Lacking Self-Awareness

Lack of Self-Awareness and Ignoring Facts - On Developing Self-Awareness and Being Self-Aware

Lack of Self-Awareness and Ignoring Facts

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Building your self-awareness leads to living a more cohesive, integrated, happy life. I’ve noticed over the years that some people make life more complicated than it needs to be because they ignore facts. It takes a huge amount of time and energy to pretend that something false is true, and all the while you’re trying to support something inaccurate, you’re wasting your life.

The much easier and more satisfying path in life is to stick to demonstrable facts, which will keep you from bending yourself into a pretzel shape to explain things. A big reason I enjoy providing life guidance for people who value self-awareness is that they tend to be open to all kinds of facts and ideas and are comfortable with exploring new avenues of knowledge and understanding.

Life becomes infinitely more complex when you lack self-awareness and try to pretend that facts don’t matter. If you don’t believe in verifiable data then you have to create a whole alternative reality that requires constant rationalization and explanation. The easier route is to just make sure that your feelings, thoughts, and behaviors align with actual evidence so you can live wide awake.

What will you do to develop self-awareness and base your life on verifiable facts?

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Awareness and Healing Yourself - On Developing Self-Awareness and Being Self-Aware

Self-Awareness and Healing Yourself

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When people have an injury of some kind they immediately look for ways to heal it. This approach doesn’t apply the same way to psychological injuries, but self-awareness can help you gain insight into your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, and help you move forward positively.

A huge number of people walk around with unresolved mental pain. One of the great benefits of building self-awareness is that it offers you the opportunity to take a careful look at yourself and identify the areas in your life that need healing. Take some time to think of questions like the following so you can live a healthy, fulfilling personal or professional life:

  • What unresolved issues do I have in my life that bring me pain?
  • What issues do I have that affect my ability to live an authentic life?
  • What issues might I change so I can be happier?
  • How do my hurts affect others?
  • How would my life be different if I healed my hurts?
  • What am I willing to do today to heal myself?

When you examine who you are and what makes you tick, you’ll discover amazing strengths as well as areas that need some care. Healing psychologically is not an easy process but it’s deeply rewarding because your pain won’t hold you back any longer. What will you do to develop self-awareness and begin to heal?

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Awareness and Your Conscience - On Developing Self-Awareness and Being Self-Aware

Self-Awareness and Your Conscience

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Your level of self-awareness is deeply connected to your conscience because you can never escape the psychological toll that behaving negatively takes on your life. For example: If your job requires that you do things that hurt people, you can’t run from it or pretend it’s not happening, it affects you regardless of how hard you try to ignore or justify it. The same applies to thinking or behaving negatively in your personal life: If you damage others, you impact the quality of your own life. Some people try to compensate for negative thoughts or behaviors by giving to worthwhile causes or doing kind things for their immediate family or friends, but the relief is temporary at best.

A more fulfilling and rewarding approach is to consciously do things that lead in a positive direction like behaving kindly toward others, practicing compassion, or helping people thrive. When faced with a choice, select the option that does the most good for as many people as possible and do nice things without expecting any personal gain. Self-awareness means that you’ve taken the time to be so comfortable with yourself that you give freely and treat others wonderfully. What will you do to develop a healthy conscience?

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Awareness Helps You Stop Reacting to Everything - On Developing Self-Awareness and Being Self-Aware

Self-Awareness Helps You Stop Reacting to Everything

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Many people who lack self-awareness spend their lives reacting to perceived slights and conflicts. They have learned somewhere that the way you deal with anything is to jump into reactive mode and get mad at people. You’ve probably met someone like this: They see someone across the room and immediately assume that that person is talking about them, so they jump into a rage, get sad or shut down.

Reacting based on assumptions or our inner dialogue is one of the major behaviors that keeps people from connecting with one another. If we spend our time assuming that someone is trying to hurt us we live a very specific kind of life that is based on ongoing hurt and conflict. People live this way for a variety of reasons but mainly because they learned it at a young age and don’t know any other way of doing things, that and a lack of self-awareness. The good news is that you get to choose what kind of life you live starting right now. Here are some tips so that you can move from reactive to calm:

1. Assume people aren’t talking about you.
2. Assume that people aren’t trying to hurt you.
3. Live a life that helps you bring joy to others.
4. Seek professional help to work through why you react to others.
5. Learn to identify the feelings that come up inside you and calm them down.
6. Try not to pre-judge people’s motivations.
7. Have an alternate plan for how you will react positively.
8. Listen to people until they are finished talking; then act.
9. Practice patience.
10. Focus first on building your self-awareness and growing as a person.

There’s nothing wrong with experiencing emotions unless they limit our ability to interact positively with others. Try working on the steps we’ve mentioned and you’ll be on your way to seeing the world in a different light. What will you do to develop self-awareness and stop reacting to everything?

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Awareness Helps You Deal with a Difficult Boss - On Developing Self-Awareness and Being Self-Aware

Self-Awareness Helps You Deal with a Difficult Boss

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Perhaps you’re in a situation where you have a difficult boss and feel powerless to do anything about it. A difficult boss is someone who uses power and control to intimidate, threaten or keep his (or her) employees off-balance. Even though it takes some effort, there are concrete things you can do to increase self-awareness, take charge of your own reactions, care for yourself, and lessen the impact your boss has on you. The following are some practical ideas to help you deal with a difficult boss:

1. Realize the boss’ behavior is not about you and not personal. He was that way before he (or she) met you. The only thing you can control is deciding whether his behavior will affect you. You, in effect, decide how much power you are going to give this person.

