing poetry and would do it for free, but there’s not enough demand for it to give you a successful career. However, if you’re resourceful, you could find a way to turn poetry into money. (You could teach poetry at a prestigious college, or turn your poems into lyrics and write songs for a popular singer, for example.)
Start Your Day with Morning Pages
Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way introduced Morning Pages, an exercise that you can use to clarify your goals and harness your creative talents. Every morning, use a paper notebook to record three pages of stream of consciousness thoughts. Morning pages are different than a journal or “to-do list.”
This mental exercise is designed to declutter your brain and reveal issues that may not be apparent to you. Write or print longhand on paper instead of your laptop, as you’ll remember and learn from written content better than typed information.
Write Down and Prioritize Tasks
Every night, write down your goals for the next day. List your three most important goals, and maybe a few “would be nice” goals that you can work on if you accomplish your top goals.
Prioritizing goals the night before lets you have a clear agenda and purpose for the next day. When you know what you need to do ahead of time, you’ll be less likely to waste time procrastinating or figuring out what you need to accomplish for the day.
Answer Questions About Yourself
The Proust Questionnaire asks questions that reveal your true personality. This questionnaire helps you understand how you think and clarifies your beliefs. You’ll learn more about what you appreciate in life, and what matters to you.
The Proust questionnaire was popularized by French essayist and novelist Marcel Proust. Here are 35 questions from the questionnaire.
Pay Attention to Your Stream of Consciousness
Observe your thoughts and feelings, and pay special attention at times when your mind wanders. If you’re at work and your mind constantly wanders to the drawing class you’re going to at night, or to a childhood memory, ask yourself why you are unable to focus at work.
Are you in the wrong field, or do you need to transfer to a different, more challenging job within the company? Don’t judge your stream of consciousness feelings; just observe them. When you’re in a quiet place, jot them down and think about why your mind wanders to certain events and feelings.
Analyze Your Decisions
After you’ve made an important life decision, such as changing jobs or ending a relationship, write down what caused you to make that decision. What thought process helped you arrive at that conclusion?
After six months or a year, analyze how your choice played out and look at the steps you choose to make that decision. If the choice didn’t work out, determine where you erred in your decision-making process.
Do you consistently make poor life decisions? You won’t be able to improve your life unless you correct the thought process that leads to poor choices. If you make choices out of fear, anger, or sadness, you may find yourself in worse situations than the ones you were trying to correct. Find better methods to make decisions, including rational decision-making or intuition.
Study Your Body Language
Your posture and gestures have as much of an impact on other people as your words. The way you move your hands, where you look, and whether or not your tap your feet affects how others interpret your words, how they act around you, and their opinions of you.
Few people consciously notice a person’s body language, but we all notice it subconsciously. You may not realize you slouch when sitting at your desk, but other people can see it and think that you are either depressed or lazy.
These opinions are formed by others’ perception of your body language, and sometimes even your words/attitude can’t override the messages sent by your body language.
If you fold your arms in front of your chest when you talk to someone, it may make people feel that you’re defensive or angry. Tapping your feet nervously may make others feel that you’re in a hurry and not interested in talking to them.
Use the video method described elsewhere in this article to evaluate your body language. You may be surprised by what you see.
Write a Letter to Your Teenage Self
Write a regret letter to your younger self expressing the regrets you’ve had in your life, and apologize for any errors in judgment you made. Promise your younger self that you will work harder to take advantage of new opportunities that come your way.
A regret letter helps you come to terms with the mistakes you’ve made, and make vows to the teenage dreamer inside of you that you won’t neglect your goals. Your words can also be used to let other people know that they’re not alone in their mistakes. Everyone can benefit from the advice in a regret letter, not just its author.
The contents of a regret letter are another tool to help you understand why you did the things you did, and how you can improve your behavior in the future. This cathartic exercise can put you back in touch with your youthful dreams. You may reconnect with those dreams, or discover that you’ve outgrown them and want to pursue new goals.
