Self and Self-Awareness

Self-Aware People Don’t Crave External Validation

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Self-aware people don’t crave external validation because they are happy with themselves and understand their own emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. They are comfortable with who they are and forge their own path in life.

Many individuals lack self-awareness and spend their lives doing what other people say. The only person who really matters is you and it’s important that you listen to what your inner voice is telling you. That doesn’t mean that you need to ignore wise people, just that it’s positive to think independently and trust yourself.

If you feel yourself craving validation, try doing something different than you normally would, like:

  • Increasing your self-awareness by evaluating your strengths and areas for improvement.
  • Working on healing the hurts from your past.
  • Doing some positive thing you love doing and that moves you in a beneficial direction.
  • Taking a walk.
  • Doing something creative.
  • Creating a list of wonderful things about you and adding to it each day for thirty days.

The trick to moving past needing outside validation is to learn how to love yourself by knowing who you are and what brings you joy in life. All it takes to get there is doing small things each day that will eventually transform your life. What will you do to develop self-awareness and stop craving external validation?

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Awareness and Where Your Thoughts Lead You

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It’s amazing what happens when you build self-awareness and think in ways that lead to positive results. If you focus only on negative thoughts and what you can’t do, your life tends to follow a predictable pattern. It moves very differently if you think in brand new ways. Try the following steps to help you achieve what is meaningful to you:

1. Think of a goal you would like to achieve.

2. Think of the reasons why you can’t achieve that goal.

3. Think of dumping those negative reasons in a trash can.

4. Develop new, positive, ways you can achieve the goal.

5. Picture what your life would look like if you pursued these positive paths.

6. Start working on your goal.

You will find that your thoughts are a powerful predictor for how you will do in life. You get results based on your self-awareness and what you think you can achieve. Try this exercise each time you feel like you can’t do something and begin moving in new and exciting directions.

What will you do to develop self-awareness and think in ways that help you live a great life?

Cheers,

Guy

People Who Lack Self-Awareness Get Stuck in Patterns

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It’s really normal for people who lack self-awareness to get stuck in a pattern, even if it’s negative. They become accustomed to the pattern to the point where it becomes normal. They take it for granted and just live with it.

For many people the key to getting unstuck is to build self-awareness and do something differently. For example: If you’ve had a certain kind of results in a relationship, doing something different has the inevitable result of changing the situation. But there is one caveat, you have to do it consistently over time until the new behavior takes root.

Try taking some part of your life and consciously doing something differently. Do it over time until it becomes your new “normal.” Lather, rinse and repeat. This approach can be applied to any number of issues. Keep it simple and do one at a time, you’ll eventually see the results.

What will you do to develop self-awareness and avoid getting stuck in a negative pattern?

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Aware Guys Are Nice and Finish First

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If you’ve ever heard the tired old saying that nice guys finish last, and believed it, then you might be surprised to find out that it’s profoundly wrong. For some unhealthy reason, our culture has decided that being self-aware and nice is an awful thing and that aggressive jerks are much happier. We’ve also convinced ourselves that whoever amasses the most stuff is naturally the winner. Perspectives like these ignore the things that really bring joy to people’s lives:

  • Possessing self-awareness.
  • Working through one’s unresolved issues.
  • Being comfortable with one’s emotions.
  • Treating people with kindness and empathy.
  • Doing things that make the world a better place for everyone.
  • Caring for the vulnerable.
  • Letting go of the need to win.
  • Not having to be on top of someone else to feel good about oneself.
  • Building positive relationships.
  • Helping everyone succeed.

No amount of money, power, or material possessions can make someone meaningfully happy. As you’ve probably read time after time, many extremely wealthy and powerful people are as miserable as can be, they just have a lot of stuff. They sit surrounded by their extravagant things in their expensive houses and have to work that much harder to convince themselves that it all means anything important.

Finishing first in life means that you’ve achieved the pinnacle of self-awareness where you are so healthy and comfortable with yourself that you spread peace and joy within yourself and throughout the world. The only things that really matter in life are how you feel deep inside about yourself, how well you treat others, and what nice things you do to improve everyone’s well-being; everything else is just window dressing. Nice guys finish first because they’ve done the hard work necessary to become so self-aware that they’re genuinely happy with themselves and are able to spread that joy. If you want to find out who really finishes last, look for the miserable person trying to make another million or billion so he can feel safe for another ten minutes.

What will you do to develop self-awareness, be nice, and live a great life?

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Awareness, Congruence, and Happiness

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Congruence is a big part of self-awareness and simply means that your thoughts and actions match each other. A lot of people live lives where they think one thing but behave in ways that aren’t consistent with those thoughts. This creates tension and inner conflict.

One of the best ways to achieve congruence is to act in ways that are consistent with what you think. For example: If you say you’re going to do something, do it; if you believe something, make sure your actions match. You’ll feel happier and more balanced once you bring your thoughts and actions together.

So many people live terribly unhappy lives because they pretend to be someone they’re not or believe things that don’t stand up to any kind of reasonable scrutiny. Save yourself a lot of pain and misery by working on healing the hurts from your past and educating yourself so you can live a life of courage and joy.

What will you do to develop self-awareness and congruence so you can be happier?

Cheers,

Guy

What Is Self-Awareness and Are You Self-Aware?

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Self-awareness is a significant part of personal development and it refers to being aware of how your thoughts and behaviors affect you and others. Many people are aware enough to identify things that need attention in their lives but they forget to take action to make it happen. There’s a big difference between knowing you do something and understanding it well enough to move it in a positive direction. Here are some signs you’re self-aware:

  • You’re able to deal with and direct your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.
  • You build positive relationships, including the one you have with yourself.
  • You genuinely like yourself and others do as well.
  • You live life based on what you really love doing.
  • You know yourself well.
  • You treat yourself and others with kindness and empathy.
  • You understand how the things you feel, think, and do affect you and others.

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Awareness and Managing Expectations

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When I talk with people who lack self-awareness, I often hear a recurring theme about not being loved or not having kindness reciprocated. This is a very common theme in relationships: one person expects one thing only to have their hopes dashed, the other seems oblivious.

The difficulty arises when we hold on to our expectations even when we see repeated evidence that we will never get what we expect. Expectations then become more of a hindrance than help. Some people hang on to expectations perhaps mistakenly thinking they stand for hope.

Hope is greatly affected by our level of self-awareness and the actions we take. If we move in directions that lead us down the same path no amount of hope can change the course. If, however, we do things differently then we can begin entertaining hope that things will change because we are actually breaking the patterns we’ve established.

Changing the way we do things is the only way to modify our situation. No amount of hope or expectations can take the place of real communication and work in our relationships. The great news is that we can do things to change the course of our relationships, they just take some courage and movement in a different direction.

What will you do to develop self-awareness and manage your expectations?

Cheers,

Guy

The Self-Awareness Guy