High self awareness is an important part of being self regulated. And logically, a good starting point would be to understand what self awareness is. Yes, the topic of self awareness is multi dimensional. But for the purposes of this course, I want to bring your attention to two aspects, being aware of your weaknesses, and being aware of how other people's behavior can affect you negatively. In other words, you're self aware, when you're able to assess your thoughts, feelings and behavior, and point out the reasons or causes Why. Why do you do the things you do?
Why do you feel the feelings you feel? Why do you behave in the way you behave? The other day, I was reading a book on social psychology. And usually when I read I've got a Word document open Where I insert all the sentences, quotes and thoughts that have made the most powerful impression on myself. I was going through my notes and I read a sentence that I was 100% sure, I would love to share here with you. Listen, self awareness helps you become mindful of the gap between what you're doing and what you aspire to, or feel you should be doing.
You've probably been there, you're doing something, but you've got that feeling in yourself, that you should be doing something else, right. So, to cultivate self regulation, you should be working on cultivating self awareness. I'm going to give you three specific actions that you can start doing immediately that will have positive impact on your self awareness. Here they are, number one, meditation. Meditation helps you become self aware. We are so busy all the time, constantly.
Working, not giving ourselves sufficient breaks for renewal. We're not aware of the fact that we have energy levels. When we expend energy, we need to restore that energy if we want to achieve high performance. I don't want to go ahead of myself but you should know that there are four types of energy, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Meditation is now part of my morning routine. I do it every day.
It frees my mind. And because I do it in the morning, I feel mentally prepared for the challenges throughout the day. It first it was very hard to meditate because I wasn't sure what I was doing. I want to give you a shortcut. If you're beginner or never done meditation before, I advise you to do it with a guide initially. And when you become more experienced, then try on your own.
Here is a spectacular website to start with the headspace.com You can sign up for free and you will get 10 minutes meditation for 10 days that really helped me a lot. Number two, asking for feedback. The second action I want you to commit to take is asking for feedback that will increase your self awareness because you will be able to see yourself from another person's perspective. And believe me, there are going to be differences between your in your friends perspective about you. It's important to do this exercise with your friends and people who know you very, very well. Ask them to be honest answering these questions.
What do you think my strengths are? What do you think make weaknesses are? Now listen in, take notes. Ask several friends, not just one. This simple exercise will increase your self awareness significantly. I did this exercise with three of my closest friends.
I was amazed by the results, I got valuable feedback on what areas I need to improve and what areas I need to focus my energy on a general rule. Don't let your weaknesses draw you back. But your main focus should be on developing your strengths. Number three, monitor negative self talk. The third action I want you to take is to monitor monitor negative self talk. This is a major contributor to general anxiety.
And this is truly a bad habit. You can urge you later negative sentences about yourself, but you can also be just thinking about them in the back of your mind. In other words, your inner voice. Have you ever caught yourself doing something that doesn't go your way and you say, Oh, I'm so dumb or I'm stupid, or an idiot or something of that sort. Here is what you should know next. Deep self talk brings you down all the time.
It hurts your mental health. Your subconscious doesn't make a difference between you talking seriously in joking with yourself, because most of the time when we talk negatively to our source, we don't really mean it. Please stop imprinting these negative sentences in your subconscious. So monitor your self talk. If it is negative most of the time, you have to change it. Monitoring negative self talk is a great exercise to increase your self awareness by itself.
Next time when you say or think something negative about yourself. You will remember this lecture you will remember me and you will know that your subconscious is always working and listening and it doesn't understand jokes. Thank you for watching.