2. Find common ground. Use your listening and open-ended question asking skills to connect with the boss. Re-focusing your energy to learning about the other person has a way of moving the conversation in a different direction than simply getting into arguments.

3. Take care of yourself. Seek the comfort of people who can support and help you. A co-worker, a friend, a consultant, or a counselor can help you take care of yourself and take some of the negativity out of your brain. Do things that bring you pleasure at work and when you’re off rather than things that feed your boss’ issues.

4. Decide what is right for you. We sometimes reach points where we need to decide if the grief of a difficult boss is worth staying in the position. Only you know the answer. Remember that life is short and difficult bosses come and go. Only you have the power to control your destiny and life, so make the most out of it.

5. Tell your boss in a kind and respectful way how you like to be treated. Don’t use the word you, become emotional, or attack. Simply use “I” messages such as, “I like for people to talk to me respectfully,” that aren’t accusatory or single out the difficult boss. Do a web search for effective communication skills or work with a consultant to help you develop effective conversation strategies.

There is no written rule that you have to endure punishment or that you can’t become more skilled in dealing with difficult people. You have a lot of control if you are willing to practice the ideas listed above. What will you do to develop self-awareness and deal positively with a difficult boss?

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Aware People Avoid Tough Love - On Developing Self-Awareness and Being Self-Aware

Self-Aware People Avoid Tough Love

/ / Self-Awareness, Self-Consciousness / , ,

“Tough love” is a horrible concept because it contaminates and corrupts the whole idea of love. A huge part of self-awareness is self-love and the ability to love others. When you are self-aware, you have the courage to work through your toughest issues and you eventually arrive at a place of peace, calm, hope, and love, not some awful scenario of violence and harshness.

The term “tough love” completely destroys the empathy, kindness, healing, softness, and caring that comes with real love. I wish that the people who use the term “tough love” would switch to some more accurate definition such as, “Trying to help someone by imposing punitive and harsh measures for what we say is there own good.”

The problem with “tough love” is that it perpetuates the same hurt and pain that likely created the issue in the first place. Let’s take a teenager acting out as an example: The teen is behaving a certain way (barring medical or psychological issues) because of their experiences in life. I have yet to meet a person who is acting negatively who comes from a wonderfully functional home. When we impose harsh measures on that person to try to correct their behavior, we’re not loving them, we’re hurting them more, which usually leads to more negative behaviors whether internal or external.

What if we decided to build self-awareness and actually love people instead of getting tough with them? I don’t know about you, but I’ve consistently noticed that people prefer to be treated kindly rather than punitively. So many teen (and adult) problems would go away if people would take time each day to simply listen to the person without interruptions or judgments, and commit to doing it long-term.

Punishment only adds hurt to hurt. I firmly believe we should get rid of this whole toughness thing and replace it with self-awareness, empathy, and real love. People often fight me when I suggest that we can care for people, hug them, listen to them, show them they really matter, and let go of the need to control and dominate them. That’s how far we’ve sunk, we can’t even imagine a world where we treat each other with love.

I propose we establish a new pattern of love and unconditional regard instead of inflicting more pain. The only way we’ll ever heal one person, or the world, is to believe and act from a place of true love. Yes, it will take considerable time and effort to make the change, but everything worthwhile requires commitment.

What will you do to develop self-awareness and get away from tough love?

Cheers,

Guy

Self-Awareness Helps You Not Limit Your Leadership Success - On Developing Self-Awareness and Being Self-Aware

Self-Awareness Helps You Not Limit Your Leadership Success

/ / Self-Awareness in Leadership / , , ,

When I consult for leaders it’s often apparent that they have varying visions of what constitutes leadership. There are those who lack self-awareness and believe leadership is giving orders or getting things done single-handedly, while others believe in teamwork and delegating. There’s no right or wrong approach to leadership, but different actions lead to different results. Here are four things I’ve noticed tend to limit leaders’ success:

  1. They can only do it their way. Leaders come in with one vision or one methodology that they follow regardless of outcome.  This approach limits their ability to find new and more effective ways of doing things as well as using their employees’ input.
  2. They don’t use our employees’ talents. People who come in with a single-minded vision often forget that they’re sitting on a potential gold mine of talent and ideas. When leaders only use their own ideas and perspectives they limit their chances to do even more with the help of their employees.
  3. They don’t praise. Many leaders simply give directives and then wait for things to be done to their satisfaction. The key here is that they focus only on getting things done rather than encouraging and praising employees along the way.
  4. They don’t plan efficiently. Leaders often go in with plenty of good intentions but spend all their time putting out fires. This reactive approach to leadership ensures they will only focus on the latest emergency limits their ability to organize our workplace.

These practices aren’t evil but they are representative of many of our workplaces. Leaders who address the issues we’ve talked about here not only find they increase their chances of success but they also enjoy their jobs more. What will you do to develop self-awareness and increase your leadership success?

Cheers,

Guy

The Self-Awareness Guy