Discover your Personality Type
Find out your personality type to get a better understanding of what makes you tick. When you know all the components that make up your personality, you’ll make better decisions, and be less likely to follow trends or go along with the crowd. Being aware that there are different personality types
Avoid taking personality tests posted on social media. Instead, take longer free tests with many multiple-choice answers available on psychology websites. The Jung Typology Test is based on Jung and Briggs-Myers Personality Theories. Other tests include the VIA Character Strength Test, the Entrepreneurial Aptitude Test (E.A.T), and the 16 Personalities Test.
When you take these tests, you’ll learn more about what makes other people act the way they do. You’ll understand that there are all sorts of different personality types. If a person doesn’t act the way you want them to act, that doesn’t mean they’re wrong, or mean, or dull – it just means they have a different personality.
Practice Self-Reflection
Use critical thinking skills and self-reflection to determine why you behave the way you do and how to improve your behavior.
Ask yourself questions about your childhood, adolescence, and how you were raised. What was your neighborhood like when you were a child?
What have you done the past five to ten years? Are you satisfied with the results of those efforts?
How do strangers react around you? What do you like to talk about for hours?
Write down the answers to these questions and see where they overlap. This exercise will help you refine your life purpose and make you more aware of what is right for you and the right way to attain it.
Ask Why?
Most self-awareness exercises involve asking difficult questions with honest answers. An exercise called “The Three Whys” provides a simple way you can make a big decision and get to the root of the problem you’re trying to solve.
Ask yourself “why” three times. Posing the question three times will help you dig deeper into the issues you should consider to make the right decision.
Apologize
As you become self-aware, you’ll recognize your flaws. Once you accept responsibility for your actions, you can improve your personality and make better decisions in the future. After much self-reflection, you’ll avoid hypocrisy in your future actions.
Make heartfelt apologies to the people you’ve wronged in the past due to bad behavior. Making sincere apologies is one of the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous, and it’s also useful in any situation where you unknowingly hurt someone.
Make positive changes in your behavior to avoid problems in the future. Interpret stimuli and the words and actions of others differently to reduce drama and conflict in your life. You’ll become more emotionally intelligent as you achieve self-awareness. Emotional intelligence is one of the most important attributes of success.
Be aware of your words and actions at the moment to make the most of your life. You’ll be able to focus more readily on your goals and relationships once you’ve conquered past bad habits and made amends to people you’ve wronged.
Observe the People Around You
Get out of your mind and observe the people around you. Listen to friends and family as they talk to you instead of thinking about what you are going to say. Watch people’s posture and mannerisms to find out how they differ from you. Avoid comparing yourself to others, per se, but be aware of how others act in relation to how you act.
You’ll notice several traits in other people, including their physical appearance, the tone of their speaking voice, posture, body language, extroversion or introversion, mood, and self-esteem. By studying them, you’ll have a better idea of how your actions appear to others.
Control Reactions to Stress in Real-Time
When you’re under stress, you experience a fight or flight mode to deal with the problems you encounter. You stop thinking rationally when you’re in this mode and may make hasty decisions.
Learn to practice measured responses to stress, Step back, take a deep breath, and relax your muscles. Instead of giving in to panic, engage your rational brain again to make better decisions under stress.
Breathe Easy
Practice conscious (or mindful) breathing to relax your mind and body. Breath deeply from your diaphragm (much like a singer would) and focus on your breath when you’re feeling nervous. This type of focused breathing will calm you down and help you think rationally.
You can make mindful breathing part of your meditation practice, or you can use it to calm down in hectic situations. With regular mindful breathing, you’ll find yourself becoming more self-aware and focused in all areas of your life.
Read Books
Successful people tend to read a lot. Read a variety of fiction and non-fiction books to expand your knowledge and thinking skills. You’ll continue to learn about history, current events, philosophy, psychology, and other subjects that will give you a better understanding of the world and other people.
Reading more books will enable you to discover the subjects you enjoy and lead you onto the right career path. Reading will also teach you about topics that you can refer to in business and personal conversations.